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> the best opportunities of governments to expressly push out anti-democratic and anti-citizen laws Coming from my perspective, in a family who fought multip

> 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.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> 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.
x-complexity 3y ago
> 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.
LocalH 3y ago
The word you're looking for is "tyranny"

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> 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.

x-complexity 3y ago

> 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.

LocalH 3y ago

The word you're looking for is "tyranny"