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Censorship and surveillance kills enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit. China is about to put the clamps on what is driving their success and growth, it was o
by watertom 8y ago
Censorship and surveillance kills enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit. China is about to put the clamps on what is driving their success and growth, it was only a matter of time. Totalitarianism will always kill itself.
- subsubsub 8y agoI can understand why Communism might have this effect, but why censorship or surveillance? Anything I can read on the subject?
- musage 8y agoNot communism. Totalitarianism. > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. -- Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism", which I recommend. She also wrote > The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. and > The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different. You cannot decouple censorship and surveillance from that basic derangement. And how that combination in turn would kill enthusiasm, the ability to think new things, there's also many things said and written about that but I didn't save those because they seemed rather obvious. > The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less. -- George Orwell He doesn't explain why it's a fallacy. But there's things to read on the subject, of course. I'd guess that just like very sociopathic individuals are essentially just feeding on and destroying others to buy some time before they fall into the black hole at their own core, so it is with power structures made from that foundation. Cancer cells die after they killed their host, an organism made out of just cancer cells wouldn't exactly fare better. That doesn't mean they can't eat the whole world and be the "most innovative" or the "most alive", all opponents being dead. They still will not innovate or be alive in any interesting sense of the words. People who cannot even face themselves cannot say or see anything interesting about the world.
- twblalock 8y agoWhy do you think this will happen? Why isn’t China the counterexample? Maybe it is really capitalism, not democracy, that determines the long-term success of a society. That’s bad news for people who care about freedom, but it might be true.
- telltruth 8y agoIt doesn't. If anything China is teaching the world that it is perfectly possible to have thriving entrepreneurial spirit under censorship and surveillance. This would be hard to accept for people in western world but we are learning that not only democracy is overrated but also freedom of expression is not the pre-condition for the economic progress. Historically, we have had several authoritarian regimes where science, art and economy flurished and freedom of expression was limited. In fact, virtually all regimes before 1600s would fall in to this mold. The Grand China Experiment is showing cracks in our dearly help beliefs and frankly its quite scary.
- wer716 8y agoWhat kind of "censorship" though? Wouldn't excessive patent laws and lawsuits be a kind of censorship? By that token, the average Chinese person is more free than they would have been 50 years ago. I don't think people realize how restrictive China was back then and how free they are now. Sure, they still have a long way to go, but to say that they are getting "less free" is incorrect. Ask any Chinese if they would rather live under Mao vs living now.