7 ms·

The Two-Party Swindle

77 points by splat 17y ago

johnnybgoode 17y ago
This was better than I expected. Everyone here is already aware of the two-party swindle (I hope), but the author describes it in a fresh way. He also explains some of the reasons it happens, for people who know the swindle exists but don't understand why. Also, he rather subtly points out that we haven't actually dispatched of the idea of people being ruled by a separate class, contrary to what we're taught in school.
- tome 17y ago
  Even calling it a "swindle" is an example of this phenomenon. Why does it necessarily have to be "the political elite"/"the ruling class" versus "the disenfranchised populous"? I'm sure a huge number of politicians are very frustrated by many of the policies of their party and would like to diverge from them to a greater or lesser extent. They are constrained too. Why can we not see this as an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, with little overall direction?
  - scott_s 17y ago
    That is how he presents it. There doesn't have to be a conscious, collaborative effort by Your Politicians and Their Politicians to keep the Voters screaming at each other, so that they don't notice the increasing gap between the Voters and the Politicians. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It emerges from the interests of the individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them. He calls it a "swindle" because whatever reservations politicians have with their party, they all try to get you to identify with themselves.
swombat 17y ago
Excellent article, as expected for an Eliezer Yudkowsky article. One place where it leaves me hungry... what can we do about this very real problem? I understand that no single person can fix this all by themselves, but is there some kind of action that we can take, when the circumstances arise, that will help resolve this problem rather than help perpetuate it? Edit: Additional note... this is one of the many reasons I like the Swiss system. We vote on issues separately from voting on people. This has its disadvantages, but at least it's direct democracy.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  Historically speaking, the corruption and degradation of the system build up until the empire collapses on itself or is defeated in a war and has a foreign power rebuild their government. This has been written about a bunch, the earliest known piece I've read notes of was by Ibn Khaldun. Some of his work is outdated, being 800 years old, but there's some pretty incredibly insightful things in it. Worth a skim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    This view of historiography goes back about two millenia years in China. A corrupt regime loses the "mandate of Heaven" and a new regime takes its place by conquest.
- bokonist 17y ago
  Direct democracy does not solve the problem, see California. The Swiss cantons work well because they are small. Direct democracy does not scale. One of the best ideas for reform I've heard is the idea of unpredictable elections, a la Venice. See: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elections.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...
  - tome 17y ago
    Unpredictable elections look interesting but why do you support them? Is there any evidence that they perform well in any particular fashion?
    - bokonist 17y ago
      They worked quite well in Venice. The Republic lasted 1,000 years, which is pretty impressive. The half-life of the typical represenative democracy seems to be about twenty years, so that's a big difference. Since Venice, unpredictable elections have never been tried. Most governments have been clones of either the British or American systems.
Musashi 17y ago
Party Politics and Partisanship are evil. Less interested in what is good for the country and more interested in what will get them elected to POWER!
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  It's not just party politics though. It's the predilection of people to form up into groups and to identify with those groups even at the expense of logic and reason. Party politics is just what you get when you do it at a national level. It happens all the time all around you.
lionhearted 17y ago
At one point, I started making a list of all the decisions politicians could make and change about the way governments were run. I came up with over 100 items, very quickly. The Democrats and Republicans both didn't address and were in implicit agreement on some 95 of those 100 things, despite the fact that some of them are really ugly. For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC, and estimates have placed the worth of those rights over a billion dollars per year. This made me sad.
- barry-cotter 17y ago
  Blog it. Then submit it.
  - davidw 17y ago
    To reddit...
- cousin_it 17y ago
  For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC Source please. I don't believe you.
- jellicle 17y ago
  > For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC, and estimates have placed the worth of those rights over a billion dollars per year. The "old" (VHF and UHF) broadcast frequencies were given to the various stations without any fees whatsoever, I believe. Each broadcast station has to pay a $170 (sic) license renewal fee every couple of years. Those frequency allocations are going away, being reclaimed by the government in the digital TV transition. Some of the old TV frequencies have already been auctioned: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_MHz_wireless_spectrum_auction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_MHz_wireless_spectrum_aucti... Many of the digital TV frequencies (which are in the same area as the old VHF and lower UHF frequencies) have been given to the existing TV stations free of charge. These would have been worth a great deal of money if sold or leased, as you can see from the 700MHz auction above. So it's actually somewhat worse than the original poster says, in that there's no $100,000 collected.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
This is good -- Eliezer? How come it took so long for this to get on the board? Great article. I thought this at first was a politics article, but for me, at least, it's a much more practical one. Let me explain. Working with large corporations, I've found that this is not restricted to sports or politics. It happens between divisions, between business groups -- even between cliques of programmers on the same team. Politics is the ultimate generalization of the problem, but it's a much more practical and immediate matter. I guess that's why I've never understood the fear of talking about politics on HN. Heck -- you guys do it all the time. Every time there's an Apple vs. Microsoft thread, or a Twitter vs. Blogging thread, or a functional programming vs. imperative programming thread -- this is the same thing. It's amazing people can't see it. You identify with a product, a brand, a group of people, and then suddenly it's us versus them. We have our experts, our slogans, our information sources. They have theirs. We can argue for years and never do more than talking past each other, because we've never generalized the type of discussion we are having and worked at the meta level. Where I think politics is more interesting is that positions change month by month. That means that political party X may support something this month and be against it the next month. In effect, it's a critical thinking test -- can you identify your own bias? Because if you were arguing for something last month and are arguing against the same thing this month, you might be identifying more with a group that ideas. It's much easier to spot this when the positions keep changing, which makes a discussion of politics useful for detecting personal bias. BTW, it's also a quick test for thinking about other things too. If you're meeting with a new person and they seem stuck on some political party thing, you can bet they're going to be group-identifying with a lot of other things as well. Different people have different levels of the need-to-identify. We all know the worst ones: the people with bumper stickers all over their car, various flag pins or whatever on their clothes, a rabid sports fan and a sticking-to-a-political-party-no-matter-what attitude. Solutions to the two-party swindle? Term limits (to prevent camping out in office) Expiration limits for laws (to prevent get-what-you-can-now-attitude). Some sort of push for a multi-party system. Oddly enough, in the US at least the thought was that it would end up being a dynamic system with small groups taking various positions and coalitions changing over time. Instead that's not how it worked out. Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about tough topics with each other.
