5 ms·

Because any government's primary objective is to secure the power of the government, and most governments including western "democratic" ones view their people

Because any government's primary objective is to secure the power of the government, and most governments including western "democratic" ones view their people as the biggest threat to that objective. Which they are right about, mind you.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
This is a really dumb thing to say and it really undermines the power of every day people to have a say in how our world is run. The Government is our voice and our strength, and we are going to need that voice heard and our will exercised in the coming years. We need to stop undermining our governments, we need to get money out of politics, and we need to sort out our democracies.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Unless you can actually address what I wrote, explain why it is a "really dumb thing to say", I'll chalk that up to you being bewildered and terrified by the truth in what I say. That's okay, many people are completely subservient to authority, dependent on the government, want to be ruled and protected. I pass no moral judgement in my comment, merely explain why the EU is desperate to surveil their own citizens.
  - ShroudedNight 4y ago
    Hazarding a guess: the 'really dumb thing' is portraying democratic government as a distinct, foreign, hostile, and alien entity that any sane and morally upstanding person would minimize their interaction with, barely giving theirs 'unto Caesar' and getting away as quickly as possible. It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      > Hazarding a guess: the 'really dumb thing' is portraying democratic government as a distinct, foreign, hostile, and alien entity that any sane and morally upstanding person would minimize their interaction with, barely giving theirs 'unto Caesar' and getting away as quickly as possible. That's not how I portrayed it. What I portrayed is the reality of how people and organizations operate within society. It's quite telling that some people are too fragile to hear even a tiny bit of criticism or slightly different perspective about their God, the government. > It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. No it doesn't, subservience and dependence on the government and viewing them as "the experts", the moral authority, to be implicitly trusted, and who aim primarily to serve others above themselves, is what reinforces apathy and helplessness and dependency. Look at all the wars America and "the west" at large has got into, because all "the experts" said we had to go to war, and you were a traitor, an expert-denier, "against us", etc., if you disagreed. The same exact strategy and rhetoric is used everywhere once you see it. Enemies are created, division is sown, critics are denounced... A little bit less blind faith and trust in government and their alleged "experts", and a bit more rational thinking and questioning would have gone a long way on many occasions. That is the dangerous apathy and faith in government that has quite literally caused the loss of millions of lives and trillions of dollars since WWII. It's funny, I get a lot of this kind of pushback from people, with my simple observations of reality. Most of it seems to come from the same people who will simultaneously go on endlessly about how corrupt the government is, how much it spends on war, how racist and bigoted it is, how subservient to corporations and lobbyists, how it doesn't provide good healthcare, its police forces are brutal and unjust, justice system provides favorable outcomes for the wealthy, it doesn't do enough to solve climate change, doesn't make billionaires and corporations pay enough tax, etc. ... And yet when I point out the obvious, gee maybe that's because the government care more about themselves than they care about you, these same people suddenly lose their minds. And I'll bet dollars to donuts I know where you and OP and anybody who criticizes me for making that comment generally on most of those above issues. The thing about the sad truth versus a happy lie is that the sad truth doesn't prevent you from taking any action, participating in the system, trying to improve it or make it work for you. It's actually the happy lie that does that. Sure there are those who will become paralyzed with terror at the idea that the authority they are subservient to and essentially worship is not completely good and moral, but those people weren't going to change anything anyway.
    - JoshTriplett 4y ago
      It's entirely healthy, and necessary, to treat government as an extremely dangerous necessity that requires constant attention to make sure it doesn't overstep.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hoseja 4y ago
    But it IS hostile and alien. It's an emergent superorganism that doesn't give a fuck about its component parts, just like the anthill doesn't give a fuck about its component ants or people don't give a fuck about their component choanoflagellates.
- junofan 4y ago
  I prefer popular sovereignty. You can support a government.
  - ShroudedNight 4y ago
    How does popular sovereignty work without some collective entity imposing accountability on bad actors?
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      It's simple. Once there are enough sovereign citizens, they can band together and form an agreement to work together for mutual protection. They will probably need to lay out at a minimum what is unacceptable for their group and steer towards common ground. I'm not sure what they should call this group. Since they are steering and Latin is popular for naming things how about we call it something like gubernare? I guess that sounds a bit old fashioned. Maybe French would help? Gouvernement? No sounds too fancy. Government? PERFECT! Let's call it that.
- negidius 4y ago
