Political realism

It is sometimes said that realists are those who think nations, institutions, groups, and even individual political agents seek power and only power for its own sake.

Such notions make one think of the definition of power O'Brien gave to Winston Smith as he lay on the rack: power is the ability to make men suffer.

And of course he was right, though it may be that what's actually wanted by most of those who seek power even "for its own sake" is the obedience it can often, albeit by no means always, motivate.

And that appeals much to sheer human vanity, along with desire for fame or joy in the admiration - or anyway respect, or anyway deference - of others.

But anyone acquainted with history should know that power is often, though not always, sought not for these things but with a view to further ends.

And that historically these ends have usually been dictated by man’s endless religious or moral delusions, in modern times supplemented by secular fantasies of the meaning, direction, or goal of history.

They have also nearly always been colored by greed.

In politics as in any other realm of action, man has been chiefly moved by stupidity, ignorance, credulity, selfishness, vanity, malice, and fear.

Like the scorpion that kills the frog on whose back he is riding across the pond and so drowns, he can’t help it; it’s his nature.

True enough, from the Renaissance to our own time, Western man, at least, has ridden an upward arc of progress in the sciences accompanied by technical and social improvements unprecedented in all previous history.

But the recent phenomenon of globalization has undermined the political, social, and economic position of ordinary people in the West while over-population and various sorts of “over-grazing” everywhere presage environmental catastrophe and planetary civilizational collapse.

An age of Soylent Green is coming.

The great riches of our seas have been depleted and forgotten.

Civilizations have completely disappeared before now from fouling their own nests, so to speak.

But not on a planetary scale, so far as we know.

Fun while it lasted.