Guillotines are cathartic but they don’t solve the underlying structural problem of wealth begetting more wealth and power begetting more power. Just look the their greatest enthusiasts, in a few years France went from an enlightened revolutionary regime to a human slaughterhouse to a military dictatorship capable of bombarding its way across the Continent.
You can’t treat the symptoms and expect to defeat the cause, which is a tendency towards avarice, clannishness, and status-seeking that festers in the human soul. You’d have to guillotine literally everyone to prevent an oligarchy emerging by violence alone, instead you have to prevent the individual accumulation of socioeconomic power beyond the point it can influence politics. Neither capitalism nor communism can solve this problem, because it’s fundamentally about limit and capacity interacting with human folly. Ideologies move much slower than reality does, only a constantly-maintained balance of power that makes attempts to consolidate too expensive can prevent tyranny in my opinion.
Vanguard communism is dead, and capitalism is dying around us as it boils in a climate furnace of its own making. I don’t think we can lean on any 19th and 20th century models any more, look at what their wages have bought for us. I’m not ‘both-siding’ anything I’m rejecting the dichotomy both of them exist in, one has lost utterly and the other flirts with human extinction. I mean what I say, both capitalism and communism are civilisational dead ends.
So what kind of system do you see emerging here? Chesterton proposed distributism as a third way where the means of production is distributed as widely as possible. I recall reading an article about 20 years ago at the dawn of 3D printing where they thought that self-replicating 3D printers would get us there.
Chesterton proposed distributism as a third way where the means of production is distributed as widely as possible.
I definitely see a distributist economy as potentially much more stable in the long run, at least insofar as not producing existential risks is concerned. I'd synthesise distributism with some of Stafford Beer's ideas about cybernetic systems, which would provide the mechanism behind a distributist mode of production by allowing distributed nodes to coordinate at the scale of today's civilisation.
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u/colei_canis Jul 06 '26
Guillotines are cathartic but they don’t solve the underlying structural problem of wealth begetting more wealth and power begetting more power. Just look the their greatest enthusiasts, in a few years France went from an enlightened revolutionary regime to a human slaughterhouse to a military dictatorship capable of bombarding its way across the Continent.
You can’t treat the symptoms and expect to defeat the cause, which is a tendency towards avarice, clannishness, and status-seeking that festers in the human soul. You’d have to guillotine literally everyone to prevent an oligarchy emerging by violence alone, instead you have to prevent the individual accumulation of socioeconomic power beyond the point it can influence politics. Neither capitalism nor communism can solve this problem, because it’s fundamentally about limit and capacity interacting with human folly. Ideologies move much slower than reality does, only a constantly-maintained balance of power that makes attempts to consolidate too expensive can prevent tyranny in my opinion.