[greyswan]

His mapping of the structure of our current governmental system was eye opening to me. I liked the explanation of the prescriptive (planned/written) vs. the descriptive (actual/unwritten) constitution. I also liked the idea that organizations that aren't officially part of the government are effectively part of it without having any accountability.

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution...

He's certainly not for everyone, but the most common criticisms of him I see are usually pull quotes taken from Wikipedia.

[Garlef]

Well... Isn't this old news? You could read for example Foucault and have a similarly enlightening but more cohesive reading experience.

But maybe immersing yourself in the rohrschach/barnum-effect nature of these texts is more fun.

[qppo]

So old we use Latin terms to describe it, like de jure and de facto.

[mempko]

His imagination is limited. He is a statist and thinks if a persons opinion doesn't matter (subjects of the state) Then they have ultimate freedom. He equates having zero power as freedom.

[adnzzzzZ]

Isn't that a valid way of thinking? I think most Chinese citizens are in many ways more free than American ones. Obviously in other ways not so much, but it isn't obvious that it's all for the worse. For instance, they don't have to pay attention to politics nearly as much as Western citizens do. Look at the state of our politicized society, how much stress it generates, and how much better your life would be if you didn't have to deal with politics invading every aspect of society.

[AnimalMuppet]

But the Chinese have politics invading many aspects of society anyway, but lack the ability to do anything about it. Is that less stressful, or more?

[adnzzzzZ]

Less, because the way it invades those aspects is direct, and not indirect through other human beings. In our society, for power to work it has to convince the population of what power wants, which means that the political invasion happens by other people caring about politics. In a country ruled by a dictator, that isn't the case, because the dictator doesn't have to convince the population of anything, he just does it, and if it works and it's better then good, and if it doesn't then he can try something else (without having to reconvince anyone that now this something else might work).

[AnimalMuppet]

And if what he tries is working for the dictator and not the population?

And China's social credit system looks like "indirect through other human beings", at least in part.

[adnzzzzZ]

China's social credit system is highly exaggerated, and not far too different from what already exists in most Western nations. People get fired here for the slightest social mistakes, right? On top of not being able to buy all sorts of things if they don't have enough credit.

As for the first question, it's not a problem for China specifically because their leaders seem competent. But more generally the problem of power transfer in case of poor results probably has lots of different solutions that haven't been tried in the past, especially now that we have more technology available. One interesting thing China does is have lots of surveys about local policies, which seems to me like something easier and more practical to have now that everyone is online.

In any case, that question is not too different of a problem than what to do when the government in a decentralized democracy such as ours has been taken over by all sorts of interests that are not aligned at all with the population's interests.

Decentralized systems like the one we have are very hard to fix incrementally precisely because they're optimized for stability in the face of constant growth, and we've reached a point of no growth, so the stability starts working against it as it makes the necessary changes harder to enact (since it's very decentralized). Like it or not, the most logical solution for this is more centralization of power. And this will likely happen in the coming decades. It's better that it happens willingly than unwillingly.