I notice I’m confused now. Manifest Destiny makes sense in the context of this post—there’s something of value to be achieved, and there will be costs. I’m not sure if I agree with this, but it’s coherent. What I don’t understand is how egregores using people via their personal incentives (for lack of a better description) fits in? It would seem that people just being people and things happening is sort of the opposite (or at least orthogonal) to actively trying to make things better? Do you mean something about shaping incentives being the method of conquest? This seems obviously true (capitalism vs communism being an good example), but if so, then using colonialism as an example might be a bad choice, or at least would need more inference steps explained.
A big component of this post is trying to help me make progress towards the question “if you have a thing that you are part of that is good, how many fucked up things can you tolerate before you decide to leave instead of trying to fix it?”. The “good” part does not need to look like there being a big mission or glorious vision of “good”. It can also take the form of “spreading civilization in general even if the people actually doing that work are not motivated by that specific goal”.
I notice I’m confused now. Manifest Destiny makes sense in the context of this post—there’s something of value to be achieved, and there will be costs. I’m not sure if I agree with this, but it’s coherent. What I don’t understand is how egregores using people via their personal incentives (for lack of a better description) fits in? It would seem that people just being people and things happening is sort of the opposite (or at least orthogonal) to actively trying to make things better? Do you mean something about shaping incentives being the method of conquest? This seems obviously true (capitalism vs communism being an good example), but if so, then using colonialism as an example might be a bad choice, or at least would need more inference steps explained.
A big component of this post is trying to help me make progress towards the question “if you have a thing that you are part of that is good, how many fucked up things can you tolerate before you decide to leave instead of trying to fix it?”. The “good” part does not need to look like there being a big mission or glorious vision of “good”. It can also take the form of “spreading civilization in general even if the people actually doing that work are not motivated by that specific goal”.