The notion that with great power comes great responsibility only ever occurs not in real life but in pop culture, as though intended to surreptitiously program simpler minds to give undue respect to those wielding power over their lives and livelihoods. In reality and in practice however, power could not be more detached from responsibility. From the self-centered hording of resources to the carbon footprints stomped in its wake, power would seem to be the avoidance of responsibility, just as war is the avoidance of wisdom. And always for the sake of having anyone else, usually everyone else, compensate for the personal responsibilities neglected. When we are irresponsible as individuals or as whatever collective, it falls invariably upon those around us to pick up our slack. When my neighbor is too lazy to set out her trash more often than once every other month, it apparently falls on me to find the time for cleaning the voluminous excesses of her messes spilling over across my yard on her behalf, filling my bin with her beer bottles and pill bottles. Her parents raising her children on her behalf as well, her size 0 panties providing her far too many opportunities in life to spare room for one lick of responsibility.
The more irresponsible one is, the more responsibilities get propelled onto others. And the more power a person or group wields, the more compensation is required. Vacuums abhor nature.
Realistically, the same also applies to empowerments, although the differing popular viewpoint is that empowering someone or something means to free it from liability as though travesties real or imagined magically warrant one side to yet dominate some other, when it is absolutely a lacked equality which explicitly generates those real transgressions. Becoming the abuser is not ending abuse, in the sense that for some to have then others must have not, no matter who is claiming the title of ownership and no matter how deeply they may personally feel they have it coming. Private bias is still bias. To be empowered is no license to use and/or abuse anybody anywhere.
If power corrupts and it indeed does, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately and it indeed does, then none must have it. With great empowering must as well come great responsibility, and when favored celebrities or demagogues wish to be rewarded for successes real or imagined, truth and equanimity insist that they should as well not be rewarded for failures real or imagined. By all means empower those who deserve it for having endured lessened civil or basic human rights regardless if the tribulations are momentary or ongoing, but only when those empowered are willing and able to accept the natural responsibilities to come of it. If a role model for example objects to voices from outside their personality cult observing how their sexual liberation does not always lead to positive ends, then perhaps they should make wiser choices in their own life, with the resources afforded them. Exemptions to fidelity must never be regarded as some bonus feature to empowerment, but rather as an entitlement for double standards shunning personal responsibility, truth or equality. Female empowerment resulting in equality is ideal, as but one of endless examples, but any empowerment contingent on perpetuating an inequality is inevitably not. No ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation warrants civil or basic human rights surpassing any other persuasion, or inequality is in fact the result. None are so special, not yourself or whomever you are made to love the most. Preferential treatment condoned by any legality of legislation is no more rational than that of any lynch mob, a subjectivity paraded as objective, when real justice leaves all participants better people.
Any conceivable argument to the contrary is finding a rationale for the origins of fascism. What are fascists after all, but self-declared exceptions to whichever rules guaranteeing an equality in life, liberty and pursuits of happiness? A healthy democratic society cannot provide exceptions for any fraction thereof to lie, to cheat or to steal at the expense of any other fraction regardless of what they believe their stories to be. Free speech guarantees neither an audience or agreement, and failure to meet with adoration is not oppression. Mandating any of that one way or the other is not free enterprise.
But that’s another argument, how poor judgements present a phraseology to further castigate those without resources or bearing, an inference that only the poor are without value, only the poor are capable of bad decision-making, powerless as they might be within the confining standards of proper society. I would imagine that billionaires actively not saving millions of lives on any given day represent extraordinarily poor judgement, depriving themselves of potential workers and customers, potential friends and allies and lovers. Each and every moment of ego-centrism is a deprivation to those in its orbit whether purposeful followers or innocent bystanders, no matter how momentary, no matter how attractive or lucrative or justifiable it manages to sell its rationale as being. This is not demanding that empowering must be further frustrated by a catch-22, only observing that cause and effect are connected well and beyond the pure subjectivity of self-gratifications. Names are not enough of a personal identifier only for egocentrics, whose obsessive-compulsive insistence for agreeable audiences brings forth further complications to necessary communication between the masses, by creating unnecessary divisions at cost to genuinely personal identity in favor of labels to cover a lack of individual merit or mettle. Adherents witlessly preach that who you truly are is of lesser importance than your self-perceptions or what you wish to be perceived as aligning with, that identity itself is declared exclusively by packaging and brand loyalty, whether that branding originates from persuasions of church or of state or the fanciful trends of industry. They allow their own identities, their thoughts and their feelings to be carjacked by those persons given absolute power over their lives and livelihoods. Authoritative power which abhors, defies and repels responsibility, but the same power they wish for themselves.
Freedom is not the liberty to influence freely, freedom is liberty from being influenced.
And so have I devised an argument herein upsetting for Capitalists and fascists and only upsetting for Capitalists and fascists.