In, "The Road to Serfdom", FA Hayek also observes that the wrong kind of people seek power. But Hayek myopically focused his view only on public sector power, and was blind to the even greater power that is wielded by private sector corporatists and plutocrats. Lord Acton observed that power corrupts. Or maybe only psychologically corrupt people seek power in the first place.
Rulers become rulers because they enjoy the wealth, power and privilege it gives them. It is mass-scale ego gratification, confirmation of their magnificence. They compete for, win, and hold their position at the top of the power heap by all means fair and foul, and they never give up their power voluntarily. They defeat, imprison or kill people who threaten to take their power or wealth or privilege away from them. They set nations to war for personal profit and to avenge insults against their ego. Whoever serves the rulers gains power, wealth and privilege too, within their "civilization". The laboring masses produce all the luxuries that the powerful people enjoy. The masses are a servant class who have no power to alter the socioeconomic and political structures that are built by the powerful for the powerful. "Democracy" has been the opiate that prevented the masses from recognizing that capitalism is simply the post-agrarian power structure of feudalism for the industrial era. This is the people's history of life within "civilization".
So is an intellectual not legitimate unless he/she drinks the koolaid and imagines impossible political "reforms" that will unseat the powers and democratize our continent size nations and domesticate civilization for the benefit of the masses? The Magna Carta empowered barons, not peasants who lived under the rule of barons. Democracy did not prevent governments from giving millions of acres of land to railroad tycoons who then weaseled the government (i.e taxpayers) into ultimately funding the railroads that the tycoons owned as their "private property". Read RF Pettigrew's, "Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870-1920", for the details of that era.
FDR's New Deal "saved capitalism" from the disenfranchised masses of Americans who had been so wholly failed by capitalism that they were threatening communist revolution. Revolutionaries try to maintain the existing large scale structures of civilization, but with "good guys" at the helm. There is lots of tumult and shouting and blood in the streets. But it always turns into, Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. It is the large scale social structure itself that causes this inevitable outcome, where the mass society is ruled by a hierarchically organized power elite.
In his 1922 book, "Public Opinion", Walter Lippman recognized that mass society requires mass mind. The transformation of American public opinion from being wholly against involvement in foreign wars, to a patriotic frenzy to kill the evil enemy in WWI, was recognized as the first triumph of mass mind formation by the machinery of mass propaganda. Bankers and industrialists get rich in wars. The masses do all the dying and all the tax-paying to pay bond interest to the bankers and profits to the industrialists, as Smedley Butler documents in, "War is a Racket".
Neither history nor presently observable reality supports any kind of optimistic vision of mass civilization's immediate future. We are depleting non-renewable resources and the environment at a fatal rate. Everybody who presently lives in civilization is utterly dependent on the fossil fueled global industrial economy to provide our daily necessities of life like food and electricity. We have no mass scale backup plan. Almost none of us are self-sufficient in food, water and heating/cooking fuel. If the fossil-fueled mass economy does not deliver drinkable water to our taps, food to our local grocer and electricity to our home, we have no alternate means of securing our most basic necessities of daily life, so we die.
Individuals and groups can quietly opt out of dependency on the sinking ship and learn how to live in relatively self-sufficient agricultural-based communities far from the madding crowds. But most people will never do that. Their destiny is chained to the fate of industrial mass civilization. You can beat your head against the sky dreaming up impotent utopias, but there is no realistic near term alternative to the unsustainable fossil-fueled global economy that the civilized masses depend on. Some plutocrats expect and are advocating an 80-95% die off of humanity. That's the "solution" that is favored among people who have power to affect policy. If your life depends on their global economic system, then when the system goes down, so do you.
The history of civilization is the history of top-down power hierarchies ruling over the masses. We are living in the outcome of that model of social organization. There is no evidence at all that civilization is either willing or able to change its course. Civilizations rise and fall, and life goes on without them.
We have power as individuals, as families, and as community groups to change the way we live our day to day lives. Cities are groups of communities, and communities can to some extent implement local remedies. There are still plenty of relatively unpolluted places to live in the Americas, for anybody who is willing and able to live there. There are solutions. But they are local and bottom-up individual and communal solutions, not global and top-down hierarchical. We have power to be part of the solution to plutocratic civilization. But we have no power to convert mass society to a democratic form of government. So do we waste our effort raging against the immovable sky? Or do we use our little human power to be the change we are advocating?
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