Bird's-eye view and personal responsibility

I was reading yesterday's post and it occurred to me that although it really just states the obvious there is one edge to it that many people prefer to ignore, namely that while everybody is responsible for his own conduct, there's also the need to assess the dynamics of the situation one lives in and if those dynamics are clear and beyond one's control (which they always are, when they are clear) there is no harm or moral failure in dealing with them in a purely strategic way.

The medieval distribution of power:

• the sword for the king,
• the pulpit for the church and
• the financing for the Jews,
  

was designed by the Catholic Church to keep popular kings under control: Since the pulpit is impotent against them, they must be made dependent on a group that can always be controlled by the pulpit, i.e. the Christ-killers. Essentially, if a king would show disrespect to the Catholic Church, it would tell the Jews to stop financing him, and if they wouldn't listen, the Catholic Church would educate the common people as to the origin of the diseases that they were getting (e.g. poisoned wells).

Well, as you perhaps already see, the model is still in use, only slightly modified:

• the guns for the state,
• the press for the journalists and
• the innovation for the corporations,
  

e.g. the press is impotent against Trump, but it can get corporations in line by educating the people as to the origin... sorry, this is not the place to be farcical. The general setting is that the press might be impotent against a foreign state, but it can put pressure on corporations that deal with that state and hence there is a modicum of control over foreign states through economic sanctions. But what happens, when this power distribution is damaged?

China, by lending out 20% of the world's workforce at very reasonable prices, is controlling corporations and corporations control journalists. Hence? Well, either you regain power over the press or you'll have a clash between the state and the corporations, also known as a military coup. That's a mechanical occurrence. If you can make a decisive contribution to rectifying journalism, it is your personal responsibility to do so. But if you have no such opportunity, you are perfectly entitled to look at the whole process like you look at an avalanche.