In the modern world, we have largely rejected overt manifestations of "power as principle," and that fact has already toppled several of the globe's worst dictatorships in a short period of time. But the struggle before us is something more subtle than sweeping up the garbage already discarded by history: Authoritarianism hides in plain sight throughout the laws and unexamined assumptions of our civilization. At the root of it all is an unchallenged basis of property that is inherently nihilistic, power-based, and destructive: Namely, the power of an agent to impose its will on a subject, be it a person or an inanimate object.
The ultimate expression of that will - and indeed, the inevitable result of continuing to found property on that basis - can only be the destruction of what is owned, because the only alternative is to void the principle. Confronted by the challenge to prove ownership, the holder of property under the present concept can only either destroy it or acknowledge that the present conception is bankrupt, and the more authoritarian a person is, the more likely they are to choose the former. In a unifying world increasingly owned by a shrinking minority of people, this cannot be allowed to continue if humanity is to survive.
The current worldwide concept of property is a relic of the ancient world where such heinous ideas as "right of conquest," filial absolutism, and power as moral virtue were not only predominant but completely unchallenged. If you conquer, then you have the right to rule. If you rule, then you have the right to destroy. If you destroy, then you have the right to conquer and rule. This circular reasoning was considered an obvious truism, and alternatives were not even contemplated in most societies until relatively recently in history. At the heart of it was a fatalistic outlook that held every event to be predestined, and the actors to be mere puppets of a divine will that could not be defied - in other words, we have no choice, so we might as well choose to be beasts. The result was a history littered with gaunt paupers, tortured slaves, and dismembered corpses.
A lot of progress has been made since then. Notwithstanding recent "hiccups" like the invasion of Iraq, the world has overwhelmingly rejected the right of conquest - leaders who claim legitimacy comes with the act of seizure are rightly condemned as sociopaths and kleptomaniacs, and when practical face international wrath. This is not to say the sickness has been eradicated on that front, but only that civilization is developing a more reliable immunity to it. Similarly, even the most violently conservative societies are now less than comfortable with filial absolutism - the notion that being at the head of a family should involve the power to kill members who "dishonor" or otherwise inconvenience it.
Generally speaking, then, civilization is moving away from the idea of human relationships as being legitimately defined by power, and toward a conception based on nurturance: A government is legitimate only insofar as it serves The People, and a family can only be called a family if it nurtures its members. We should not underestimate how radical a change this is from the bulk of history: In the past, it wasn't merely claimed that absolutism served people the best, but that it was the definition of good governance in both politics and family. If a ruler chose to make the lot of his people unending misery and suffering, then by virtue of that choice, misery and suffering were the moral outcome. If a patriarch chose to sell his entire family into slavery, then that was the moral outcome because he had chosen it.
The idea of power being wrong was categorically ruled out: Power only had the obligation to serve itself, so the only possible wrong would be to use power in a way that compromised that itself. To the pre-philosophic ancient mentality, then, men like Hitler and Stalin would essentially be Christ - the apotheosis of all virtue - while people like Socrates and Gandhi would be thought of as pure evil, and in fact usually were condemned as such. The authoritarian mind is conditioned to only see things in terms of power relationships, so when it's confronted by a viewpoint that negates power, it sees only the negation - it sees nothing else being present. Empathetic morality and nurturance-based tenancy is regarded as a Null condition - an existentially horrifying void reflecting the inner reality of the sociopath. Every event is defined only by a one-sided act of infliction, and everything else is a muddled mystery to them.
Ideas of power in human relationships have retreated, but not disappeared - they've ensconced themselves in perverted conceptions of liberty based on property: I.e., the libertarian ideology that conceives of rights only on the basis of individually-vested ownership of the self. All this does is take the ancient ideal one step back, and leave it a single decision away from being realized again: If I own myself, then I can sell myself into slavery - and if the person I sold myself to then owns me as fundamentally as I once owned myself, then they also own the children I produce, and can do whatever they want with both me and them. They can kill us, sell our body parts, and do everything to us that we would originally have been entitled to do to ourselves under the libertarian concept of individual liberty.
