Finance makes Apple and Google forced friends

Some days I really think people don't know how to live under a democracy. There just always seems to be this segment of the population that want to be told what to think (and preferably told things are going well)

Some days I think liberty is the only way to live life, but that people mistake that liberty doesn't come at a cost. Most people don't have enough skin in the game to be willing to accept that cost. The original pilgrims, the founding fathers, and the lot did. There are attacks on our liberities that would have started revolutions (Patriot act being the most egregious example).

Don't know what to think anymore. Politics disgust me. I'm told I'm not even old enough to be this cynical.

Anything which deconcentrates or destroys capital (rapid innovation, war) relatively strengthens democracy.

An age of peace, and lack of political will to prevent innovation-capture by current monopolies, results in democracy weakening relative to commercial interests.

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.