Jerry asked an excellent question: What is power? Per Arendt, power seems to be an individual's ability to stack the deck, to arrange the pieces of the proverbial chess board in a manner that best benefits the individual, and the more the individual is able to stack the deck, the more power the individual believes s/he has. Another definition of power: that power is the ability to get things done. Anecdotally, people seem to pursue power so they'll have options and privileges that others do not have; it's the often elusive ability to do as one pleases, without meaningful consequences, because someone else is set to pay the price for it; it's tantamount to moral hazard in insurance law. Power is also the ability to have absolute control over people, circumstances, etc.; theoretically, this is the best way to get one's way, which is easier said than done, of course.
nations as 'bounded entities' - this is a problem as it constrains our imagination as humans, these strictures of ideology and phantom entities ... we need protection and freedoms as world citizens, world peoples, world humans ... we have to escape our colonial mindsets and find livable/sustainable mindsets ... growth in the human and ecological sense, which can always be renewed and find new avenues, be ever re-circling, recycling. we are currently in a plateaued stagnancy, waiting for the new human breakthru
