Power is the key to Western culture
It has been stated often aready; but it cannot be repeated often enough. I'll try to give it a particularly succinct edge:
The Western outlook on life, for all its cult of individualism, is about power: Who holds it over whom or what, and by what means?
Ever since the advent of Christianity, mankind, as the assumed pinnacle of the Creation, claims power over other creatures and nature in its entirety. Each and every individual, thus, claims power, if not over other people, then over their animals, plants or tract of land in general.
Exploitation as a basic concept of life, thus, is immanent to Western society; cooperation, by contrast, is deemed inferior and if anything, a means to an end; that is, the better to exploit nature.
Capitalism has simply developed an economic system around this concept, while thoroughly expanding its reach by introducing material wealth as a source of power independent of the political variant. Formerly, people held power over others by dint of their divine right of birth; their projection of religious authority; or by sheer force.
Yet in capitalism, money is what constitutes power. Simultaneously, people aspire to climb a career ladder so as to reach corporate power over others. Of course, many people are quite content to stay where there are in the great wheel of society, quite happy to receive orders rather than to give them; still, they are affected by power, if on the receiving end.
Hence, when liberalism protests the freedom of the individual, it is always but the freedom from the power of others (Isaiah Berlin's concept of negative freedom), while claiming power for the individual at the same time: Over their own land, house or corporation, brokered by material wealth.
So you cannot escape the tyranny of power in 'liberal' Western societies: You either have it, or you are subject to it. Perhaps its purest form, dating back to the ancient Greeks, is when you are lent it temporarily by others via a societal contract, i.e. by an election, complete with the option to take it away from you if you abuse it.
In this context, power is at least wielded under agreed terms, within specific limits, and for agreed purposes. Yet it may still be corrupted by capitalism's ultimate power: material wealth. So accept power for what it is - an inescapable fact of the Western way of living.
tangentwithtanner
dededos
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
romaincrisis
origamiaround