But modern society has retreated from that idea too, recognizing that (with some situational caveats) people do not have the right to kill or deliberately inflict serious injury on themselves. And the reason is that people are moving away from the concept of rights being based on property - a person is not their own property. A person is not property at all. Their life is held to be something that exists of itself, for its own sake, and is not subject to external valuation. In fact, despite the intransigence of American jurisprudence, this also increasingly applies to capital punishment - if a person's life is not their own property, then they cannot "forfeit" it regardless of their actions, just as their present evaluations of their own worth cannot justify denying future reconsideration by committing suicide. Self-termination only becomes debatable when the question is arguably moot, as in the case of an agonizing terminal illness.
Even further, this movement in society isn't limited to questions of life and death: Concepts of legal guardianship have continually evolved over time. A parent in the 18th century would not have had the explicit right to murder his children, unlike the paterfamilias of an ancient family, but he had near-limitless discretion to inflict his will on them short of deliberately causing death. By the 20th century, the concept had changed further from the inherent right of a power/property-holder to exercise judgment for the good of a possessive institution to the practical right of a guardian to exercise judgment for the good of a ward - what remained to be determined was whether that good was being properly served. In other words, the emphasis shifted from protecting the power of the actor to protecting the interests of the acted-upon.
Over time, this way of seeing things has spread throughout society - concepts as diverse as democracy, custodial fitness, legal due diligence, and upkeep of real estate have reflected the idea that there are responsibilities attached to authority that go beyond serving itself. Originally these were all cynical and patently false pretenses: The ruler insists his dictatorship is beneficial to the slaves he brutalizes, just to wallow further in their inability to say otherwise; the abusive parent claims to be acting for the benefit of the child; the lord of the manor says, as a vain afterthought, that other people wouldn't do as well to hold the same property, etc. But the funny thing is, lies based on an attempt to co-opt an underlying truth - namely, that the benefit of the acted-upon holds moral value - have a funny way of bootstrapping themselves into a force all their own.
The vain lies of one dictator have to compete with the vain lies of other dictators, and pretty soon a situation arises where they actually have to legitimately compete on that basis. It doesn't happen often, but it only has to happen once to spiral out of control in the grand scheme of things. And eventually, there is a dictator who ends up believing his own bullshit that he is "benevolent," and then things really get interesting because you suddenly introduce peer pressure into an institution previously defined by absolute impunity. You have kings who want to be meritocrats, barons who want to be academics, merchants who suddenly have the power to finance the newfound vanities of their rulers, and lawyers with the skill to elaborate on them. This is how darkness turns to light; how medieval grotesquerie becomes Renaissance divinity; and how ignorant violence becomes Enlightenment intellectualism.
A deprecated truth is hijacked as a pretense, then becomes an insincere fashion statement, then a superficial institution, but people are born into it believing it to be true, and these people give rise to an identity based on the truth-within-the-lie. All that remains is to take the small step (but giant leap) from defining these responsibilities as being externally-defined social exigencies to being inherent in the possession. In other words, a leader who serves The People is not merely a "good leader" - not a positive example of an otherwise absolute identity - but the inherent definition of a leader. A parent who nurtures a child is not merely a "good parent" - not a positively-connoted instance of a morally-neutral category - but the definition of a parent. A leader who attacks The People is not a leader at all; a parent who harms their child is not a parent at all; and so on. And ultimately, if we extend this epiphany into a general rule of morality, every instance of authority is defined only insofar as it nurtures that which it holds authority over.
For centuries now, market fundamentalists have insisted that their greed is a boon to the world - have wrapped their insatiable appetite for money, financially-based power, and unyielding ownership in the proposition that acting blindly with zero oversight or accountability was producing benefits for humanity in general. It was always a lie, but as long as they could keep building up the pyramid scheme, it was a lie they could maintain: There was always a new group of suckers to convince they had graduated to the elite, and a new set of working stiffs to screw over.
At first the scheme was fed by immigration: Work the first generation to death, admit the second generation into lower echelons, then convince the third generation to victimize the first generation of the next wave. But with globalization, there was no need to wait, and no need to allow any more people into the middle- and upper-classes: Simply export the jobs to countries where unionization and democratic reform border on impossible, then use the flood of profits to corrupt institutions at home so the newly-impoverished masses have no recourse.
