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> what is government there for - if not to enact laws that keep people safe and prevent profiteering companies from hoodwinking the common folk to help their ow
by notpachet 5y ago
> what is government there for - if not to enact laws that keep people safe and prevent profiteering companies from hoodwinking the common folk to help their own bottom lines?
Well put. Are our governments guilty of systematically oppressing us? In many cases yes. That doesn't mean that every government-imposed regulation is brimming with evil. But it is easier (and probably more dopamine-releasing) to believe in a world where the government is the bad guy 100% of the time. It requires less work than acknowledging the occasional good fruits of otherwise inimical regimes.
- undecisive 5y agoAbsolutely. Putting on my hypotheticals hat, part of it will be: - not being in the room where it happened, and presuming that the only impetus for change is evil, which feeds into our own deep-seated resistance to change. - not knowing which voices are being paid to speak (news media, social media, etc) and which voices are completely under-informed - compared with knowing which voices are definitely being paid to speak (government mouthpieces, propaganda) and conflating "don't know whether to trust" with the much simpler "don't trust". - knowing that sometimes Governments do good things for good reasons, but even then they often end up producing terrible unintended side-effects, or end up being polluted by less-than-wholesome agendas as a price of getting enacted. So yeah, I totally get that it's hard work overcoming all that to get to a point where you trust anything the government does. The real irony is that it's often government inaction that we should be more suspicious of - it's the status quo and anaemic half-arsed reforms that more often feed into the pockets of the powerful while giving a veneer of progress.