Feb 14: Janne M. Korhonen- Macho Russia? Think again...
Thread published on September 13, 2022
Janne M. Korhonen, Macho Russia? Think again…
The truly lethal armies fight for a cause and are supplied by the biggest and most advanced economies.
Democracy and freedom are probably the only secular causes that reliably make people willing to risk their lives for others. Free societies become the most advanced economies.
Authoritarians either do not read history or if they do, they read very selectively, preferring convenient myths to messy realities.
Therefore, authoritarians ALWAYS assume that democracies and in general, empathy for others, are "weak" and "soft."
They are always wrong.
Modern democracies have now faced authoritarians for over a century. Ultimately, democracies have always prevailed and buried those who were foolish enough to challenge them in a contest of arms.
This is not an accident.
Democratic societies with low hierarchies and distributed decision-making are simply superior information processing machines compared to any autocracy.
They utilize distributed information far more efficiently and while they too make errors, they are corrected far more rapidly.
The more important the information advantage is, relatively speaking, the more pronounced the superiority of distributed decision-making, mutual trust at every level, and low-level autonomy.
In the modern battlefield, information advantage is EVERYTHING.
Autocracies fail badly at every step. They inevitably lack trust between the elites and the followers, they cannot distribute decision-making power, they cannot allow autonomy.
Concentrated power always looks hard but is always brittle. Distributed power always looks soft but is (almost) always strong.
Democracies may look soft to someone who doesn't understand the only true source of power: voluntary, mutually beneficial cooperation.
To those who understand, per Arendt, that voluntary cooperation is the only true source of power, democracies hide heat-treated steel under a velvet glove.
Mind you: PROPERLY heat-treated and inspected by competent professionals who take pride in their work.
And if that steel needs to be wielded as a weapon, it will be wielded by other competent professionals who also take pride in their work.
Not by corrupt toadies and macho nitwits whose main skillset is showing off and bullying those who cannot effectively resist.
And, for the record:
Oh, one more thing, about empathy.
There are countless studies of what motivates humans to tolerate the intolerable, e.g. hold the line even when outnumbered and under modern artillery bombardment.
There is one consistent answer: care for others.
When it comes to the moment of decision in the foxhole, soldiers are not fighting for lofty ideals. They are fighting for their friends and family.
Empathy for others is what makes unbreakable armies.
Consistently, those who act hard and laugh at empathy tend to crack first.
This is so true!