[shrubby]

The moral comes from the grassroots as power corrupts.

As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ...

The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein.

A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in the article put into concrete and compare everything via the lens of "what if all eight billion of current humans and also the future generations would do this".

Right now nobody's daring to to this but as long as we start asking "who's afraid of the narcissist zillionaire" the world starts to make sense and the solution appears.

[wildpeaks]

Power reveals rather than corrupt: it's easy to act moral when there are consequences (real or imagined) when you don't, but you see someone's true self when they know they could get away with it.

For example, this is why the way someone treats service workers is a good indicator of someone's character.

[rightbyte]

Ye like a guy at Walmart and a cop. The leeway to mess with you is off by orders of magnitude.

[shrubby]

Yup.

I'm looking this via the lens of moral development where:

Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.

Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.

Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.

Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.

My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.

Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape.