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Back in the commie days you had to join the Party, if you wanted to be anything above a grunt, and plenty of people did for precisely that reason. Plenty more regarded Party membership the same way one would regard a confession of enjoying some good kiddie-diddling.
Now, I believe that this can actually continue in perpetuity, if the people on top stay on top of their game, but it doesn't strike me that the Western elites are capable / have the means to do that. They've made several bets that didn't pan out, with AI being the latest one they're putting their hopes on, which might explain all the doomerism / utopianism around the subject.
Yes and no. Insisting on a top-down view of society will leave you as half-blind as insisting on a bottom-up one. Even an absolute monarch's power is limited, no matter what his law says.
On the other hand, this is a point I wholeheartedly agree with. There's limits to this as well, but currently it's people insisting that Western democracies are meaningful that are closer to being wrong.
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