- 17y ago
ckinnan 17y ago
Ironically, the Founders didn't expect a role for political parties and most were concerned with their rise. "There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the Spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true--and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose--and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming, it should consume." GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address to the people of the United States, Sep. 17, 1796
sethg 17y ago
The author seems to blame the two-party system and the class divide between politicians and voters for the fact that nobody is shrinking the size of the government. I have a much simpler explanation for this phenomenon: no substantial body of voters want smaller government. The clique of libertarians who actually believe in "smaller government" and not simply "government taking less of my money in taxes and spending less on the things that I personally don't like" is substantial on the Web and among the intelligentsia, but not so much in the voting booth. Look at how poorly Ron Paul did in the Republican primaries.
- dinkumthinkum 17y ago
  I agree essentially with you but I don't think that's really why Ron Paul did so poorly. Ron Paul did poorly because he was always going to do poorly. He was kind of an older looking guy who said a lot of funny things and was kind of a curmudgeon. Most people don't even know what libertarianism is or that he was one. Then many people who know he was a member of the Libertarian party don't really know the difference between those people and your garden variety Republican. But you are right in that the majority of Americans aren't libertarians anyway. Most people (Republican, Democrat, "Independent," haha, whatever) actually do want the government to tell us what we can and can't put in our own bodies. Even the "Legalize Marijuana" people are somewhat hypocritical. They say "legalize pot, it's not as bad or heroin." Oddly enough, most Republicans (the old white guys) actually want social security, which you would think they would view as anathema communist propaganda. American politics are very strange.
- tc 17y ago
  Very few people want free markets. The rest just want the standard of living that only free markets can offer.
  - MaysonL 17y ago
    And the few people who want free markets aren't willing to pay for them.
- grandalf 17y ago
  i have an even simpler explanation: most people think that increasing government size/scope will make their lives better. These are the same people of whom 40% believe Elvis is alive!
kragen 17y ago
The same thing happens between the armies of nations. Nation A's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation B; Nation B's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation A. Even though they're fighting each other, the civilians on both sides are very similar to each other, and the war makes them all worse off through taxation and slaughter. The armies are also very similar to each other, in values and in training, and very different from the civilian population. In fact, they probably trained together in joint exercises or at WHISC before the war. If you slice the identities one way, the attacks by the armies on the civilians show that the armies are dangerous to the civilians, and therefore civilians should endeavor to eliminate armies, as did the people of the United States in the American Revolution, and as did the people of Costa Rica during the previous century. But of course the more common way to look at it is that the attacks by Nation A show the great necessity for the civilians of Nation B to support the army of Nation B, in order to deter and defend against attacks from Nation A, and vice versa. So armies, as a class, whip up support for themselves by attacking and killing the civilians whose support they depend on. And so today in Israel and Palestine, each nation has strong popular support for organized violence against civilians on the other side. Of course, historically the connection between armies and governments is extremely close. Is there a way out? Are the Costa Ricans in imminent danger of invasion due to their lack of armed forces? Having armed forces didn't seem to help the Salvadorans, the Guatemalans, or the Nicaraguans when the US funded terrorist campaigns against their people, didn't help the Panamanians or the Granadans when the US decided to invade them, and didn't help Guatemala when the United Fruit Company organized a coup. In fact, in most of those cases, the army acted against its own people. But would Honduras have avoided the Football War if they had had no army? Or would they now be a province of El Salvador? Would Cuba be a territory of the US, like Puerto Rico? (And would Cubans be better off if they were?)
tokenadult 17y ago
There is a problem with the submitted essay that is a common problem with many essays on lesswrong: it writes about a matter that developed historically with insufficient examination of the history of the matter. Maybe the people submitting articles to lesswrong need to read more history more often. The American two-party system is remarkable in how much the two parties do NOT insist on long-term ideological consistency. Each party shifts its positions and adds and subtracts party platform planks as new third parties introduce net points of view into political discourse. The parties are stable because their positions on issues are very unstable. If you compare the party platforms of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to those of a century ago, you will see on many issues a complete role reversal of the parties. Similarly, which party is more favored by southern voters or which party is more favored by black voters is far less stable than the general tendency that black voters and southern voters only occasionally favor the same party.
- grandalf 17y ago
  that was not a cornerstone of his argument in the least. I wouldn't even say it was a part of it at all.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    How would you summarize his argument? Why did the title of the article refer to two parties?
grandalf 17y ago
the missing piece of the essay is the question of whether "political entrepreneurs" should be considered legitimate. Using group dynamics to achieve power is just a reality of human nature, as Elezier points out. But Elezier jumps from this fat to assume that we should then be concerned about the unequal distribution of power between most people and the few political entrepreneurs (aka "power seekers"). It's hard to argue that all power seekers are bad, even if all do use group dynamics to gain and keep power. So how to we determine which power seekers we consider legitimate?
kazuya 17y ago
Seems the author carefully and intentinally avoid talking about religions. Why?

