this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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I think this more of a perspective thing, that might be related to free will vs. determinism.
Lenin or Trotkij taking power leads to rather different outcomes in my opinion.
(I assume you mean Stalin, unless this is a different guy I don't know about)
So far, yeah. I estimated two centuries for individual actions to wash out, though, and that was just one ago. On the other hand, if it would have lead to some complex chain of events ending in certain MAD, that could take millennia to become a human footnote, and would leave extinctions that may not ever be reversed. The 20th century was kind of a metastable point where everything is amplified.
I hear Trotsky was also pretty unpopular. He was Lenin's chosen heir, so I'm guessing he had a chance, but even if Stalin had died at some point pre-revolution it's possible Zinoviev or someone would have taken his place.
No I actually meant Leon Trotsky, just wrote his name from memory. He wanted more the Cambodian way of communism.
Even if I would accept that estimation, in those two hundred years the lives of many humans are greatly impacted, which is for me all that matters in the end. Since I like to view history from human point of view this seem pretty relevant. If you take an impartial abstract point of view - than nothing really matters since the universe will disappear anyway at some point. Maybe that's the difference in our perception.
Yeah, Trotsky vs. Stalin. You wrote Lenin, who you probably know was a predecessor to both of those two rivals, and who died of apparent natural causes related to old age shortly after the revolution.
Oh absolutely! We're not totally powerless, just nearly. In some ways that's harder, because we still have to try if there are some things we can make better.
In real life, I do activism, and I've been a vegetarian for years. What this has changed is that I focus more on the quiet background side of activism, and I don't stress out about being super ambitious. If I had money, I'd do philanthropy. If I was born into an autocracy, I'd just have to settle for being kind to whoever I come across, and supporting the less-terrible side when, outside of my control, wartime or revolution comes. And sometimes, I also try and contribute to the discussion intellectually.
The same would apply if I had been born Charles Darwin. I'm not Darwin, though, and the only thing I control are my own actions. He's just a part of history, like everyone else in that era. Many argue about the free will of individuals, but large groups definitely have no free will. For example, advertising and political campaigning, major industries, are built on top of that fact.