[Atlas667]

Yes, facts make it necessarily both.

But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?

The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.

If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.

The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.

[thaumasiotes]

> Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land

That depends on the society. The king in Achaemenid Persia owned all the land. His successors the Seleucid Greek kings didn't. A medieval European king didn't even come close.

I read something to the effect that (in one very early Mesopotamian city) the king owned about 1/3 of the land, another ~1/3 was owned by large landholders who numbered maybe a couple dozen (this group included the queen), and the final ~1/3 was owned by a very large number of small landholders.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Consider the alternatives to this.

The first is that great works are being accomplished without anyone being in charge of them. People invent alternating current and land on the moon in a completely decentralized manner with no one leading the effort and no one making a larger contribution than anyone else. Not the thing where everyone gets to try but only one out of a million succeeds but rather some other thing where everyone is a fungible cog and you can't identify anyone as being the lynchpin or anyone else as not pulling their weight, and yet the great works still happen.

The second is that great works are not being accomplished.

The first one seems implausible. The second one seems bad.

[Atlas667]

What are you talking about?

I don't think authority is bad. What we're talking about isn't purely organizational, its economical. Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.

Hierarchy can be an abstraction of group decision making and not a relationship to the products of labor (as it is now).

Or do you think people will only do things if others own the products of their labor? Would it be impossible to exist as a society without a small group of people owning the products of millions of peoples labor?

Like I said with my original comment our current notion of great men is mostly a political fabrication by the rich. The rich being the people who own the media outlets we consume, the publishing houses, the internet, the people who own the vast majority of the things we need. They have the power to influence our morality through information culling, exposure and/or volume. Thus they have birthed the modern idea of "great men". "Great men" as they exist today are not great by us, they are great by them.

Do you think these forms that currently exist are the end form of human organization? These forms breed too many ills to be able to last forever, monetary corruption IS the real manifestation of these forms of human organization.

[AnthonyMouse]

Hierarchy is someone being at the top. Who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or all the people who elected him and then fought as solders to win the ensuing war?

> Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.

These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions, which is to say competitive markets rather than oligopolies or government central planning. And that is going to result in large companies and big personalities -- it's only a problem when they become so large that they no longer have adequate competition, which is something that happens well after the point that they have leaders whose names people know.

[Atlas667]

Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.

> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.

There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.

> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...

Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy.

This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.

The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

> Both of them freed the slaves.

But only one of them ever gets credit for it.

> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?

There are two ways to frame this.

The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.

The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.

> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?

Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.

We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?

[Atlas667]

> The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.

Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.

It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.

> Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.

So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.

This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.

This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.

[anon291]

Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny.

Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

Ascribing only vices (chopping heads off) to monarchs is wrong.

To be clear, I am a staunch republican and believe king Charles and other European monarchs need to step down. However you are engaging in revisionism

[watwut]

> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders while not invading others, eased commers and also enhanced "human flourishing"? And did all that while other people in kingdom and surrounding kingdoms were basically unimportant to all that and the king was the center person to all of that?

Cause I am going to argue that whatever benefits and disadvantages of monarchy, your king is imaginary. Despite being powerful, kings were very much limited by what went on around them and what they could not control.

[anon291]

There is no country which matches your requirements for good king. This is not a serious question. Yes there have been many just kings throughout history.

[Atlas667]

You know, I am not a historian. And I'm not gonna talk as if I know anything about how kings were viewed by the people.

But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.

[samdoesnothing]

Why not compare them to their modern equivalents? They seem mostly the same as politicians today, except some actually cared about the people the ruled.

[Atlas667]

Nah, I think the rich are the kings, politicians are their court.

We have a bunch of little kings with a public court that theyre all trying to use for themselves.

IDK you but I think you cant get rich by being a good person. You actively have to ignore others' needs to focus on growth, to use people.

[cyberax]

The only "good kings" are:

1. The ones that are long dead.

2. The ones that have their head chopped off.

3. The ones that don't actually have a lot of power.

> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

"Good kings" did not "provide protection". The army did. They also did not provide "protection" to everybody, regular peasants usually couldn't care less about their current king.

[card_zero]

Many of the long dead ones did good things. In a manner of speaking there shouldn't have been kings in the past, but we can extend that statement to say that the past should have been modern times, which it couldn't be. Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected. Charlemagne, then, who (at least in his capacity as a cultural focal point) standardized Latin and founded schools and reformed the illegible script into miniscule, was reasonably good, for a king. The Persian, Roman, and Indian emperors, who started postal services, were doing it for espionage and warfare, but as it happens, they were also doing some good.

[cyberax]

> which it couldn't be.

And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?

If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.

Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:

> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.

> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.

Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?

[anonymous908213]

> If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better.

If you study modern politics, then you'll notice how preciously few people are focused on making the lives of regular people better. I don't actually believe, if you were to do a deep dive on all of the kings of the past few hundred years and not just the most famous ones, that the ratio would be meaningfully worse. I do suspect fame will negatively correlate with "goodness", since people who do their job quietly are less notable than people who cause a commotion.

[card_zero]

Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.

I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.

[amanaplanacanal]

Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.

A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.

As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.

[cyberax]

Nope. I'm not talking about technical advances.

How about abolishing slavery? A representative government? Right to a fair trial?

> I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents.

The idea is that some things are just bad and can't be excused by mere history. It doesn't mean that we should automatically pay reparations, but it DOES mean that pretty much all historical leaders should be considered tainted.

Charlemagne is not a great king that united France and made sure education prospered. He was a warmonger who accidentally ended up improving education. And so on.

[paulryanrogers]

Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?

If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?

[Atlas667]

> Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?

It isn't, though I may be tangentially speaking about Great Man Theory, I wasn't focusing on it.

> If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?

I thought using "great men" gives space for virtue and a spiritual/intellectual worth, not just a morally ambiguous "power".