The Need For Power

Reason, truth, and justice are not concerns of anyone at all other than the world's few genuine rationalists and perhaps a handful of others who care about these things without having given themselves over to the sheer rationality necessary to understand them.  Almost everyone likes to be called rational, but almost no one cares enough to even understand what reason is and what it is not.  Almost everyone actually believes that their subjective conscience reveals real obligations (an epistemological impossibility), but almost no one is even consistent with their own moral preferences when left to himself or herself.  Even these people often do care about one thing, though: having less power than someone of a different ideology.

Power is the grand way to get the attention of those apathetic towards reason, truth, and morality--yes, the last of these three things may not ultimately exist since the best a person could hope for is disproving incoherent moral frameworks and showing that there is evidence that the uncaused cause has a moral nature, but only a selfish imbecile thinks their preferences have anything to do with the matter.  Someone who would never carry out any moral obligations that could be proven to exist is merely an egoist or a slave to cultural norms that would fall short of these obligations.  However, they would still be likely to panic and object if someone with more power than them was to interfere with their life of moral apathy.

Within a Christian theist context, this is one of the benefits of God having more power as the uncaused cause than humans do is that unrepentant people will have annihilation forced upon them as their deeds deserve.  If Christianity is true, this divine power will ensure that scores of people are literally reduced to nonexistence (Matthew 10:28, Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23) for irrationality and sin they were too selfish and hypocritical to avoid.  It is power exercised on behalf of truth and justice, not affection or mercy, that triumphs in the end according Christian theology.  Those who are apathetic to the obligations they are bound to are destroyed like the lesser beings they are.

Power is the best pragmatic way to force fools and the indifferent to actually care about logical truths, such as the fact that if a moral obligation exists, people who avoid fulfilling it are inferior to those who care about doing what they should.  This is why there is always a need for power among rationalists.  On one hand, a rationalist is more concerned with understanding provable truths than they are about other people one way or another, but on the other hand, a rationalist who builds financial and social power in addition to the intellectual power all rationalists have by default is in the best position to snare the attention of their irrationalistic society.

Some people object to power based upon perceived or actual misuses of that power, but this objection has nothing to do with the actual nature of power itself; it is a fear-based, emotionalistic reaction to what some people do with their power.  There is literally nothing to object to if there is no morally obligatory way to use or not use power, which is another thing often overlooked in an era where individuals want to feel validated in beliefs based on personal preferences.  Power is not automatically evil whether or not morality exists.  If there is no such thing as any moral obligations, there is no such thing as a misuse of power.  If morality does exist, it does not logically follow that power is immoral.  Some people just like to pretend it must be to have an illusory basis for objecting to uses of power they do not subjectively like.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.