The lie has been exposed, and there is nowhere else for its proponents to run - and what's more, most of them are so arrogant and overconfident, many have abandoned even the pretense that their power serves anything but itself. In that fact lay a very dangerous situation, because as I noted in the introduction, when property is confronted and forced to prove its own existence, there are only two paths that can be taken: It can prove itself by destroying what is owned, or else it can prove itself by nurturing what is owned. The latter would seem the logical choice, but when you are dealing with moral tautologies, logic has nothing to do with it.
Why would a ruler choose to be the lord of a nightmare state where everyone suffers? Why would a parent choose to be a brutal, sadistic tyrant over defenseless children? Why would people cling to destructive relationships and property they can't maintain? Because they are operating on the power impulse, and power ultimately is defined by destruction. A person may choose self-destruction because choosing anything else makes them feel paradoxically powerless - but if they destroy themselves with drugs, or booze, or what have you, they are constantly affirming their power over themselves. Ditto if the destruction is being meted out on to another person, on to an animal, on to an institution, or even to an inanimate object. Power, as Orwell defined it, is violence - pure, unadulterated, and constant violence.
As long as we accept a definition of property based on power, we also accept that the fundamental expression of property is destruction of what is owned and all secondary consequences along with it. If you own a house, and the ownership of that house is under threat because you are failing to meet community standards, maybe you choose to assert your property with absolute finality by burning it to the ground - an irrevocable act that proves once and for all that it was your house and none other's, at least under the power-based definition of property. Unfortunately, the size of the house doesn't matter to the psychology involved in the behavior: It may be a mansion. It may be a sprawling estate. It may be a whole country. It may be the whole world. If a person holds the world to be their property and has internalized a definition of property based on power, they may consider it more justifiable to see the world die than to relinquish or amend their claim on another basis.
Right now, because the lie mentioned above has been exposed, the social definition of property is at a crossroads: It is no longer a tenable argument that "greed is good," or that the interests of a minority can serve as a one-to-one substitute for the interests of the many or the whole. And as in many situations where a comforting lie is overturned to expose a hideous truth, this poses great dangers: The authoritarian husband confronted with divorce may murder his wife; the authoritarian parent confronted with loss of custody may murder his children; the authoritarian political leader confronted with ejection from power may stage a bloody coup and fight a civil war to the death against his own people; and in the case of economic power, as we've already seen warning signs of, the holders of accumulated property may be perfectly willing to sink the world into a mini-Dark Age rather than accept conditions on their continued authority.
The answer is to seize on the truth-within-the-lie, and ensure that hope flourishes on that basis rather than letting the truth be an instrument of despair. To only call out the lie and fail to liberate the truth around which it formed is a dangerous mistake, and one that modern history has too often demonstrated from the French Revolution all the way through the myriad Communist totalitarian states - they attacked the lies of blood nobility and exploitive capitalism, but had nothing to offer in their place: They were fundamentally negative phenomena, and became an affront to humanity because of it. Instead of attacking capitalism per se, and one-sidedly deprecating the claim that profit serves humanity, we must demand that it do so - we must rethink property-as-power and redefine it as a benevolent stewardship that is morally voided when benevolence is betrayed or neglected. How we choose to approach that politically and legally is down the road, but first we must get right in our own thinking and moral judgments: You cannot legitimately control that which you do not serve.
This viewpoint is key to a world where profit is a holistic concept rather than a one-sided transfer of wealth and power - where a farmer is one who tends the land, not one who rapes it and leaves behind a desert; where an entrepreneur is someone who realizes added potential from the same resources, not someone who simply comes up with a clever way of taking resources from other people; and where a wealthy person is someone who is talented at finding this potential, not merely someone who is a barnacle on society who is good at accumulating and giving nothing back. That is not to advocate "socialism" per se either - state property based on power is every bit as destructive as personal property justified on the same basis, if not more so - but rather to change the premise of the discussion and see where it leads.
If we can learn to view property as being defined by nurturance rather than power, then bitter libertarian arguments against such essential policies as progressive taxation, regulation of business, and provision of public services have no purchase: They are not merely failures of priority, but utterly bankrupt tautologies every bit as irrelevant as the right of conquest or the power of a patriarch to murder disobedient children. Property-as-power belongs in the same garbage heap of history as every other concept that was circularly justified on the same basis, and humanity will benefit just as greatly when we take that final step toward justice as when we took the first.