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Scaling...Unfortunately, almost every social system has the defect that those born in proximity to the levers of power have an overwhelming advantage in the competition for resources with their contemporaries. Consequently, they attain privilege without needing to establish the skills and wisdom of the founders. Costly incompetence or deadly tyranny follows naturally. Despotism, monarchy, totalitarianism and even democracy suffer from this defect. Where privilege arises, the difference in circumstances between leader and led becomes a barrier to understanding. From the heights, individuals at the bottom blur. They become abstract categories, or are at best represented by institutional leaders with their own under-restrained ambitions. At the bottom, people struggle for a sense of consequence. Buffeted by policies spun off from the unmanaged competition at the top, they can descend into anomie. In a sense, they become unreal to themselves, until the human desire for meaning explodes into anger, dissolves into dissipation, or achieves expression in a spiritual dimension. The spiritual process, if managed maturely, manifests a solution to the problems of privilege. Love clarifies our perception of each other, and establishes a tone of conduct that allows the implications of our intentions to propagate transparently back to the privileged. To those closer to nature, it establishes a coherency of reaction that serves to brake the self-indulgent impulses of the privileged. And finally, love frees the humble to introspection that leads down paths of power inaccessible to those suffering from the social subscriptions of privilege. |
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