Thought: Does Power Corrupt ? Or does Power Reveal?

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
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Well, to start, in a way that didn’t attempt to shift the issue to subsequent decisions. Let’s see how you did this time!

Nope.

You made the choice to use God as an example case in a discussion about power and corruption, thus inviting discussion of God in relation to power and corruption. Once again, don’t go making this about me just because you don’t like the implications of your own choices.

Yes, because if I don’t believe in God, any position I ascribe to him would be hypothetical by necessity, now wouldn’t it?

No, it’s a pretty bog-standard theistic myth. I find the Caldari invocation of Cold Wind more compelling, if I’m being honest. At least there is wind on Caldari Prime, and quite a lot of it cold.

Hold up, though, you’re already changing the conditions of the issue. If I made weapons (and no, I don’t build them) and they were then used in ways I absolutely knew they would be, then yes, I would be responsible for that use.

You’re introducing ‘abuse or misuse’ here, but once again, that’s impossible in the scenario of an omnipotent creator that knows how everything will happen. There can be no misuse, because if there was a use God didn’t intend, then that misuse wouldn’t exist.

That’s the crux of the issue you can’t escape. God got to set the starting conditions. God, with perfect knowledge of the future, had the power to make any alterations needed to avoid undesired results before engaging in creation.

If you know that something will happen after you do X, and you still do X, you intend that thing to happen. It may not be your goal, but you still intended it to happen, however incidentally.

I don’t have any history with God, cuz I don’t believe he exists. I have a history with believers, who generally alternate between being truly amazing people who sincerely seek to be positive influences in the cluster, and being absolute pricks who use God as an excuse to be terrible to other people in their own lust for power and validation.

There’s a thin smattering of ‘I really hope I know what I’m doing, but in the end, I’m as lost as anyone else and just fumbling my way through life’ types in the middle who generally try to be decent people. That, so far, is where I think you land, but you seem to crave surety way too much to admit it to yourself, which is dangerous.

:sigh:

Capsuleers are not immortal. We are serial copies, immediately replaced and so disposable that even our closest friends, relations, and lovers never even notice when it happens. We die, forgotten and unmourned, as someone else who happens to remember most of our life, steps into that life to take our place.

I, for example, am currently just shy of 134 days old, made out of a lump of generic biomatter, sculpted to look like someone who died over a decade ago, my brain flash-grown to match the all-but-final brain-state of a prior lump of sculpted genetic biomatter.

All anyone ever gets is a lifetime: theirs. Most of the iterations of my identity have gotten ones that average out at around one month long.

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The Question of “Why does Evil Exist” is an Interesting Question. It is somewhat Tied to another Question which is “Why does the Universe Exist ?”, which is even More Difficult to Contemplate.

I have Read a Theory that Attempts to at least Partially Answer these Questions. I shall Attempt to Summarise, as the Original was rather Verbose with Confusing Sentences contained within It. Also the Person who Explained it To Me appeared to have been Drinking earlier in the Day, as there was an Archaeology Party at the University Here.

The Universe exists as a Tool for God, the Creator, to design Universes. This seems somewhat Circular to Me, but that is not Important right now.
The Model of the Universe that this Theory uses, is That of a Multidimensional Hypergarlic, which seemed Overly Complex to Me, why a Garlic, rather than a simple Onion ?
The Premise is that more Recently created Universes are at the Centre of the Hypergarlic, and older Universes towards the Outside.
Occasionally Beings can move between Layers of the Garlic, appearing as Angels or Demons to the inhabitants, depending on their Direction of Travel - Beings from Corewards would appear Angelic, beings from Skinward would appear Demonic.
There is also a Premise that if one Lives a Righteous Life according to the Conditions in their native Layer, then one’s Soul may be “Saved” and re-used in a Coreward Layer.

The Purpose of the Universe in this Model, is to provide Information on how Beings with Free Will react to Having Free Will, such that the Design for Beings in Newer Universes can be Iterated Upon, such that Newer Universes contain more Righteousness. The Model does not Explain Why God would wish to do this, though there are Analogies such as how People like to build things like Fish Tanks, to have a Small contained Ecosystem to watch for Entertainment and/or Meditative Purposes - watching Fish in an Aquarium is Quite Soothing, so I am Somewhat Inclined to Believe this.

