I HATE what these people are doing but can't help be impressed by it.
I understand why, but I'm still disgusted. Typically the sort of people prone to believing in ends justify means, don't distinguish between ends and means at all. There is a qualitative difference between one who acts upon others without appeal to law or morality, and one who acts, whatever their method, in response to others attempting to tread on them--in the same way there is a qualitative difference between force and violence.
And while morality is indeed an invention of mankind, it is not merely for the disenfranchisement of the powerful, in service of the weak. While I hate stalin, his quote is apt and true "quantity has a quality all its own". The moral arc of history has always, in the long run, been towards greater enfranchisement because, as a civilization reaches its peak, it is already halfway to failure. By definition, the peak is the halfway point of any curve. If you look at the final days of the original chinese government, before mao's coup succeeded, they chose selfishness and self-preservation, over their nation, choosing to cut bait and run. I'm not going off on a tangent here, I'm driving at something: there may or may not have been some consideration for living to fight another day, to return renewed and take back their nation, but I don't think so. Without consideration to the idea of honor, purely pragmatically, it might have rallied their forces and acted as a sort of martyrdom, for the head of the chinese government to stand and fight, even if it meant death. This illustrates a broader idea though: That as a civilization faces its decline, as chaos and disorder increase, and it confronts its own limitations, there must increasingly come a series of decisions, hardly predictable in their interval or arrival, but bound by some law of nature or the universe to arise--and at these junctures, officials and rulers must be tempted to choose between their own political and military survival, versus what is best for their own nation, their territory. Thats what hitting the ceiling of your own merit as a ruler does, it forces you to decide between short term political gains and the long term survival of the broader polity.
The moral arc of history is this and only this: That the selfish, the short-term, will fail, and fall, and fade away. The most effective and longest-lasting rulers and regimes, will on average, become, in time, both the most machavallian, and the most egalitarian, without which the social, economic, and political forces of civilization are not properly balanced, and thus determine, longer or shorter, the ultimate lifespan of that civilization and its various regimes that rise and fall throughout a nations history.
Eventually we will reach not merely a global state, or very near to it (orwells three competing superpowers), but it must, by definition, inevitably fall if it is rotten, and give rise, eventually, to something better.
I do not know, given each magnitude increase in a nations population, if there are ultimate limits to how benevolent it can become, only that the arc of history has shown the worst regimes (the most short-term oriented) have eventually failed and falled, leading to today's world, which despite all the globohomo and 'modernism', is still considered the most peaceful and prosperous periods in human history.
For more, I would listen to
Because war is the most all encompassing metaphor there is for all the various processes in nature and civilization.
I listen to it, almost daily, and its worth it every time.
Cogent comment. Thanks for the link too.
Cogent comment. Thanks for the link too.
Always.
Don't get me wrong - I'm disgusted,, too.
Typically the sort of people prone to believing in ends justify means, don't distinguish between ends and means at all.
Quotable.
Thanks for the link - I will listen.
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