Name: Anonymous 2008-02-07 22:20
I call this the single player RPG dilemma, in which one is given a comforting reality in which to progress at their own pace in a perfectly balanced environment with successively harder challenges catered to the hero, versus the reality of an MMORPG where many people compete at once, leaving no true hero to be the very best. Now that this analogy has been presented, I will address the idea of "ruling the world" as many ambitious people have hoped to do. "Elect me as ruler of the world," one anonymous user says.
This is all well and good until you realize just how many people want to rule the world, and under what idealistic conditions. Instead, I will propose that the world is suspect to many thousands of competing world rulers, who all wish to rule the world at once. While this could present a problem, it actually works in a cooperative setting. Everybody wants to rule the world, and in doing so, everyone gets each other to achieve similar ends, forming clubs, organizations, and miniature governments until the world can be divvied up among would be world rulers.
But no one truly rules the world then, you might say. Well one must expect the inevitable back stabbings and betrayals to reduce competition and establish "only one" as a certain someone might say, but let us consider capitalist markets such as real estate- no one can claim to be the "ruler" of the entire real estate market, but when competition is introduced, you have more real estate investors willing to one up each other while cooperating through competitiveness, forming associations, selling supplementary guides and advice, and so forth.
Let the same be said of world rulers and megalomaniacs. Ruling the world should be a marketplace of ideas, an industry, in which people continuously strive to be the very best, knowing that in all likelihood the #1 spot will never be reached. Carrot and stick you say? Yes, but so is everything else.
This is all well and good until you realize just how many people want to rule the world, and under what idealistic conditions. Instead, I will propose that the world is suspect to many thousands of competing world rulers, who all wish to rule the world at once. While this could present a problem, it actually works in a cooperative setting. Everybody wants to rule the world, and in doing so, everyone gets each other to achieve similar ends, forming clubs, organizations, and miniature governments until the world can be divvied up among would be world rulers.
But no one truly rules the world then, you might say. Well one must expect the inevitable back stabbings and betrayals to reduce competition and establish "only one" as a certain someone might say, but let us consider capitalist markets such as real estate- no one can claim to be the "ruler" of the entire real estate market, but when competition is introduced, you have more real estate investors willing to one up each other while cooperating through competitiveness, forming associations, selling supplementary guides and advice, and so forth.
Let the same be said of world rulers and megalomaniacs. Ruling the world should be a marketplace of ideas, an industry, in which people continuously strive to be the very best, knowing that in all likelihood the #1 spot will never be reached. Carrot and stick you say? Yes, but so is everything else.