Therefore, in this Model, the Universe exists as a Research Tool, and an Entertainment Device, such that God can build Better Universes in Future, though “Future” is somewhat Vague, as the “Newer” universes already Exist Simultaneously with the “Older” universes in the Hypergarlic. It is Difficult to Understand this without use of 4-Dimensional Models.

I found this Theory Confusing but Intriguing, but am at a Loss to Attempt to determine Whether it is True or Not.

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The difficulty in challenging the Creator on the premise of “The Problem of Evil” is twofold:

  • The presumption that what we perceive as evil is, in fact, ‘evil’ when our perspective is immeasurably limited compared to his and
  • The presumption that our determination of what is ‘evil’ and what is not has any authority in the court of the Creator

It is easy for us, in our self-righteousness, to stand in judgment over God because we are dissatisfied with his creation. That doesn’t mean it is just or wise for us to do so.

Your perception of God’s choices and actions (or inactions) will be based on your perception of his nature. Begin with that foundation of discussion before proceeding. Unless you can reconcile that point, you will never reconcile the dependent points.

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You mention the paradox of God permitting evil to exist.

Makes me wonder about the relationship between the viewer and the perpetrator.

How often do apparent cats of corruption get viewed as such because the viewer is limited by a lack of knowledge?

In movies and fictional n we, the viewer, have the unique ability to perceive things from multiple perspectives. Now the characters would not have that same ability.

How often are we, as characters in a story, limited in our perspective? Always. So how often do we perceive corruption when there is none?

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I don’t see you attacking the structure of the idea that I presented, merely the mention of God in relation to it. Quite interesting.

Well yes, that’s why I presented it in such a manner. We may not be on the same page, but at least we’re in the same book.

Of course you do, the Cold Wind is an uncaring force that punishes the weak simply for existing. They have reasons to express such hardship through such an idea, but even they acknowledge the concept as a mind tool. I have much admiration for the Caldari’s practical ideas, though not for their stubborn obsession with utility.

This is your fatal assumption: Linearity. You made the same assumption in regard to superpositional states. God knows all of the choices you can make, but that decision still rests upon you. You assume that omniscience is constrained to linear time. It is not. God created time. God exists outside of time. Your perception of time from within its bounds is not objectively accurate.

You’ve reduced our existence to a science experiment taking place within a faulty environment. How depressing.

Oh I am dangerous dear, as are most of our kind. Very few human beings, if any, are without sin and even the most pious will be tempted and fail. I have made mistakes and I have hurt people. If you knew my father and his actions you would be quite appalled, but he is with God now and I have found wisdom and refuge in the scriptures.

Perhaps in time you will see that the body is merely a vessel for something much more. The mind, your consciousness, survives despite the destruction of its corpus. So why not the soul? There are those who have an even greater spiritual struggle with the self versus death and I pray for them as I do for you. The technology that you speak of as cold and bereft of meaning is a blessing and a privilege that goes undervalued far too often.

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Except that in-context, no, ‘evil’ is defined by the Amarr God, through the Scriptures attributed to his divine revelation. Thus, it’s not our determination, it’s His, and so we can be reasonably sure that either what we’re talking about as ‘evil’ is, in fact, ‘evil’ in the eyes of the Amarr God… or… he’s a liar. :wink:

. . . Saint Junip wrote about a ‘planet of peace’ in the middle of a sustained campaign of conquest?

So Saint Junip’s letters can be dismissed as the words of a liar and a propagandist?

When we lack proper context and awareness of exigent circumstances? Probably a lot. But that’s one of the difficulties with not being omnipotent: you’re limited in what you can do, and so expectations of what you can do must also be limited.

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Is not science an extension of perception?
A three dimensional object casts a two dimensional shadow on a plain. Much can be inferred from what is apparent. Yet even more has been revealed from searching the void for its mysteries.
If perception is reality, then the very process of perceiving corruption is an act of creation.
Does it not follow then that an observer residing at a metaphorical topographical pinnacle of dimensions is an almighty creator?
The search for truth is holy.

