A Cynical View of Soft Power

Dishonest people with money and power usually stay in power. The cases where they do not are outliers: and not the norm.

One of the things I came to learn living in Northeast Asia and going to graduate school with people from mostly developing countries is that soft power is a farce. What they admire is the power America wields: not America itself. I then hit me. Humans have a way of seeing good anyone that is powerful or at the top. It also became clear to me that American soft power will collapse as soon as the US is not longer at the top: and that is because they will no longer go out of their way to hunt for excuses to rationalize their admiration for America in the hopes of getting something from America.

Soft power is a face in our international anarchic system. No country does good most of the time, and no leader does either. Obama did as many horrible things as Trump has done, but the difference is it is not in our face. Clinton did some pretty bad things, and so did Eisenhower and Gandhi (a pedophile) or MLK (a womanizer) do horrible things.

We tend to look for the good in people that either serve an agenda we seek to promote, or because by talking ourselves and those around us into liking that person or power we can hope to be on their good side and get something from them.

Some humans call this ass kissing, but the truth is all of you do it even if you do not know it.

This is because people tend to talk themselves into liking those they think they can get something from ahead of everyone else. Look at how we report on crime by the powerful as opposed to the poor if you need proof. If they are poor we think "off with their heads" while if they are powerful we try to explain their acts with more reasoning as oppose to righteous hate.

People hate to hear this because they cope with it by dint of a lie they tell themselves: that the world is just, or the just world hypothesis. That is what soft power really means: finding a way to rationalize liking someone or something that can do something for us. The threshold to turn against unjust people in power is much higher than people that are poor.

Changing this requires seeing it first in ourselves