Overflight, 145
They would probably have witnessed strange and fascinating dynamics. For example, since 1 million people cannot make decisions collectively, each group might sprout a small ruling elite. What if one elite offers the other $10 billion, keeping $90 billion? The leaders of the second group migh well accept this unfair offer, siphon most of the $10 billion into their Swiss bank accounts, while preventing rebellion among their followers with a combination of sticks and carrots. The leadership might threaten to severely punish dissidents forthwith, while promising the meek and patient everlasting rewards in the afterlife. This is what happened in … eighteenth−century Prussia, and this is how things still work out in numerous countries around the world.
Such threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass−cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the inevitable laws of nature or the divine commands of God, rather than just human whims. All large−scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be as real and inviolable as gravity.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow
“… the causes of the current multidimentional crisis … the ultimate cause of the current crisis at the ecological, but also economic, political and, more widely, social level is not, as one is used to saying, the industrial revolution, technology, overpopulation, productivism, consumerism, etc. In my view, in actual fact, all these alleged causes are the symptoms of a much more serious distress called "concentration of power".