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There is an objective difference between patriots and terrorists (though a patriot can be a terrorist and vice versa).
Patriot is one whose motivation is love to his place of origin.
Terrorist is one whose motivation is inflicting fear on his opponent as a way of achiving political goals.

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Science is a methodology. Experience is an extension of perception. And perception is an extension of experience.

But more, perception isn’t reality, it’s just how we experience reality. And we are, as far as we can tell, fundamentally incapable of perceiving reality as it is. That doesn’t mean our perception of one another’s behavior creates that behavior. What you’re looking for is ‘observation’, not ‘perception’, and even there, ‘observation’ doesn’t require awareness or a mind at all. ‘Observation’ in this context is simply ‘interaction’, and the ‘observer’ can be any other localized field or combination of fields.

Metaphorically? Maybe. Actually? Nope, no creator needed as far as we’re aware. And if anyone wants to pull the old ‘then where did existence come from?’, then I’d posit they need to answer ‘where did God come from?’

Amen.

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Those with power dominate others by many means, by law, by capital or by violence.

Amarrian slavery, Sansha indoctrination, Caldari meritocracy, Angel Cartel defilements, and Blood Raider harvests, Guristas plunders…those are but a few examples of the evil that are present in this universe.

Power does corrupt and at the same time it does revral one’s true nature.

For power itself, is evil.

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You forgot the gallentean democracy, that is the most evil of all the evils.

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There’s a lot of back and forth in this thread that severs as an interesting window into how different members of the summit organize and view themselves in proximity to power. I think you can tell a lot about someone’s individual circumstances based on their relation to power and authority. I guess to get to the original question…

I think the breathe of answers and passion on the topic reveals something important about all this. There’s no “rules based order” to determine any sort of objectivity on these philosophical questions, its all based on your position relative to your material conditions-- be that class, clan, clade, or caste. Not every society in the cluster has the same specific shape that they organize themselves in relative to power, but each society does have some form of class-based hierarchy that determines people’s feelings on the topic.

Are you close to a position of authority, where it serves your needs? Then you probably believe that power simply reveals existing corruption rather than it being some sort of institutional-level failure. Never had a real taste of institutional power and authority in your life? Then you probably believe that power corrupts, and express skepticism toward authority as something that has not served your position. Maybe you don’t full register it to class, but express it as something more ethereal like “human nature.”

I find that phenomenon far more interesting than circular debate on vapory unfalsifiable virtues these days. To my knowledge, no industrial society in New Eden has successfully transcended that vertically organized structure. Even during the Steroyn Arcologies War, no anarchist or otherwise horizontally structured societies have shown that they can exist as an industrialized power. The gears that run society need someone in a position of power to direct them, and we’re seemingly stuck with that reality. The only way I can imagine a way out of it is if we make leaps and bounds in automation capable of intelligent, heuristic decisions making that can empower the individual or the cooperative to manage a supply chain as easily as the pre-modern Raata ran cottage industries.

Basically, authority serves that which is good for who has authority. Questions of corruption are irrelevant, there is only what is in the class interest and which class controls that authority. For years I grew up with this understanding as a member of the Caldari State, acutely aware of my family’s position and the megacorporation’s responsibility to ensure cohesion among the classes to avoid conflict. When I got jaded with that, I floated around a bit to find alternatives only to come back to the same answer every time.

But now we’re staring down the barrel of the Triglavian Collective, and I’m not so sure. We know terrifyingly little, even from the inside seemingly, about the role that class and dialectics play in the Collective. We have no idea what role automation plays, given their relationship to assimilated Rogue Drone hives. If they wield power over Rogue Drone AI to run a horizontal society for the betterment of their citizens is that a misuse of authority? If they forcibly assimilate occupied territories into the Clades but provide them all the same advantages that their advanced social order is able to create, is that a misuse of authority?

I have a feeling that the Clades themselves don’t even have an answer that they agree, and the longer we go without a more complete picture of them the more concerned I grow. I only hope that working in proximity with them will reveal more, and will be the first one to fall on my sword if I don’t like what I find out.

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This phrase may be more astute than you realize.

