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Power or money?
In "house of Cards" Kevin Spacey says that power is better than money. He was talking about the black guy who chose to lobby for super wealthy people than politics. What is better, money or power and why?
What is power? There's two forms of power:
- Power to: ability to do something
- Power over: power to constrain someone's freedom
But why do you need power? You need power to be free. There's two forms of freedom:
- Positive freedom/agency: power to make your own free choices
- Negative freedom: no power over you
Money is just one form of power. So by definition power is superior to money.
Interesting question.
I gotta agree with Killer7 here.
Today there is a strong overlap between the two and you can barely have money without power or high levels of power without above average income/money.
But the ability to hoard resources (ancient form of money) is relatively recent -since agriculture-.
And the ability to accumulate currency (money) independent of physical products is even more recent (since currency systems spread out over the world).
Today we are witnessing the biggest gap in history between the ability to make money and some form of life-relevant skills (ie.: life experience / being brave at war / hunting well / leadership / being good with people, etc.)
See some high-earning bankers, programmer,s or the garage-dorks building tech companies or some
And I think that's a good thing, actually.
More people can contribute to society and we have more paths to success. That's always good for driven people.
But if society were to collapse today, then money becomes just paper.
And physical resources could not be claimed and defended unless the people around agree that those resources are yours.
How to make those people award you with those larger than average resources?
And we're back to more pristine forms of acquiring power.
Things like: personal qualities that make people look up to you, social skills (making friends and allies), knowledge of power dynamics (who's undermining and plotting against you, who you need to win over or get rid of, etc.), and some physical fitness wouldn't hurt either.
Hopefully, civilization is not going to collapse any time soon, though.
Here's all the forms of power that I can think of:
- Physical power (physical strength and beauty)
- Mental power (mental strength and intelligence)
- Cultural power (status and social skills)
Money is a consequence of status. People give it to you because they recognise the value you provide.
Lucio is helping us improve all forms of personal power.
If society collapsed today a good number of these new tech billionaires would struggle mightly to mate and acquire any power.
Starting from Zuckerberg.