77 points by splat 17y ago

This was better than I expected. Everyone here is already aware of the two-party swindle (I hope), but the author describes it in a fresh way. He also explains some of the reasons it happens, for people who know the swindle exists but don't understand why. Also, he rather subtly points out that we haven't actually dispatched of the idea of people being ruled by a separate class, contrary to what we're taught in school.

tome 17y ago
Even calling it a "swindle" is an example of this phenomenon. Why does it necessarily have to be "the political elite"/"the ruling class" versus "the disenfranchised populous"? I'm sure a huge number of politicians are very frustrated by many of the policies of their party and would like to diverge from them to a greater or lesser extent. They are constrained too. Why can we not see this as an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, with little overall direction?
- scott_s 17y ago
  That is how he presents it. There doesn't have to be a conscious, collaborative effort by Your Politicians and Their Politicians to keep the Voters screaming at each other, so that they don't notice the increasing gap between the Voters and the Politicians. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It emerges from the interests of the individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them. He calls it a "swindle" because whatever reservations politicians have with their party, they all try to get you to identify with themselves.

swombat 17y ago

Excellent article, as expected for an Eliezer Yudkowsky article. One place where it leaves me hungry... what can we do about this very real problem? I understand that no single person can fix this all by themselves, but is there some kind of action that we can take, when the circumstances arise, that will help resolve this problem rather than help perpetuate it? Edit: Additional note... this is one of the many reasons I like the Swiss system. We vote on issues separately from voting on people. This has its disadvantages, but at least it's direct democracy.

lionhearted 17y ago
Historically speaking, the corruption and degradation of the system build up until the empire collapses on itself or is defeated in a war and has a foreign power rebuild their government. This has been written about a bunch, the earliest known piece I've read notes of was by Ibn Khaldun. Some of his work is outdated, being 800 years old, but there's some pretty incredibly insightful things in it. Worth a skim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah
- tokenadult 17y ago
  This view of historiography goes back about two millenia years in China. A corrupt regime loses the "mandate of Heaven" and a new regime takes its place by conquest.
bokonist 17y ago
Direct democracy does not solve the problem, see California. The Swiss cantons work well because they are small. Direct democracy does not scale. One of the best ideas for reform I've heard is the idea of unpredictable elections, a la Venice. See: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elections.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...
- tome 17y ago
  Unpredictable elections look interesting but why do you support them? Is there any evidence that they perform well in any particular fashion?
  - bokonist 17y ago
    They worked quite well in Venice. The Republic lasted 1,000 years, which is pretty impressive. The half-life of the typical represenative democracy seems to be about twenty years, so that's a big difference. Since Venice, unpredictable elections have never been tried. Most governments have been clones of either the British or American systems.

