68、番外：小闪电的选修课Essay ...
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D-GESS – The Making of the Modern World
Essay Assignment
Write an analytical essay on the making of the modern world from a structural perspective.
The essay should address long-term historical processes rather than a single event or case study.
Focus on the relationship between power, resources, institutions, and social order.
Assessment will prioritize analytical structure and coherence over descriptive detail.
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A Structural Perspective on Distribution, Power, and the Modern World
From a macro-level perspective, human societies operate within a structural system organized around resources, value, and distribution. The world can be understood as a systemic assemblage in which total resources and distributable value remain highly constrained, while the number of participating actors continues to expand. Individuals and groups are embedded in this system through their participation in distribution. As population scales grow and social complexity intensifies, distributive pressures accumulate, compelling societies to seek regulatory pathways that sustain the system’s long-term viability.
Historically, such regulatory pathways tend to unfold along two broad directions. One direction pursues value expansion: through the evolution of social institutions, advances in technological systems, and transformations in modes of production, the overall stock of resources is enlarged, thereby easing distributive conflict. The other direction follows a zero-sum logic: through war, purges, and conflict mechanisms, the number of participants in distribution is reduced, and the ownership structures of resources and power are reconfigured. These directions do not constitute moral choices; they recur as systemic responses under structural pressure.
Under specific historical conditions, when channels for value expansion are blocked and internal institutional tensions continue to accumulate, societies often turn toward highly mobilized forms of internal reorganization. In this context, revolution can be understood as a systemic attempt at regulation centered on political mobilization and ideological reconstruction. By redefining identity, legitimacy, and moral ordering, social members are reinserted into new configurations of distribution and power. Existing relations of resource ownership, epistemic authority, and organizational hierarchy are profoundly disrupted. Conflict thus extends beyond direct material contestation to encompass discourse, historical narration, and the reordering of future trajectories.
From the mid-twentieth century onward, the operational logic of the international system underwent another critical transformation. The prolonged absence of direct large-scale wars among major powers exhibits a strong structural correlation with the establishment of nuclear weapons systems. Nuclear weaponry elevates the cost of war to the level of civilizational survival, subjecting military conflict to an extremely rationalized framework of risk assessment. Any uncontrolled confrontation carries the potential for irreversible systemic collapse. The resulting structure of nuclear deterrence shifts conflict away from direct military consumption toward proxy wars, economic competition, technological rivalry, and institutional confrontation. Peace, at this level, manifests as a low-trigger stability under conditions of high risk rather than the disappearance of conflict.
Within these structures, the logic of power operates as a highly self-reinforcing closed loop. Power is not accountable to abstract notions of the public good; it unfolds along the pathways of its own formation and authorization. Its sources of legitimacy—whether revolutionary mobilization, ideological orthodoxy, institutional authorization, capital support, or the monopoly of violence—recursively shape the directions of its responsibility. Policy, governance, and distributive practices continually serve the maintenance and reproduction of power’s foundations rather than individual experience as such.
Returning to the relational level between individuals, differences in social status and hierarchical stratification emerge as structural outcomes jointly shaped by modes of resource ownership, institutional positioning, and historical sedimentation. In the present and foreseeable future, class differentiation will persist as a stabilizing apparatus for organizing complex societies. Human history has not unfolded along a linear trajectory toward equalization; it advances through recurrent cycles of producing, contesting, and reconfiguring hierarchy.
War reorders the value of life through violence; religion confers legitimacy on differential orderings through transcendental narratives; institutions freeze stratified arrangements through rules and identities; financial systems, in depersonalized form, embed relations of domination into time, risk, and expectation. Through credit, interest, debt, assets, and valuation, individuals are no longer directly possessed in bodily terms but are instead integrated into a calculative system in which future returns serve as collateral.
From the perspective of capital’s operation, these devices—often labeled “modern instruments of distribution”—do not function as neutral regulatory tools. They constitute the structural objectives of value accumulation and class reproduction themselves. Hierarchy no longer appears in overtly coercive forms; it persists through the rational, voluntary, and contractual, and is steadily reproduced within exchanges that present themselves as fair.
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关于分配、权力与现代世界的结构视角
在宏观尺度上观察，人类社会始终运行在一个围绕资源、价值与分配所构成的结构体系之中。世界可被理解为一个总体资源与可支配价值高度有限、但分配主体不断增加的系统集合体，个体与群体以参与分配的方式嵌入其中。随着人口规模扩张与社会复杂度提升，分配压力持续累积，由此推动社会不断寻找调节路径，以维持系统的可持续运行。
在历史经验中，这类调节路径大致呈现出两种方向：一种路径指向价值增殖，通过社会制度的演化、科技体系的进步与生产方式的升级，使整体资源总量不断扩张，从而缓解分配冲突；另一种路径则建立在零和博弈逻辑之上，通过战争、清洗与冲突机制，减少参与分配的主体数量，重塑资源与权力的占有结构。二者并非道德选择，而是结构压力下反复出现的系统反应。
在特定历史条件下，当价值扩展通道受阻、制度内部张力不断积累，社会往往转向高度动员化的内部重组方式。放在这一语境中，革.命可被理解为一种以政治动员与意识形态重构为核心的系统性调节尝试。通过重新定义身份、合法性与道德排序，社会成员被重新纳入分配与权力结构之中，原有的资源占有关系、知识权威与组织层级发生剧烈扰动。冲突由此从物质层面的直接争夺，扩展至话语、历史叙事与未来方向的全面重排。
进入二十世纪中后期，国际体系的运行逻辑再次发生关键转折。大国之间长期未爆发正面的大规模战争，与核武器体系的确立形成高度结构性关联。核武器将战争成本推升至文明存续层面，使军事冲突被纳入极端理性化的风险评估框架之中。任何失控的对抗都可能引发不可逆的系统崩溃，由此形成的核威慑结构，将冲突从直接军事消耗，转移至代理战争、经济博弈、科技竞争与制度对抗等间接领域。和平在这一层面上表现为高风险条件下的低触发稳定状态，而非冲突的消失。
在上述结构中，权力的运作逻辑呈现出高度自洽的闭环特征。权力并不对抽象的公共利益负责，而是沿着其生成路径与授权机制展开运作。其合法性来源，无论是革.命动员、意识形态正统、制度授权、资本支持或暴力垄断，都会反向塑造权力的责任指向。政策、治理与分配行为，持续服务于对权力根基的维系与再生产，而非个体经验本身。
由此回到人与人之间的关系层面，社会地位差异与等级分化呈现为由资源占有方式、制度位置与历史沉积共同塑造的结构性结果。在目前以及可预见的未来中，阶级差异仍将作为组织复杂社会的稳定装置持续存在，人类历史并未沿着线性趋平的轨迹展开，而是在不断制造、争夺与重置等级的循环中推进的。
战争通过暴力重排生命价值，宗教通过超验叙事为差序结构赋予正当性，制度以规则与身份冻结分层秩序，金融体系则在去人格化的形式下，将支配关系嵌入时间、风险与预期之中。信用、利率、债务、资产与估值，个体不再被直接占有身体，而是被嵌入一套以未来收益为抵押的计算系统中。
在资本运行的视角中，这些被称为“现代社会分配工具”的装置并非中性的调节手段，而是价值积累与阶级再生产本身的结构目标。等级不再以粗暴形式显现，而以理性、自愿与契约的面貌持续存在，并在看似公平的交换过程中，被稳定地复制下来。
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第68章 番外：小闪电的选修课Essay