  Calling things you disagree with "really dumb" is not an effective way to change minds. Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people. Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well off, and lobbyists will rarely fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective. Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.
- realjhol 4y ago
  How can you possibly be this naive? In reality it's always Michel's Iron law of Oligarchy. It doesn't matter what political system you think you have. In the end what you have is always an oligarchy.
  - staunton 4y ago
    How can you possibly be this cynical? There are bad actors and corruption in every political system. But different systems and different implementations of them have different levels of these. I would say most governments do an OK job (compared to say 1000 years ago, or compared to what any bloody revolution could do within 10 years), given how difficult the task is of governing a lot of people with vastly different interests and opinions. There is also still a lot of room for improvement. If you don't like the way your government works, try to improve it. Be part of it. Saying everything is corrupt no matter what is completely useless. I also doubt it makes you feel better overall, at least any longer than the moment you take to write such a comment.
    - realjhol 4y ago
      > How can you possibly be this cynical? It sounds cynical - yes, but we have to deal with reality as it is. Not as we would wish it to be. Surely that is the lesson on the last 10-15 years of poltics. Power simply doesn't work this way. Power always collects in the hands of an organized minority - be it a king and his inner circle, or in the power brokers, government institutions, political party internal governmental structures, media hacks, NGOs, and state institutions, and the money power of western democracies. Understand this. There is no vote you can cast to evict any of these people. Furthermore, they control the information dissemination aparatus. Like kafabe in pro-wrestling, they have complete control over the narrative story arcs, and they define the oppinions that are acceptable in society. Take the US government, for example. Just think about the vast - almost boundless state power they have amassed. They spy on every single communication anyone makes on the internet. They even assassinated a sitting US president, for goodness sake. Do you think if you just meekly ask them, they'll simply hand over the whole structure into the hands of their sworn enemies? No - it won't ever happen. Your guy will be installed, and he will find his every action is thwarted. He will be effectively powerless. And if you complain, they'll laugh in your face. More generally: A mass of people is powerless. You must know this from real life: you can't expect a group of 1000 people to take responsibility for achieving some objective. The group will instinctively look to a leader to guide them, and they will wait for someone to take charge. That person will then need a group of lieutenants to administrate his leadership, and hey presto: there's your oligarchy. There's nothing wrong with this. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a reflection of human nature. There is nothing wrong with "kings", various "lords" and officials, if they have the people's best intests in mind. The problem is democracy is that it allows responsibility to be diffused among the people. Who will ever be held responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawall debacle? Or for the Iraq war? Or for the Snowden files? Or for the trillions of US government debt? ..to name just a few. No one will ever be held responsible, because democracy allows the oligarchs to point the finger back at the people, and blame us for our choices, when in reality we really have no control over the matter whatsoever. At least our ancestors could pick up pitch forks and carry their heads out on pikes if things became untennable. We cannot hold power to account in any way at all. They don't fear us in the slightest. In 2023, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
Fricken 4y ago
Any institution's primary objective is to secure it's own power (the second is to expand those powers). It's as true for governments as it is for corporations, religions, and even the home gardening club.
- t0suj4 4y ago
  Sounds like good argument for competition. I haven't heard of a case where a garden club expanded it's power enough to prevent members from leaving and establishing their own.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    Garden clubs usually don't have police and armies. They have to bend to powers that do have them, usually the judiciary system, which can summon police. A garden club with police and an army doesn't have to bend to anyone and might force members not to leave.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    Depends on the definition of "garden club". Indeed, you probably could call early agriculturists somewhere in Middle East a "garden club".
maxilevi 4y ago
I agree. With this in mind, can government ever fully work? It seems like it’s becoming a behemoth that will need to be killed and redesigned in the future, just like it happened in the past
- ako 4y ago
  It will never fully work, as we have as many opinions on what good government looks like as there are people on this earth. What one considers good government, is someone else’s nightmare government.
- molotovh 4y ago
  Is this not exactly what was meant by "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants"? We treat government like a monument to be preserved for posterity, but it is not. Government is a living thing and it follows a cycle of growth and decay that eventually requires culling, just like any other form of life.
stametseater 4y ago
> most governments including western "democratic" ones view their people as the biggest threat to that objective Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead. Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.