Musashi 17y ago

Party Politics and Partisanship are evil. Less interested in what is good for the country and more interested in what will get them elected to POWER!

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
It's not just party politics though. It's the predilection of people to form up into groups and to identify with those groups even at the expense of logic and reason. Party politics is just what you get when you do it at a national level. It happens all the time all around you.

lionhearted 17y ago

At one point, I started making a list of all the decisions politicians could make and change about the way governments were run. I came up with over 100 items, very quickly. The Democrats and Republicans both didn't address and were in implicit agreement on some 95 of those 100 things, despite the fact that some of them are really ugly. For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC, and estimates have placed the worth of those rights over a billion dollars per year. This made me sad.

barry-cotter 17y ago
Blog it. Then submit it.
- davidw 17y ago
  To reddit...
cousin_it 17y ago
For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC Source please. I don't believe you.
jellicle 17y ago
> For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC, and estimates have placed the worth of those rights over a billion dollars per year. The "old" (VHF and UHF) broadcast frequencies were given to the various stations without any fees whatsoever, I believe. Each broadcast station has to pay a $170 (sic) license renewal fee every couple of years. Those frequency allocations are going away, being reclaimed by the government in the digital TV transition. Some of the old TV frequencies have already been auctioned: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_MHz_wireless_spectrum_auction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_MHz_wireless_spectrum_aucti... Many of the digital TV frequencies (which are in the same area as the old VHF and lower UHF frequencies) have been given to the existing TV stations free of charge. These would have been worth a great deal of money if sold or leased, as you can see from the 700MHz auction above. So it's actually somewhat worse than the original poster says, in that there's no $100,000 collected.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

This is good -- Eliezer? How come it took so long for this to get on the board? Great article. I thought this at first was a politics article, but for me, at least, it's a much more practical one. Let me explain. Working with large corporations, I've found that this is not restricted to sports or politics. It happens between divisions, between business groups -- even between cliques of programmers on the same team. Politics is the ultimate generalization of the problem, but it's a much more practical and immediate matter. I guess that's why I've never understood the fear of talking about politics on HN. Heck -- you guys do it all the time. Every time there's an Apple vs. Microsoft thread, or a Twitter vs. Blogging thread, or a functional programming vs. imperative programming thread -- this is the same thing. It's amazing people can't see it. You identify with a product, a brand, a group of people, and then suddenly it's us versus them. We have our experts, our slogans, our information sources. They have theirs. We can argue for years and never do more than talking past each other, because we've never generalized the type of discussion we are having and worked at the meta level. Where I think politics is more interesting is that positions change month by month. That means that political party X may support something this month and be against it the next month. In effect, it's a critical thinking test -- can you identify your own bias? Because if you were arguing for something last month and are arguing against the same thing this month, you might be identifying more with a group that ideas. It's much easier to spot this when the positions keep changing, which makes a discussion of politics useful for detecting personal bias. BTW, it's also a quick test for thinking about other things too. If you're meeting with a new person and they seem stuck on some political party thing, you can bet they're going to be group-identifying with a lot of other things as well. Different people have different levels of the need-to-identify. We all know the worst ones: the people with bumper stickers all over their car, various flag pins or whatever on their clothes, a rabid sports fan and a sticking-to-a-political-party-no-matter-what attitude. Solutions to the two-party swindle? Term limits (to prevent camping out in office) Expiration limits for laws (to prevent get-what-you-can-now-attitude). Some sort of push for a multi-party system. Oddly enough, in the US at least the thought was that it would end up being a dynamic system with small groups taking various positions and coalitions changing over time. Instead that's not how it worked out. Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about tough topics with each other.

