Interesting. But how do you reconcile the many counter-examples? Pointing to an incident in time is fine, but someone could just as easily point to the US bill

Interesting. But how do you reconcile the many counter-examples? Pointing to an incident in time is fine, but someone could just as easily point to the US bill of rights, the general trend over time towards personal liberties in the West (women voting, marriage equality, voluntary assisted death was just passed in one Australian state), et cetera. Whether one or the other is natural seems hard to establish. A more reasonable claim might be that people with power generally seek to attain more (and are in a position to attain more), and the end result of that is authoritarianism. Of course, it's more nuanced than that too. For instance the current Australian government get a lot for free since keeping people afraid enough that they tolerate the powergrabs also happens to pay for Rupert Murdoch's empire, and keeping him happy is as straightforward as maintaining a standard neoliberal trickle-down economic agenda. It could be that we oscillate between authoritarianism and democracy/libertarianism on a multi-generational x-axis simply because nothing is perfect and our cultural memories are so short.