Ok, fine....I agree ...but then what? It's this second part that infuriates me because I just can't wrap my brain around the fact that it is we that give these people their power. We all buy into the trinkets they offer us.

How can we break that self-reinforcing cycle?

So far my frustration has made me understand that majority rule doen't help as it's game of divide and rule plays into their hands. It's why 20 years ago I moved on to Sociocracy and now on to the far more scaleable Systemic Consensus for governance. As a collective value base, at least for now, I can live with ECG (economy for the common good). Nicky Case's evolution of trust makes it clear that globalization and urbanization creates the ideal setting for exploitation and that we should aim for far more tight knitted social fabrics. (repeated interactions, a precondition for trust) It's why I think we are seeing a rise in the number of intentional communities. Most transactions here are moneyless, or, if used, it remains mostly within the community, slowing draining the external grip over them.

But will that cut it?

Are smaller communities able to concentrate resources on a scale that capitalism or other isme's can? Is that the isme's main raison d'être? The function they will always full fill in society. The reason they will always dominate and drive the natural process of increasing complexity. Small is beautiful, but could Schumacher perhaps be fundamentally wrong? That big is better....? A natural emergence, the behavior of the sum of the parts, encoded into humanity genome? That having a better life is not it's purpose...

There is something on a human systems level that I'm not yet grasping. Some law of the universe I'm not seeing...