I think one of the main problems is associating ‘power’ with such a negative attitude. ‘Power’ needn’t be conceived as ‘domination’. I would say changing people’s attitudes about what ‘power’ means and highlighting the positive use of ‘power’ rather than attacking the negative uses of ‘power’ would be more helpful.

If your car is broken and I tell you what is wrong with it and fix it is that ‘domination’? Clearly I possessed the ‘power’ to fix your car yet you seem to be making out that someone being more skilled or able necessarily means ‘domineering’ or ‘subjugating’? This is the conundrum of the ‘individual’ and ‘ego’. We wish to be independent, yet in reality we rely on each other more than not - although there is a greater inclination towards one more than the other from person to person.

Nice thread btw :)

This is a tough topic and likely to induce some egotistical responses and appeals to a more ‘victimhood’ mentality. I do believe that whatever humanity is going to do it is doing it right now - we’re unwitting witnesses to a revolution that won’t be understood for several decades.

Note: I truly believe you mean this. Just pointing out how such a weighty word can be easy misconstrued to indicate a sense of victimhood by those who carry a weight of resentment around on their shoulders rather than applauding those who use ‘power’ for the betterment of society. Surely it is a question of how ‘power’ is used rather than dispensing with ‘power’ altogether?

I think the core issue in political philosophy isn't so much power, but authority. That is, it's not so much about who has the ability to force others to do something, but who has a legitimate moral or ethical right to command, and conversely everyone else a duty to obey them. That does have an effect on how power ought to be distributed, because whoever has the power is the one who's going to be commanding and being obeyed.

As a philosophical anarchist -- one who thinks nobody has a legitimate right to command, or duty to obey -- I think power in the sense that you mean (which is a more specialized sense than the one sushi is on about above, social power specifically, the ability to coerce) needs to be distributed as evenly as possible, so that it remains balanced between people, and consequently nobody has more of it over another than they have over them, leaving everybody with effectively zero, relative to anyone else. I have thoughts on a structure that I think could help to approximate that, detailed in my essay On Politics, Governance, and the Institutes of Justice.

Read your essay, interesting, hopefully I'm not gagging you with banal analysis, but thought it could be a good discussion. Not that schooled in politics myself, but I got something out of it. I think you highlight important motive forces that are diminishing and sometimes completely lacking in our society, namely proactive individuality, experimentation, and institutions that are neither synergistic nor antagonistic but exist in parallel, in essence non-competitive.

Individuals don't spontaneously commit to a novel interest unless channeled into it by market dynamics, pre-packaged informational sourcing and predictive authority. We don't seem to have entrepreneurship that is scientific enough to innovate a new, non-degenerative and non-corrupting institutional template rather than simply new products. And all of our institutions are in a state of financial tension, where any benefit in one area always results in detriment somewhere else, a situation that perpetually coerces society into some form of antagonism via competition.

We spend too much effort inventing products by the millions while neglecting the equally important pursuit of experimenting with various kinds of collectivity. Instead of solely implementing organizational strategies imposed authoritatively from the top of a social hierarchy, fomenting class distinction and power struggle, we could be making a wide assortment of parallel movements, speculating communes that don't get immediately choked out of existence by rivalry and acquisitive consolidation.

One country having multiple governments, a precedential one and also subsidiary experimental ones for assessing vastly different possible structures, is a good idea. But the psychological issues you must have dealt with elsewhere are a major obstacle. Once the global scale is reached, we have to choose a scientific division of social labor or eternal imperialism, and the imperialist approach is extremely appealing to the human psyche. Maybe this is a pivotal era in human history that will result in long-standing commitment to either collaboration or oppression, reason or force.

From a purely philosophical point of view: Power is elevated social status, which comes with 1. better mate selection, 2. More plentiful mate selection 3. increased chances to bring offspring to dominant or elevated position 4. which ensures the survival of the individual's DNA.

All animals that live in societies build hierarchical structures. I don't mean bees and ants; I mean lions, sea lions, gorillas, gazelles, deer, etc etc. I don't know much about fish and their schools, or some sea creatures and their colonies, such as sponges and coralls.

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This said, I must also state that the difference of an offspring success is negligible these days between the oligarchical families of these times, and the average income- and power-stance families.

Furthermore, power is distributed unevenly. A pauper can topple a CEO, and a musician or a basket-ball player can mate more abundantly with more numerous partners than the President of the United States of America.

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Looking at the thread, the other participants are involving their thoughts on social injustice, on efficiency of societal institutions, on psychological effects on the powerful and the powerless, etc. Those observations are mostly valid, maybe even all of them. My point is not to criticize the observations of others in this thread, but simply to point out how and why being powerful had been historically advantageous, and how it is no longer that, if you consider only the advantages that had been considered in pre-historic times.