[munificent]

> Like were unable to create a stable democratic state.

I believe equality is an unstable equilibrium.

Throw a bunch of people on an island where everyone starts out equal. Soon, some will have marginally more power than others. Maybe they happen to be stronger, or washed ashore at a point with a few more coconuts and fish, maybe they just get lucky.

What do you use that extra power for? The obvious answer is to use it to force others to give you more power. Let that cycle run for a long time and you get the wildly unequal despotic power structures witnessed through almost all of human history.

The reason democracy "wins" is because bringing the least-powerful people up is a net benefit to everyone, including the most powerful, even if it requires bringing some of the most powerful down. It's a more efficient system -- extracts the most value from the most people -- so the total volume under the equality curve goes up at the expense of the top end going down a little.

For that to work, though, everyone has to buy into the system, even the most powerful. You need a populace that will willingly sacrifice personal power for the betterment of the whole. That requires intense, constant cultural education and community building.

When that breaks down, it's incredibly easy for a society to fall back to the default state of "everyone in it for themselves".

The horrors of WWII were enough to scare people shitless about unchecked power concentrated in the hands of a few. But those horrors are passing out of living memory right now, so it's little surprise that we're going back to authoritarianism and rapacious power hunger.

I'm generally an optimist about the human condition, but the news scares the shit out of me right now. It feels like we're forgetting everything about democracy and won't relearn it until we plunge headlong into WWIII.

[netcan]

I can almost hear a Scottish accent in that argument.

IDk if a thought experiment about a desert island conducted inside a mind that is already thinking in terms of economic dynamics is... There are plenty of examples in the real world. It's pretty rare that little societies have dynamics like that.

Small groups of people usually share instead of trading. Power structures usually emerge from violence, religion or someone becoming chief. Power built by the sweat of one's (scottish) brow is something more characteristic of modern, monetary, large scale industrial and post-industrial societies.

Pharaoh wasn't pharaoh because his ancestors were marginally better farmers.

[RobertoG]

I think that you are misinterpreting what he is saying.

He is not saying that Pharaons were marginally better farmers but that balance in power is intrinsically unstable.

Losing a simple pawn in the beginning of the game makes you lost the game.

[tracker1]

And seems to center around the same ideologies that were most prevalent in the early 1900's too. Industrial/corporate capitalism and communism respectively (new names, same ideas). In the end many didn't learn and the same mistakes will repeat. Pragmatism places things somewhere in the middle, but this time around people are far less willing to make concessions or even have conversations for the sake of progress.