Never waste a good crisis. It's been well documented that crisis events are the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws that lead to erosion of freedom and wealth transfers from poor to rich, as those types of events provide the perfect excuse to bypass the usual and very long and through democratic processes where everyone takes their sweet time to dissect, analyze and debate them. And we recently had plenty of crisis: Covid, inflation, waves of refugees, war in Ukraine, war in Israel.
"Don't think about it too much you poor taxpayer, you don't understand this issue anyway, it's too complex for you and plus, you're too busy being distracted and worrying about this virus/rampant inflation/CoL/war to have time to think about such petty issues like your privacy, so just sit back, relax, worry about paying your rent, and let us worry about protecting your online privacy, m'kay?"
> the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out
anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws
Coming from my perspective, in a family who fought multiple wars to
preserve liberal democratic governments based on social contract, this
seems backward, and beyond my value system.
Anything that I would see as a legitimate "government" would be
pro-democracy and fully in the service of its citizens.
If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have
governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that
case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have
instead, and how to get rid of it.
> If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it.
Under this perfect standard, you never had a "real government" in the first place. You had, at best, some approximation of it, and you gradually lost it to time.
> If the cynical slant you suggest is true, then we don't actually have governments any longer, and you should not use that word. In that case, we ought to figure out how we lost real government, what we have instead, and how to get rid of it.
- "we ought to figure out how we lost real government": It happened because of the inability to collectively overcome recency biases, which the State often exploits to their benefit; A tragedy happens, people want it fixed, the government gives a "fix" that grants them more power, and when its realized that too much was given away, it's by then too late to fully reverse the "fix".
- "what we have instead": What we have now is a State whose main focus is its own self-preservation, even when certain high-level agents/politicians have the goal of doing the opposite. Day-to-day-wise, the State is mainly focused on making sure that the State continues to exist, with the accomplishment of what it was meant to do in the first place being secondary.
- "how to get rid of it": Only two types of events can eliminate such a State. (1) An event so cataclysmic that not even a State (with total control over everyone & everything) can survive; (2) A ground-up total rejection of the State as a whole, even the good parts; (3) A rival State defeating the existing State & taking over.
The event that causes (1) implicitly also means the destruction of modern society & a regression to medieval ages.
(2) will be hard to drum up support for given the benefits from the good parts of the State, even if they're ephemeral.
The new State from (3) is just as likely to be as bad/good as the old state, just with different warts.
At its core, its a human hardware/software problem. The human hardware needs to be made more resilient against adversarial attacks & internal failures, so as to reduce the need for a State to begin with. Similarly, the human software also needs to be improved to mitigate cognitive biases as much as possible.
Never waste a good crisis. It's been well documented that crisis events are the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws that lead to erosion of freedom and wealth transfers from poor to rich, as those types of events provide the perfect excuse to bypass the usual and very long and through democratic processes where everyone takes their sweet time to dissect, analyze and debate them. And we recently had plenty of crisis: Covid, inflation, waves of refugees, war in Ukraine, war in Israel.
"Don't think about it too much you poor taxpayer, you don't understand this issue anyway, it's too complex for you and plus, you're too busy being distracted and worrying about this virus/rampant inflation/CoL/war to have time to think about such petty issues like your privacy, so just sit back, relax, worry about paying your rent, and let us worry about protecting your online privacy, m'kay?"