The power imbalance was what made bad things happen. So my preferred interventions for the future would give people the power to fight back against bigger agents who would threaten them, ideology or no.
The problem with this is that power imbalances were also what made some important good things happen, so without (and if we don’t come up with a replacement mechanism) we can also get into big trouble. Robin Hanson has been talking about some aspects of this under “cultural drift”.
The most salient example (to me) of this is the spread of analytic philosophy. Without the British Empire (or the West as a whole) taking over or spreading its culture by force over large parts of the world (including by others imitating Western culture in hopes of avoiding conquest, like Japan, and China to a lesser extent), the number of people with a reasonable philosophical tradition would be even tinier than it is today.
(One could tell a plausible story about this, that good philosophy leads to good science which leads to greater military power. Or that power competition helps cull harmful memetic parasites.)
Of course this is overall terrible, and not something I endorse, but neither would I endorse an intervention to get rid of power imbalances, without figuring out how to solve this kind of problem first. (Also, to be clear, I do not think we should rest our hopes of future civilization being philosophical competent on such power dynamics. It seems like a very risky / non-robust way for that to happen, and my point is just that we could make things even worse by getting rid of it and not having a better alternative in place.)
I’m a fan of competition’s benefits as much as the next guy, but it seems to me that extreme imbalance of power actually isn’t that good for competition. Monopoly can lead to stagnation too. The optimal rate of competition and improvement probably happens under moderate imbalance.
The problem with this is that power imbalances were also what made some important good things happen, so without (and if we don’t come up with a replacement mechanism) we can also get into big trouble. Robin Hanson has been talking about some aspects of this under “cultural drift”.
The most salient example (to me) of this is the spread of analytic philosophy. Without the British Empire (or the West as a whole) taking over or spreading its culture by force over large parts of the world (including by others imitating Western culture in hopes of avoiding conquest, like Japan, and China to a lesser extent), the number of people with a reasonable philosophical tradition would be even tinier than it is today.
(One could tell a plausible story about this, that good philosophy leads to good science which leads to greater military power. Or that power competition helps cull harmful memetic parasites.)
Of course this is overall terrible, and not something I endorse, but neither would I endorse an intervention to get rid of power imbalances, without figuring out how to solve this kind of problem first. (Also, to be clear, I do not think we should rest our hopes of future civilization being philosophical competent on such power dynamics. It seems like a very risky / non-robust way for that to happen, and my point is just that we could make things even worse by getting rid of it and not having a better alternative in place.)
I’m a fan of competition’s benefits as much as the next guy, but it seems to me that extreme imbalance of power actually isn’t that good for competition. Monopoly can lead to stagnation too. The optimal rate of competition and improvement probably happens under moderate imbalance.