Previous discussions:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 (June 2013)
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2 comments
Thank you for the link. I found barrkel’s comment[1] particularly moving:
> A non-authoritarian government is an historical anomaly. It's a ball balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of millions, and kept there by the vigilance of those who care. Please start caring.
> It's a ball balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of millions, and kept there by the vigilance of those who care.
I feel like the ball has started to roll downhill, and is rapidly gaining speed, but that the only folks who can stop it are too dug into their own partisanship to take a look around them and do something.
That, or they desire authoritarianism. I've frankly been surprised at the number of people I've talked to in the past few years who seem to like the idea of a strongman leader. I always assumed everyone but the most extreme wings of the right and left believed in liberty and democracy, but I now see that was I mistaken.
My experience has been the opposite. I've rarely met anybody in the center ~80% or so that didn't have a little dictator inside of them, yearning to come out and strangle the masses under behavior controls, dictating how everyone else is to live. I find it doesn't take more than a few minutes of conversation with moderates, before you can see the gleam of dictator in their eye, where you can get them to openly state something about wanting to directly or indirectly control other people and how they live.
And when it comes to the extreme partisan wings, the dictator is giant rather than little. You don't have to engage them in conversation for it to come out, they project it all the time willingly, openly.
Everyone wants to believe that they know how other people should be living their lives. And everybody believes that they themselves know where to draw the line between freedom and order.
Freedom means something different to every person on the planet, and that makes it difficult to protect.
> My experience has been the opposite.
What you describe isn't the opposite. It's mostly the same.
And if 100% of the people you encounter are displaying either a little authoritarianism or a lot, you need to spend more time with libertarians.
China strikes me as a good example of this. I remember reading an article that was composed of 5-6 personal stories from young Chinese (20s and 30s). Generally, they’re very happy in China. As far as they’re concerned the leadership took China from agrarian to world leader in a short period of time, vastly improving their quality of life.
Of course, the reason this works is because they’re the majority—the “everyday” Chinese citizen who the gov’t is trying to improve life for. Life is not as good if you're not in the target demographic.
My time in China suggested to me that a lot of people wanted to leave but were afraid to say it anywhere or any way that could hold them accountable.
With systems like the social score, can you trust any public opinion from a member of the Chinese state?
Authoritarianism only looks like authoritarianism if you don’t agree with who’s in charge.
Clever, but not borne out by evidence. You're not going to claim that Stalin's Russia and Thatcher's Britain (to take two arbitrary governments) were equivalent in authoritarianism, with the only difference being who agreed and who disagreed with said governments, right?
Or are you?
June 2013 discussion's top post is by the person involved in making Lotus Notes (Ray Ozzie). His comment - which tangents into issue of privacy and data control - is also prescient, and could have just as well been written today, which is a sad testament to how things didn't get any better in the past 6 years.
As well in this thread.