You ever hear the saying that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters at least one of them would likely produce the stage play of Hamlet by pure chance from slamming the keys? That’s not exactly how this works but it’s close. The reality is co-operative power always exceeds what any individual can do, but co-operative power requires co-ordination. Usually these systems start out with well meaning people coordinating groups of people to build a house, raise a barn, build a wall, found a city, organize a farming district, found a nation, start a multinational corporation. Unfortunately the guy co-coordinating the team, tends to get a little full of himself over time, starts taking bigger shares for himself than is truly justifiable, and then their kids do the same thing and the system starts to decay.

Public, private, capitalist, socialist, doesn’t matter what the goal or structure of the organization looks like, it always rots from the top. And then it falls apart, we rinse the blood off, and repeat with a slightly different version. This is not new, Plato had a very good description of it in 375 BCE (approximately). And every new attempt we try to build it a little bit better to prevent someone (or their great, great grandson) from eventually deciding they’re a demigod and entitled to do whatever horrendous idea pops into their head. We even built systems that kick you out of the top seat every once in a while to see if people still trust you to be in charge. Unfortunately we forgot corporate governance is also governance, creating a wealth class which became modern aristocracy, and yada yada here we are. Turns out our current system is also vulnerable to corruption. So are all the rest we’ve tried too though, and we have at least 10,000 years of attempts at it. It’s a hard problem.

We get better, we still fail, we try again, repeat infinitely. How do we do good things like abolishing slavery, age of consent and minimum wage? We got better. Why are there still evil, greedy, pedos in charge? Well, they didn’t start that way, but they did end up a blood sucking fiend, sometimes after generations of rot, sometimes in one lifetime. You can’t really turn a vampire back to human though, so we do what we have to do. We’ll hopefully find a better solution on the next go around, trying to figure out how to work together to achieve a good life for everyone without the people facilitating the project turning into monsters.