jay_kyburz 4y ago

This is a really dumb thing to say and it really undermines the power of every day people to have a say in how our world is run. The Government is our voice and our strength, and we are going to need that voice heard and our will exercised in the coming years. We need to stop undermining our governments, we need to get money out of politics, and we need to sort out our democracies.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
Unless you can actually address what I wrote, explain why it is a "really dumb thing to say", I'll chalk that up to you being bewildered and terrified by the truth in what I say. That's okay, many people are completely subservient to authority, dependent on the government, want to be ruled and protected. I pass no moral judgement in my comment, merely explain why the EU is desperate to surveil their own citizens.
- ShroudedNight 4y ago
  Hazarding a guess: the 'really dumb thing' is portraying democratic government as a distinct, foreign, hostile, and alien entity that any sane and morally upstanding person would minimize their interaction with, barely giving theirs 'unto Caesar' and getting away as quickly as possible. It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    > Hazarding a guess: the 'really dumb thing' is portraying democratic government as a distinct, foreign, hostile, and alien entity that any sane and morally upstanding person would minimize their interaction with, barely giving theirs 'unto Caesar' and getting away as quickly as possible. That's not how I portrayed it. What I portrayed is the reality of how people and organizations operate within society. It's quite telling that some people are too fragile to hear even a tiny bit of criticism or slightly different perspective about their God, the government. > It teaches and reinforces apathy and learned helplessness when it comes to effecting change on matters of public policy. Ultimately, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. No it doesn't, subservience and dependence on the government and viewing them as "the experts", the moral authority, to be implicitly trusted, and who aim primarily to serve others above themselves, is what reinforces apathy and helplessness and dependency. Look at all the wars America and "the west" at large has got into, because all "the experts" said we had to go to war, and you were a traitor, an expert-denier, "against us", etc., if you disagreed. The same exact strategy and rhetoric is used everywhere once you see it. Enemies are created, division is sown, critics are denounced... A little bit less blind faith and trust in government and their alleged "experts", and a bit more rational thinking and questioning would have gone a long way on many occasions. That is the dangerous apathy and faith in government that has quite literally caused the loss of millions of lives and trillions of dollars since WWII. It's funny, I get a lot of this kind of pushback from people, with my simple observations of reality. Most of it seems to come from the same people who will simultaneously go on endlessly about how corrupt the government is, how much it spends on war, how racist and bigoted it is, how subservient to corporations and lobbyists, how it doesn't provide good healthcare, its police forces are brutal and unjust, justice system provides favorable outcomes for the wealthy, it doesn't do enough to solve climate change, doesn't make billionaires and corporations pay enough tax, etc. ... And yet when I point out the obvious, gee maybe that's because the government care more about themselves than they care about you, these same people suddenly lose their minds. And I'll bet dollars to donuts I know where you and OP and anybody who criticizes me for making that comment generally on most of those above issues. The thing about the sad truth versus a happy lie is that the sad truth doesn't prevent you from taking any action, participating in the system, trying to improve it or make it work for you. It's actually the happy lie that does that. Sure there are those who will become paralyzed with terror at the idea that the authority they are subservient to and essentially worship is not completely good and moral, but those people weren't going to change anything anyway.
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    It's entirely healthy, and necessary, to treat government as an extremely dangerous necessity that requires constant attention to make sure it doesn't overstep.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hoseja 4y ago
  But it IS hostile and alien. It's an emergent superorganism that doesn't give a fuck about its component parts, just like the anthill doesn't give a fuck about its component ants or people don't give a fuck about their component choanoflagellates.
junofan 4y ago
I prefer popular sovereignty. You can support a government.
- ShroudedNight 4y ago
  How does popular sovereignty work without some collective entity imposing accountability on bad actors?
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    It's simple. Once there are enough sovereign citizens, they can band together and form an agreement to work together for mutual protection. They will probably need to lay out at a minimum what is unacceptable for their group and steer towards common ground. I'm not sure what they should call this group. Since they are steering and Latin is popular for naming things how about we call it something like gubernare? I guess that sounds a bit old fashioned. Maybe French would help? Gouvernement? No sounds too fancy. Government? PERFECT! Let's call it that.
negidius 4y ago
Calling things you disagree with "really dumb" is not an effective way to change minds. Unless you are part of the 0.01% richest (or something like that), governments are not your voice or strength, and you have essentially no ability to influence their actions. Governments are composed of politicians and other people who will act in what they consider to be their own best interest. Those interests will generally be very different from the interests of most other people. Getting money out of politics is impossible. Politicians are not going to vote to make themselves less well off, and lobbyists will rarely fund the campaigns of those who would make lobbying less effective. Instead of looking to governments for solutions to problems they are neither capable of solving nor willing to solve, we should try to solve those problems by voluntary cooperation whenever possible.
realjhol 4y ago
How can you possibly be this naive? In reality it's always Michel's Iron law of Oligarchy. It doesn't matter what political system you think you have. In the end what you have is always an oligarchy.
- staunton 4y ago
  How can you possibly be this cynical? There are bad actors and corruption in every political system. But different systems and different implementations of them have different levels of these. I would say most governments do an OK job (compared to say 1000 years ago, or compared to what any bloody revolution could do within 10 years), given how difficult the task is of governing a lot of people with vastly different interests and opinions. There is also still a lot of room for improvement. If you don't like the way your government works, try to improve it. Be part of it. Saying everything is corrupt no matter what is completely useless. I also doubt it makes you feel better overall, at least any longer than the moment you take to write such a comment.
  - realjhol 4y ago
    > How can you possibly be this cynical? It sounds cynical - yes, but we have to deal with reality as it is. Not as we would wish it to be. Surely that is the lesson on the last 10-15 years of poltics. Power simply doesn't work this way. Power always collects in the hands of an organized minority - be it a king and his inner circle, or in the power brokers, government institutions, political party internal governmental structures, media hacks, NGOs, and state institutions, and the money power of western democracies. Understand this. There is no vote you can cast to evict any of these people. Furthermore, they control the information dissemination aparatus. Like kafabe in pro-wrestling, they have complete control over the narrative story arcs, and they define the oppinions that are acceptable in society. Take the US government, for example. Just think about the vast - almost boundless state power they have amassed. They spy on every single communication anyone makes on the internet. They even assassinated a sitting US president, for goodness sake. Do you think if you just meekly ask them, they'll simply hand over the whole structure into the hands of their sworn enemies? No - it won't ever happen. Your guy will be installed, and he will find his every action is thwarted. He will be effectively powerless. And if you complain, they'll laugh in your face. More generally: A mass of people is powerless. You must know this from real life: you can't expect a group of 1000 people to take responsibility for achieving some objective. The group will instinctively look to a leader to guide them, and they will wait for someone to take charge. That person will then need a group of lieutenants to administrate his leadership, and hey presto: there's your oligarchy. There's nothing wrong with this. The Iron Law of Oligarchy is a reflection of human nature. There is nothing wrong with "kings", various "lords" and officials, if they have the people's best intests in mind. The problem is democracy is that it allows responsibility to be diffused among the people. Who will ever be held responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawall debacle? Or for the Iraq war? Or for the Snowden files? Or for the trillions of US government debt? ..to name just a few. No one will ever be held responsible, because democracy allows the oligarchs to point the finger back at the people, and blame us for our choices, when in reality we really have no control over the matter whatsoever. At least our ancestors could pick up pitch forks and carry their heads out on pikes if things became untennable. We cannot hold power to account in any way at all. They don't fear us in the slightest. In 2023, this should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention.

