Principle; ‘For every ounce of power, there must be an equal part of accountability‘.
Discuss.
I am thinking that if you have people with power over others, with no retort to a secondary authority e.g. gangsters, then they will abuse that power. Equally if you have say an elected sheriff, mayor or other local authority, and they have jurisdiction over a region, they too can act according to what they believe and what the majority want ~ hence being uninclusive of minority opinion. So with both centralised and decentralised power, you always need accountability in every measure. A sheriff should be accountable to other local and central authorities, and govt should be accountable to all other areas of power.
On another level, where power is relative to wealth, then there goes an equal measure of responsibility to the given amount of power. If e.g. someone owns a massive slice of the wealth pool, they have a responsibility to all they employ, and to not take that wealth our of the pool from whence it derives ~ where it produces a negative affect over those in his domain.
These are just rough outline for how I see the principle, how do you see it?
The way I see it is that at just about every level people desire power over others. Most marriages degrade into power struggles, for example. So it’s not just heads of state or employers who want power.
Power is, in fact, a drug. People at all levels of society, including children, have become addicted to power. For this reason, the individual has less and less control over his/her life. A society which values power is a sick society. It is run by sick people for sick people. When humans no longer have control over their own lives then they cease to be able to function as autonomous, self-reliant human beings. That is what makes them sick.
One of the difficulties with this is that since power is a drug, those who weild it are immune to reason and common sense - just as someone hooked on heroin will do just about anything to maintain their habit, so too will those in power do anything to keep themselves in power. Therefore there’s pretty much no chance of reforming society bar some sort of apocalypse.
A healthy society will not value power (and money since money is a means of weilding power over others).
The funny thing is that the president of the US, for example, is considered to be one of the most powerful people on the planet. That is incorrect. Think of him as the top stone, the pinnacle stone, of a pyramid. It is only propped up by the millions of stones underneath it. Without those millions of stones it wouldn’t be the pinnacle stone. In the same way, heads of state appear powerful, but they rely on the support of millions to achieve that status. Their power is, in fact, artificially created. They are trapped in their positions like flies in a spider’s web.
In summary, then, power makes a society sick and unhealthy and therefore with a limited shelf life. Societies based on power die. We are just awaiting our turn! Also, there’s an awful lot of misconceptions about power, some of which I have attempted to explain above.
I more or less agree, hence I think you agree with my premise? …That as it is inevitable that some people will always have a measure of power over others, and hence the amount of power they have, has to be counteracted in some way. They have to be held responsible and accountable to other parties including those they may well perceive to be below them.
quetzalcoatl, I am not sure that I would say it is inevitable that some people have power over others. That is the product of a sick society and one which will eventually decline and die. Another may spring up in its place, though!
I don’t think that holding people to account for the power thay have over us works. Those in power make sure they take less and less responsibility but exercise more and more control.
Perhaps what we do agree on, however, is that having power over another person is undesirable.
Indeed, perhaps it is somewhat idealistic to presume that some people wont always want and abuse power. I have faith that people are sick of it, and that may evolve into a lack of it ‘naturally’, after all if people change society will change with it.
perhaps what i mean if for a transition period and also to ease the system into the changes ~ make it conducive to it.
The way people ‘use or abuse’ their power will depend on their personal morals, no? I find that those with the greatest cumulative power do good, while those given meagre power can be tyrannical with it.
Perhaps, though generally most of us don’t go by our own morals [not completely anyway], we often find ourselves involved in situation which we learn from, and hence we don’t know the answer prior to that learning experience. I would think it is more that given power, we will find ourselves abusing it, at least some times.
Like hitler, Attila the hun, Genghis khan, almost any given roman emperor etc? hmm by ‘cumulative’ do you mean as a collective? Or as built up too. I think collections of individuals can act as an individual would e.g. given political movement, democracy, or religion etc. I agree with the latter certainly, take into consideration any given parking attendant lols
quetzalcoatl, I think I understand what you mean about a transition period.
However, I am, perhaps, less of an optimist than youin this matter! Once those in power get to taste power, as with getting hooked on drugs, they are very unlikely to want to come off those drugs voluntarily. I suppose they’d have to be presented with the benefits of coming off their drug. Unfortunately, I can’t see a way of convincing, say, Obama, that he’s a druggie! Any movement would have to start at grassroots level, I guess.
I suppose you are right, I was thinking that one could change the model and then better things would follow. The more I think about it, the more there seams to be no option but to have a complete change, it just has to be done in the least destructive way ~ which is where problems with the imposition would come into it. This is as like communism the theory and in praxis, the original intent is soon lost in translation.
