Reply #52: Natural process of power

[The2ndWheel]

Power centralizes and consolidates. That's all it does. Power always wants to make everything else like itself. Merging business and government, or church and state, or whatever, is normal.

The only way to stop it is for it to collapse on it's own(that's why every empire will always fade away eventually), or for another giant center of power to defeat it(which is why we have war). Laws and legislation won't do it. Over time, power is able to change laws. It may be in 5 minutes, or in 5 years, or in 250 years, but it will happen. Power never dies, it never has to feed its children, worry about bills to pay, eat, sleep, or take a breath. All power does is try and obtain more power, so that it can acquire more power at a future date.

It will never go away. We will all waste our limited lives on this tiny blue planet stuck in an unknown arm of one galaxy among billions trying to fight against it.

http://www.bigskyastroclub.org/pale_blue_dot.htm

"We succeeded in taking that picture , and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

-Carl Sagan