Fricken 4y ago

Any institution's primary objective is to secure it's own power (the second is to expand those powers). It's as true for governments as it is for corporations, religions, and even the home gardening club.

t0suj4 4y ago
Sounds like good argument for competition. I haven't heard of a case where a garden club expanded it's power enough to prevent members from leaving and establishing their own.
- pmontra 4y ago
  Garden clubs usually don't have police and armies. They have to bend to powers that do have them, usually the judiciary system, which can summon police. A garden club with police and an army doesn't have to bend to anyone and might force members not to leave.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Depends on the definition of "garden club". Indeed, you probably could call early agriculturists somewhere in Middle East a "garden club".

maxilevi 4y ago

I agree. With this in mind, can government ever fully work? It seems like it’s becoming a behemoth that will need to be killed and redesigned in the future, just like it happened in the past

ako 4y ago
It will never fully work, as we have as many opinions on what good government looks like as there are people on this earth. What one considers good government, is someone else’s nightmare government.
molotovh 4y ago
Is this not exactly what was meant by "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants"? We treat government like a monument to be preserved for posterity, but it is not. Government is a living thing and it follows a cycle of growth and decay that eventually requires culling, just like any other form of life.

stametseater 4y ago

> most governments including western "democratic" ones view their people as the biggest threat to that objective Which is particularly farcical when you realize that in the 20th century, governments murdered tens of millions of people. Governments are concentrations of power that wield monopolies on violence. If governments can be kept under control, kept within some reasonable guardrails, then they're very useful for various reasons. I am not an anarchist, even remotely. But when governments get out of control the result is often millions dead. Governments which view those guardrails as a threat from the people are a threat to the people. Such perceptions prove the necessity of those guardrails.