When assessing someone's power, we tend to pay attention immediately to external attributes. For a person, it is height, muscle, and weight. For an army, it is the number of personnel, the volume and technological sophistication of weapons. For a company, it's market share, turnover, patents, customers, etc. Evolution has taught us that in an encounter, as a rule, the larger individual wins. In the wild, all animals have similar "OS" in the form of instinct. If there is no difference in "software," then "hardware" rules. That is why in primitive societies - in the early Paleolithic, prisons and Muscovy - only the propensity for violence is valued, and the most pathological psychopath becomes the king.
As the internal organization of both the individual and society as a whole becomes more complex, the number one value becomes creative solutions to non-standard problems, i.e. ingenuity, creativity, innovativeness. And friendly cooperation with other people is especially important, because social capital is a lever that exponentially increases the creative output. Here clash is also inevitable, but in a civilized society there is a conflict of ideas, not people. The more developed the spiritual vector of culture, the sharper the struggle for truth, not for power.
In this sense, who is the strongest? The one who has the least amount of unproductive internal friction. Any squabbles, intrigues and quarrels increase entropy in the system, increasing the probability of collapse. And no matter how big the group is, how advanced the technology is, and how bottomless the resources are, soon the system will start to wobble, stumble, and fall to pieces itself. Investor Peter Thiel writes: "Internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all." Developing his thought further, it can be argued that the most important thing is for the founder to have peace in his mind. Then any external problem is surmountable.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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