Beyond Philosophy

An attempt to summarize my own take on economy, politics, and government as these exist historically in human societies. Teaching is a beggar's profession; so is most of the service economy. It does not make food, or shelter, or anything essential to its own or others' survival. That does not make it worthless, naturally, only non-essential and dependent: if we are busy trying not to die, we don't have time for non-essentials, and beggars may go unfed, unclothed, and unsheltered. What keeps us alive is chiefly food and shelter: farming, foraging or hunting, and building are essential. Another essential that we don't always like much is protection: the ability to avoid predation skillfully, diplomatically, and when that fails, to defeat it directly, with violence. Politics arises as we attempt to organize essentials and non-essentials within a community; as that community grows, the eventual outcome is always mafia. A legitimate mafia, one that operates by kno...

This is something I wrote up this morning, thinking along the lines of the dictum attributed to Lord Acton:  Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins has written more about how we find this illustrated in history, specifically the history of France from the fall of the Roman empire to the twentieth century.   The need for renunciation is a theme in all serious philosophy since antiquity, though it is often ignored in modern conversations about power, which either take the accumulation of more power for granted, as necessary, or embrace it explicitly as good. To me this looks like suicide.  People can wield power well, at the individual level. But the persistent problem in our history is systemic: the existence of hegemony that persists in human societies too big to operate without strangers. When someone in the family goes criminal, we deal with him; when strangers go criminal, they take over (or we become them to k...