Technology

"Power corrupts" is not specific to capitalism.

I guess it's hard to explain to somebody without grand-grandparents or relatives of the same generation, some of which were jailed for years and some executed by NKVD, in all cases with very vague convictions similar to "fuck you that's why".

Or to somebody who probably doesn't know that today's Russian elites (and, by the way, Baltic and Transcaucasian ; but not Ukrainian surprisingly, I don't know how that happened, and not entirely Central Asian ; Ukrainian elites are those capitalists you consider very bad and evil) in culture and approaches (and level of intelligence) are still descendants of those NKVD executioners.

I've had one Stalinist moron wave that "power corrupts" to me, so when I pointed out that his idea accumulates power even more, he just said he hates autists and doesn't want them making decisions with consequences for the society.

That was in person and you might have already guessed that the guy was a lawyer (I don't remember if I said to him that some people think of lawyers the same way he thinks of autists, and that a few good things like stoic philosophy work even better with autists ; that latter thing - likely, cause he very often referred to antique things and reacted positively to my such references, but I don't think he ever managed to finish to what end those arguments were ; seems to be a pattern with Marxists to make prolonged speeches with pretentious tone&expression without logical structure and any definite outcome, as if they thought that more words mean more value - would be consistent with definitions of work and value by Marx).

But that's offtopic, about what you said:

Getting back to capitalism, and since I remembered Marx, let's accept some of his reductions. Say that "feudalism" was before "capitalism". Of course, it wasn't just "feudalism", it was a fabric of non-uniform subjects of economy and politics with non-linear traditional relationships to each other.

But suppose we just take arbitrary power over those weaker than us, and lack of organization or technology from that mass to resist, and inherent subjectiveness of information and mistrust into it. We are coming back to it, not further from it into "capitalism" with its flow of verifiable information, accumulation of trust and values of upholding deals and cooperation.

There is a concept of "the new Middle Ages", I was interested in it and emotionally felt we are coming there in my teens in 2008-2014. I've also met a few reptile and immoral, but rather perceptive people interested in that same concept. And if you are interested in Middle Ages in Europe, the similarities in cultural developments are uncanny.

So we are already there. We all talk about simulacra, while whole peoples fight for their lives in Tigray, in other regions of the African continent. We discuss global warming when whole countries are under threat of abrupt annihilation. We discuss "AI slop" affecting internal politics of some big country, when in other places "AI slop" is used to justify genocide and rewrite history. And we all don't see each other and don't know what to believe.

Our world has been becoming smaller for centuries, but it is becoming bigger again. Our time is equivalent to late Rome.

There are upsides to such changes, but those depend on ties and mechanisms that build up very slowly.