The Clades make widespread use of bioadaptive technology, demonstrate a remarkable ability to manipulate rogue code, and their subversion methods sometimes result in rogues adapting in hitherto unseen ways. They call us “Kybernauts”, interpretable literally as technology navigators, and that is almost certainly in relation to our state of being as infomorphs.

What if they have no answer at all? They don’t need one. It’s superfluous data, needless junk information that provides them with nothing but conflicting conclusions. Look at all the philosophical dissonance present here in this discussion alone. Cogitation of any form is an expenditure of resources that consumes energy, creates heat, and interferes with other functions that require processing power. It can be cast aside by the Trigs as easily as it is cast aside by rogue overminds and that may explain why methods of information warfare used by Trigs are so effective.

They may have reduced their activities to the purely mechanical: Perfect utility devoid of wasteful efforts. Greed, power, freedom; all ultimately useless from a certain perspective.

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True Power reveals corruption.

Power is not having the right to free speech and saying whatever you want while hoping someone physically attacks you for what you have said so you can then sue them for money. That isn’t power, that is corruption. A want of money without working for your wages while making yourself believe that you are entitled to incite a fight and then claim a butthurt status after you get pounded into the ground.

True Power has a lot of facets to its base but involves understanding life and the cosmos and that with billions upon 12th exponential of planets, people can live in peace on their own planet, that with hard work, an engineering background and a strong will to survive, endure and spread the seed of humanity to the cosmos, will defeat corruption on Earth.

Corruptions base foundation is, “I want, you have, I don’t want to, give me what you have or die.” But in reality, those who follow the latter really don’t have the intent of hurting the person, except to the point of the victim giving the abuser what the abuser wants.

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I’m not in any position to disregard this theory, and understand it conceptually. Certainly the existence of Sanshas Nation proves that this isn’t beyond the realm of plausibility simply for being so inhumanly alien to our censibilities. But being optimistic here, my kneejerk reaction is that the Clade’s revulsion to hivelinked consciousness is telling while their focus on Proving speaks towards their need of more datasets to drive their society-- not less, viewing it as unnecessary static.

My personal theory, which is as of yet doesn’t have much supporting evidence so take this with a huge grain of salt, is that you are half right. I think that the Clades offset the question of authority and power, but rather than creating a society of pliant drones they do so by applying all of the semiotic data gained through dialectical proving into a sort of cybernetic gestalt consciousness (The Flow of Viraj) trained to predict the best solutions for the Collective as a whole. If this is true, then abiding to the Flow has succeeded in the continuation of Triglavian society even hellish conditions as the Abyss. For untold generations raised in Triglavian society, they simply have no reason to question it’s judgement. They may well have the same capacity for individuality as us but serve the Flow willingly. The question compounds and complicated itself though now that they have New Eden citizens under their occupation, with the Clades differing on how best to assimilate them into the Flow. Gods and spirits, it’s possible that the Flow itself doesn’t have an answer on how to do so yet so the Clade has had to rely on the interclade conflicts we’ve seen after the Invasion to generate enough data to reach a solution. Certainly if the Flow is an AI reliant on datasets to make heuristic planned conclusions, when faced with a new problem it hasn’t had a dataset on it needs a large sample pool of new information to reach a solution. But what are the implications there relative to this thread? Can an AI be trusted to make decisions free of bias or will the AI always trend toward self-preservation, self-interest, and reproduction (in the Flow’s case through creating new data and continued Proving) like any living intelligence in a position of power?

This is, again, all unfalsifiable until we have more information. For now they are frustrating tight lipped about the inner workings to outsiders, even among Pochven residents and freeblade mercenaries who have fought alongside (though still notably at arms length) of eachother.

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In my opinion power does not necessarily corrupt, I dislike that framing as it also implies a lack of agency on the part of the person with said power. Power evolves, it enables. It gives you the ability to enact choices you otherwise couldn’t. It gives you the ability to manifest a vision of the world that would otherwise remain locked within your mind. We make choices based on our available options, power expands that. The choice is still yours. Power also alters your perspective and makes you see the world as an aggregate from a birds eye view, as capsuleers we can certainly attest to our view of people and society and the world changing compared to our time as baseliners. Power is complicated, and the way it affects people is a school of philosophy in and of itself, beyond just a simple phrase

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