Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree with the core premise. There's nothing fundamentally new about what's going on. Authority is not being undermined more than it was in the past. Technology may be speeding up the process, and enabling easier communication however.

The Christians effectively toppled (or consumed from within) the Roman empire, starting from an exceptionally small base.

Starting from a small group in each country, Communists took over Russia and China - the world's largest countries by land mass and population - and they did it exceptionally quickly considering.

Other examples: Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro, the Founding Fathers, Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein, 1979 Iranian revolution, the Taliban. And those are just a few examples from the last couple hundred years. History is littered with a gazillion more, small and large, of varying ideologies. None of which needed smart phones or the Internet.

These types of things have always happened throughout history.

Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Hoffer believes that mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable; that religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values differ.

Agreed. Since 1995, I've been hearing wild-eyed "visionaries" predict that the internet will bring about equality and the Age of Aquarius. They seem to forget that the same sort of things were said about radio and television. (And probably the telegraph, too.) Proponents of television believed that people would take distance learning courses by sitting in front of the TV. Instead, it turns out that it does nothing more than further propagate least-common-denominator pop culture. My, how things do change...

Good point. In fact, I would go further and say that there is a new mega power emerging to which all of these new and emerging "micropowers" are subjugated.

All of the "progress" we see in developing nations joins them to the global economy as both consumers and sources of cheap labor. Increasingly, the spoils of this globalization are accruing to a smaller and smaller subset of corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals.

When you look around at recent so-called disruption that potestors and modern "revolutionaries" enact, you realize that none have succeeded in displacing powers that are aligned with the global capitalist agenda. Indeed, those that do succeed have all served the interests of that agenda.

Agreed.

The libertarian fantasy that once we sufficiently undermine governments they will fall and a utopia of individual action free of tyranny will reign is just that - a fantasy. Governments are being weakened by the forces of corporate globalization and the winners aren't the masses. They're a tiny band of corporations and a small wealth elite that controls access to resources via control of those corporations. While overly oppressive government can indeed by a terrible problem, it is often overlooked that an elected government is the only means by which the masses can effectively contain the voracious appetites of giant corporations (which will often act in ways that aren't even in their own long term interests, destroying much of the economy on which they feed).

Free markets when well regulated by a government accountable to the people represent a happy medium, which served us well for an extended period in the 20th century. We seem to have lost that. Instead we're left with crony capitalism and government which acts on behalf of the highest bidder. The worst of both worlds. It is a lot harder to overthrow our corporate overlords in this world of weak governance than to overthrow an oppressive ideological political regime.

Well noted.

In addition to the "The libertarian fantasy that once we sufficiently undermine governments they will fall and a utopia of individual action free of tyranny", all processes that uphold all forms of government around the world are merely an illusion that reinforces the status quo globally.

But then again, things can change whether we want them to or not ;)

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