Comment by nthingtohide
15 days ago
This is very telling. The American Empire didn't even work for Americans. Who really benefitted? Just the Elites? Why should common people care about propping up an empire if the people in power don't bother about them. For context, read this thread.
> Why should common people care
because, like Yishan is saying, they don't even realize the 'empire' _is_ working for them. We sit around in absolute physical security, awash in cheap goods, able to travel anywhere, finding our cultural and technological products in demand across most of the world, ...
We only feel want in areas like medicine and education where protectionism and prejudice have prevented us from fully enjoying the benefits of that position.
Many if us can’t read threads because we don’t have accounts there anymore.
https://nitter.net/yishan/status/1906592890845028405
> The original architects of American global power did something very clever that no other empire had ever done before: they deliberately hid the instruments of their power.
> Specifically, they institutionalized the hard power of the post-WW2 American military into a "rules-based international order" and the organizations needed to run it.
> ...
> The reason they did this is because repeated use of hard military power is fragile and self-defeating: it engenders resentment and breeds defiance.
I think a similar thing happened to the people with the ideology of markets: they're presented as some neutral, optimal thing, but they aren't. They encode biases and preferences that suit powerful interests, which can take a lot of effort for a common person to discern. But since there's no leader or decision-maker to point to and defy, so it's hard to organize people about the problems, and then it's hard to point them at the right root cause/solution.
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