Thanks for the references!
We have so far failed to make any real progress in the direction of not putting self-serving assholes in charge of important things. We clearly can’t connect the fact that we keep putting these same sorts of people in positions of responsibility together with the fact that we keep regretting it - and doing it again they keep blowing up. Talk about perseveration….
Over the last 2000 years, we’ve learned that *real* leaders are assholes, and that’s WHY they get things done. We’ve learned it way too well - so well that we instinctively decide, “well, HE wasn’t the asshole we needed, obviously”…and go looking for that mythical better asshole.
That might actually be the biggest problem we’ve got as a planet
Until 1400-1500 AD, it seems it was always been same. A small segment of the population with mad martial skills held power, usually around a clan or absolute monarch and enforced with edged weapons. With the occasional rock, club and torch thrown into the mix. Horses, draft animals and peasants carried the load of producing food and means of transport while warriors did most of the fighting. Peasants had little say or stake in outcomes.
Since then, things rapidly changed. Lethality and ease of use of canons, firearms, other technology changed the equation of who held power. The industrial age made people more valuable because their work was more productive and skills necessary to produce those widgets made it undesirable to just kill off dissent. Alongside with that change came social changes that were demanded by social groups that were needed by ruling groups to maintain order in more complex and productive society. The rise of the bourgeoise -- knowledge workers and eventually proletariats -- industrial workers.
Not to mention population growth. We have too many people on the planet right now. This isn't about that but with all of those people come fragility in society's ability to feed, clothe, house all those people.
I don't know where I'm going with all of this. What I hope I'm conveying is the iron age gave way the industrial age and modern eras seem to be changing ever more rapidly. Machine age, age of aerospace, communication age all as different from each other as the industrial age was to the iron age before it. It's not just tech that is changing, unless one considers society as a technology. Our societies are evolving rapidly too. We've talked some about 19th century politics and statecraft compared to 21st century politics. We've gone from gunboat and power politics of the 1800's to soft politics where nations compete based upon economic growth, development of new technologies, communication and cooperation. Russia is stuck in the 19th century mode of statecraft and it's failing. China might have been out-doing everybody in excellence at 21st century development but it's society is stuck with autocratic authoritarian rule which stifles development. We'll see.
We don't understand humanity well enough to know how best to organize ourselves. Democracy is a societal hack that allows a society to change when the underlying population comes to consensus about how to address its failures. Authoritarian systems fail to adapt until the whole system crashes. In the past 200 years, social safety nets and social services emerged and the best performing societies today contain a mixture of capitalism and socialism. Some more one way, others more the other.
I'm coming to believe that social democracy is coming to dominate the 21st world. Not because it's the right thing to do but because those societies are more robust to change and chance than autocracies. Or the US model, which is much more capitalist and places higher emphasis on luck -- how wealthy the parents are, for example -- than societies with more equitable access to resources that are needed for people to thrive, such as education, healthcare and housing.