My American magical life
Chapter 503 - 503 81 Will the Day be Bright

503: Chapter 81: Will the Day be Bright?

What if it’s Forever Dark Without Sunlight?

503: Chapter 81: Will the Day be Bright?

What if it’s Forever Dark Without Sunlight?

“In ‘The Great Ming Dynasty 1566,’ Hu Butang delivers a heart-wrenching performance as he bitterly and sorrowfully sighs.

What does he sigh about?

‘You have me in you, and I have you in me; the world’s affairs go awry right here.’

When we taste this kind of critique that carries definitive implications, we cannot overlook the standpoint of the person who proposes it.

Hu Butang’s position is rooted in the welfare of the Great Ming, which is why he detests the notion of ‘you have me in you.’

However, returning to the situation of ‘you have me in you, and I have you in me,’ from the fact that it can become a significant problem, we deduce its effectiveness in practice.

Because it’s effective, people repeat it, adhere to it, and promote it.

The world in which humans live is real, and human social structures are developed relying on this real world.

Based on the various contradictions and interests that exist in reality, the source of social power is extremely stringent under the framework of absolute rationality.

Ideology, military, politics, and economy—by combining these four sources of power, we can explain the logic behind the evolution of all social conflicts in human history.

In terms of the development of specific social power structures, in most non-religious states, political and military power are monopolized by public authority, while ideology is like a complex chaos model for the majority of people, most of whom or organizations also lack the ability to control it—including some governments that monopolize political and military power.

Therefore, seizing opportunities from the realm of economic power in the inherent power framework becomes the best option.

Let’s all make money together and avoid fighting.

The combination of politics and ideology leads to the institutionalization of authoritative power, suppressing the development of all dimensions of society, but this combination has become mainstream—Across a broad data set, political and ideological integration always relies on military power, which can bring great stability.

However, historical practice has fully proven a point: the end of authoritative power is not eternal.

When a system reaches its peak, every subsequent day is a decline, and the fall accelerates.

With the aforementioned sociological concepts as a premise, the ‘you have me in you, and I have you in me’ situation is not a problem—it is an inevitable result of the social power struggle process.

Compared to someone deploying the army to march to Luoyang, someone making ideological amendments or seizing political power, the economic power’s demands of so-called interest groups are the least harmful to the power order.

The power order of the Feudal Era was challenged for thousands of years but didn’t entirely break down, then the Industrial Revolution emerged.

The development of production capacity brought forth a new version, and economic power began to take a significant position in the power order.

Without an army or ruling power, interpretive power doesn’t matter.

With money, you can buy cannons, hire mercenaries, and the new capitalists challenged the traditional power order.

The brilliance of capitalist parliamentary politics lies right here, inspired by ‘The Napoleonic Code’ of the great French Emperor Napoleon, Western representative governments can, during stages of rapid production development, continually adjust the superstructure problems through parliamentary power struggles.

But the problem with this model is that economic power erodes the stability of the power order itself through parliamentary politics because the blind expansion of capital has no limit.

As long as there are profits, the capitalist behemoth will be driven forward by the newly integrated parts of its body, then inevitably fall into the inherent fundamental contradiction of capitalism—intense exploitation and workers’ inability to consume.

Under this demand for expansion, the continuously developing economic power dictates parliamentary power, thus making coercive institutions comply with the direction of development of productive forces and relations, but it also erodes the instrumental rationality of political and ideological power.

Therefore, the inertia of the power order itself pushes for the emergence of anti-monopoly measures—they are self-saving, trying to save the power order itself and various organizations or individuals that rely on it by making partial sacrifices.

From a consequentialist point of view, until the first half of the twentieth century, this inertia of the power order still functioned.

But the peak of a system means it will inevitably decline—this is in line with the basic cosmological principle of entropy increase.

The great codex of two hundred years ago could not adapt to new problems brought by changes in the eras.

There is no all-around perfect role in the script of fate; everything has its flaws from the very beginning, and some fundamental codes etched into the system cannot be fixed by adding more patches.

When the power order starts to be gradually overlooked, ‘you have me in you, and I have you in me’ becomes the holy scripture guiding practice.

The erosion of the power order itself, in a decentralized form, conceals the beneficiaries of power theft, preventing the system from finding materials to fix its flaws in the decentralized yet united capitalists.

The collapse began, but it was brought about by the managers of the order themselves because they desired more benefits.

(That’s why I recommend everyone to watch Hayao Miyazaki’s last work; as a left-wing art master, his thoughts have greatly inspired me.)

Those giant corporations and capital groups themselves need to reconcile their internal distribution contradictions through external expansion.

‘The United Front’ actually operates on the same logic, only its purpose is more prominent in terms of righteousness—it aims to oppose invaders.