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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

The current power structures are responsible for climate destruction that means many of our children will be forced to spend their lives in an Earth worse than what their parents experienced. Meanwhile, the leaders of those power structures have taken no responsibility, no change of course, and instead have enriched themselves more and more.

The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility. Today we see billionaires, world leaders, and autocrats amassing ever more power while demonstrating no responsibility.

Is it any surprise people want to tear it all down even if they don't know what they want instead?

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> The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility.

Is that typically true? It seems the pattern is often:

person/group amass power -> things are okay for a while -> power corrupts and there's longrunning abuse of power -> [time] -> society eventually makes noise and/group gets destabilized/dies -> repeat

Sure. In fact, take any category of power relations; these are categories of people, related by power over one another. Then, the dual category is one of responsibility relations.

To say that Prima has power over Secunda is to say that Prima can alter Secunda's environment arbitrarily. However, this is equivalent to Secunda requiring certain open-ended alterations to their environment, and being unable to establish those alterations without Prima.

No matter how many times one goes around the concept, one cannot be responsible without having the power to enact the responsibility, and one cannot be empowered without having expectations on the use of that power.

By "fundamental premise" I meant something along the lines of "the reason any human is ever OK with another human having power". If we didn't assume some correlation between power and responsible use thereof, we would all either be hermits, or tearing each other to pieces.

group amasses power under leadership signifucantly more competent than competitors in a war -> things are ok for a while because group's opponents are spent in blood and treasure, and also because of competent leadership -> [time] -> new interest groups form, old opponents recover strength, leadership declines due to reversion to the mean and complacency -> war breaks out when the government is sufficiently weakened -> repeat

I think you're projecting. I don't think that a single one of these protest movements has to do with global warming.

I don't think they're linked at all. People saying they're linked reminds me of people who argued for some connection between the Viet Cong and the '68 Paris riots. Uh huh.

Some of them are even protests against measures that may improve the environment, such as raising fossil fuel prices, or the farmers' protests against measures to reduce nitrogen run-offs in the Netherlands.

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