I like the application of Dunbar's number, though I am torn on (2). The largest countries currently have over 1 billion citizens, that's still 10 million representatives. That's as much as some countries.

One solution is to say that no country should be so large anyway. And I'd like that, creating such huge power structures (hierarchical or not) is dangerous. But realistically, sometimes they are needed for defense. A lot of power structures are shaped by the necessity of organized defense (and can then be used for organized attack).

It's a law of nature that they will _try_.[0] That's why people should always have ways of defending themselves, whether it's with courts or guns.

[0]: This is not a figure of speech - many anti-social traits which result in NPD, ASPD and their subclinical versions[1] are genetic. There is literal evolutionary pressure to exploit others.

[1]: Meaning the trait is sufficiently pronounced to be harmful to others but not enough to be harmful to the person having it so it's not diagnosed as a disorder.

I've been saying this too but lately I think the fundamental notion of power is wrong. There's 2 perspectives which are 2 sides of the same coin:

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All social relationships should be consensual.

This means based on _fully-informed_ consent which can be revoked at any time.

This already marks employment as exploitative because one side of the negotiation has more information and therefore more bargaining power. Not to mention having more money gives them more power in a myriad of other ways (can spend more on vetting you, can spend more on advertising the position than you can on advertising your skills). Just imagine if people actually had more power than corporations - you'd put up an ad listing your skills, companies would contact you with offers and you'd interview them.

Citizenship is also exploitative because you didn't willingly sign a contract exchanging money (taxes) for services (protection, healthcare, roads, ...), in most countries you can't even choose which services you want to pay for. And if you stop paying, they'll send people with guns to attack you. This sounds overdramatic (because it's so normalized) until you realize from first principles that is exactly what it is.

_If democracy is supposed to mean people rule themselves, than politicians should be servants which can be fired at any time._ In fact, in a real democracy, people would vote on important laws directly and only outsource the voting to their servants about laws which don't affect them much, or they'd simply abstain.

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Power should come from the majority.

This should naturally be true because all real-world power comes from violence and more people can apply more violence (or threaten it, when violence is sufficiently probable to be effective, it usually does not need to be applied, the other side surrenders).

But people who are driven to power have been very good at putting together hierarchical power structures where at each level the power differential is sufficiently small that the lower side does not need to revolt against the upper side. But when you look at the ends, the power differential is huge.

Not just dictators, "presidents" or presidents but "owners" and "executives" too.

You don't truly own something you can't physically defend. When you as a worker finish a product, you literally have it in your hands. You could hand it over to a salesman and you'd both agree on how to split the money from selling it. But instead, you hand it over to the company (by proxy its owner) which sells it and gives you your monthly wage irrespective of how much the product made. The company being free to fire you or stop making the product obviously makes more money then you - it's an exploitative relationship.

But why do you hand it over? Because if you don't, they'll tell the state and it'll send people with guns to attack you.

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Bottom line is if people had equal bargaining power ("equality"), then if they chose to temporarily give "power" to someone in one area, they'd obviously take away their "power" is some other area. Why? Because they'd know if they didn't, the more powerful person would use this power differential to get even more power, and so on, starting the runaway loop we have here now.

A threat is not a debate.

But really, the point GP was trying to make (IMO) is that all western democracies are very obviously sliding towards authoritarianism. They are building tools which, even _if_ they don't abuse them now, will be available to any future government and with time, the probability of one of them being non-democratic is 1.

Restrictions and oversight should increase proportionally to the power an entity has.

This is a very under-appreciated concept.