17y ago

ckinnan 17y ago

Ironically, the Founders didn't expect a role for political parties and most were concerned with their rise. "There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the Spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true--and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose--and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming, it should consume." GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address to the people of the United States, Sep. 17, 1796

sethg 17y ago

The author seems to blame the two-party system and the class divide between politicians and voters for the fact that nobody is shrinking the size of the government. I have a much simpler explanation for this phenomenon: no substantial body of voters want smaller government. The clique of libertarians who actually believe in "smaller government" and not simply "government taking less of my money in taxes and spending less on the things that I personally don't like" is substantial on the Web and among the intelligentsia, but not so much in the voting booth. Look at how poorly Ron Paul did in the Republican primaries.

dinkumthinkum 17y ago
I agree essentially with you but I don't think that's really why Ron Paul did so poorly. Ron Paul did poorly because he was always going to do poorly. He was kind of an older looking guy who said a lot of funny things and was kind of a curmudgeon. Most people don't even know what libertarianism is or that he was one. Then many people who know he was a member of the Libertarian party don't really know the difference between those people and your garden variety Republican. But you are right in that the majority of Americans aren't libertarians anyway. Most people (Republican, Democrat, "Independent," haha, whatever) actually do want the government to tell us what we can and can't put in our own bodies. Even the "Legalize Marijuana" people are somewhat hypocritical. They say "legalize pot, it's not as bad or heroin." Oddly enough, most Republicans (the old white guys) actually want social security, which you would think they would view as anathema communist propaganda. American politics are very strange.
tc 17y ago
Very few people want free markets. The rest just want the standard of living that only free markets can offer.
- MaysonL 17y ago
  And the few people who want free markets aren't willing to pay for them.
grandalf 17y ago
i have an even simpler explanation: most people think that increasing government size/scope will make their lives better. These are the same people of whom 40% believe Elvis is alive!

kragen 17y ago

The same thing happens between the armies of nations. Nation A's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation B; Nation B's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation A. Even though they're fighting each other, the civilians on both sides are very similar to each other, and the war makes them all worse off through taxation and slaughter. The armies are also very similar to each other, in values and in training, and very different from the civilian population. In fact, they probably trained together in joint exercises or at WHISC before the war. If you slice the identities one way, the attacks by the armies on the civilians show that the armies are dangerous to the civilians, and therefore civilians should endeavor to eliminate armies, as did the people of the United States in the American Revolution, and as did the people of Costa Rica during the previous century. But of course the more common way to look at it is that the attacks by Nation A show the great necessity for the civilians of Nation B to support the army of Nation B, in order to deter and defend against attacks from Nation A, and vice versa. So armies, as a class, whip up support for themselves by attacking and killing the civilians whose support they depend on. And so today in Israel and Palestine, each nation has strong popular support for organized violence against civilians on the other side. Of course, historically the connection between armies and governments is extremely close. Is there a way out? Are the Costa Ricans in imminent danger of invasion due to their lack of armed forces? Having armed forces didn't seem to help the Salvadorans, the Guatemalans, or the Nicaraguans when the US funded terrorist campaigns against their people, didn't help the Panamanians or the Granadans when the US decided to invade them, and didn't help Guatemala when the United Fruit Company organized a coup. In fact, in most of those cases, the army acted against its own people. But would Honduras have avoided the Football War if they had had no army? Or would they now be a province of El Salvador? Would Cuba be a territory of the US, like Puerto Rico? (And would Cubans be better off if they were?)

tokenadult 17y ago

There is a problem with the submitted essay that is a common problem with many essays on lesswrong: it writes about a matter that developed historically with insufficient examination of the history of the matter. Maybe the people submitting articles to lesswrong need to read more history more often. The American two-party system is remarkable in how much the two parties do NOT insist on long-term ideological consistency. Each party shifts its positions and adds and subtracts party platform planks as new third parties introduce net points of view into political discourse. The parties are stable because their positions on issues are very unstable. If you compare the party platforms of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to those of a century ago, you will see on many issues a complete role reversal of the parties. Similarly, which party is more favored by southern voters or which party is more favored by black voters is far less stable than the general tendency that black voters and southern voters only occasionally favor the same party.

grandalf 17y ago
that was not a cornerstone of his argument in the least. I wouldn't even say it was a part of it at all.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  How would you summarize his argument? Why did the title of the article refer to two parties?

grandalf 17y ago

the missing piece of the essay is the question of whether "political entrepreneurs" should be considered legitimate. Using group dynamics to achieve power is just a reality of human nature, as Elezier points out. But Elezier jumps from this fat to assume that we should then be concerned about the unequal distribution of power between most people and the few political entrepreneurs (aka "power seekers"). It's hard to argue that all power seekers are bad, even if all do use group dynamics to gain and keep power. So how to we determine which power seekers we consider legitimate?

kazuya 17y ago

Seems the author carefully and intentinally avoid talking about religions. Why?