Re movement-building as a buck-passing strategy, I guess that the formation of the major world religions can be seen as movement-building, in a sense. Yet my interpretation is that you don’t see that as an example of buck-passing, but as a more direct change of world history (you mention it as an example of a particularly influential time). Thus some forms of movement-building are, on this view, seen as buck-passing, and not others (size of the movement is probably a relevant factor here, but no doubt there are others).
Maybe that serves to show that the distinction between directly changing world history and passing the buck for later isn’t sharp (maybe it could be seen as a matter of degree). It would be good to see some further analysis of this distinction.
Thanks—I agree that this distinction is not as crisp as would be ideal. I’d see religion-spreading, and movement-building, as in practice almost always a mixed strategy: in part one is giving resources to future people, and in part one is also directly altering how the future goes.
But it’s more like buck-passing than it is like direct work, so I think I should just not include the Axial age in the list of particularly influential times (given my definition of ‘influential’).
Thanks, I think this was very good.
Re movement-building as a buck-passing strategy, I guess that the formation of the major world religions can be seen as movement-building, in a sense. Yet my interpretation is that you don’t see that as an example of buck-passing, but as a more direct change of world history (you mention it as an example of a particularly influential time). Thus some forms of movement-building are, on this view, seen as buck-passing, and not others (size of the movement is probably a relevant factor here, but no doubt there are others).
Maybe that serves to show that the distinction between directly changing world history and passing the buck for later isn’t sharp (maybe it could be seen as a matter of degree). It would be good to see some further analysis of this distinction.
Thanks—I agree that this distinction is not as crisp as would be ideal. I’d see religion-spreading, and movement-building, as in practice almost always a mixed strategy: in part one is giving resources to future people, and in part one is also directly altering how the future goes.
But it’s more like buck-passing than it is like direct work, so I think I should just not include the Axial age in the list of particularly influential times (given my definition of ‘influential’).