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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 7964879" data-attributes="member: 72555">Power flows from the barrel of a gun.Well, sort of.  The barrel of a gun is useless unless you are pointing it at people, and those people are useful.People being useful can always choose to die rather than consent.  So it is the consent of the useful people that is power, and you can use a gun to attempt to get it.So power flows from the consent of useful people.This (one of the reasons) why democracy works (regardless of it being "good", I'm saying "works"); power aligns with electoral power, so you reduce the difference between nominal power and actual power.  This helps prevent the structural forcing of revolution, or inefficient use of force to compel consent of the power of the people.But in those "utopian" societies, people are no longer useful.  They don't produce anything that a hypothetical dictator (individual or organization) wants or needs.  If they have guns pointed at them, simply wiping them out doesn't hurt the people with the guns (materially); in fact, as they seem to economically be little but a drain on the productivity of the society involved, societies that do eliminate their surplus population end up with more "effective" economies.  If that "effective" economy can compete with other economies and defeat, swallow or (memically) infect them, you run into a problem where this system grows, while ones that respect human rights shrink and lose.In comparison, today when you point your guns at your people and you do wipe them out today, you end up with an economy that is destroyed.  The people produce the wealth, so the consent of the people is the source of power.So long as human rights hold, UBI solves the over-productivity "problem", but it misaligns both economic and political power with actual power.  So a revolution is only being held at bay by the stability of society, and human-rights-less political system is in a more stable configuration...---Now, we can turn this on its head.  For most of human history, power came from food.  Peasants where valuable because they grew food.  A few specialists didn't grow food, and produced something else.  Today, 99% of the population of western economies is not food related.  To someone in the food-dominated era this would be unbelievable.So maybe we can transition to some other kind of value produced by people, and devalue everything machine produced to being trivial in cost.(I think I stayed clear of political forces here?  I didn't place judgement on any actors.  I tried to just talk about power...)</blockquote>

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