this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Why do you think this is? What are the root causes?
Fear. It's that simple. An authoritarian mindset is one predicated on fear. After 9/11, Dick Cheney and George H. W. Bush used fear to drive their policies of restrictive freedoms. They pushed these through so they could amass additional powers and push government money towards their friends. Once these freedoms are gone, they almost never come back. The Republican party has been running on a campaign of fear ever since. Quite honestly, they've used fear as their driving force since the '80s. Back then it was fear of the Communists, and then it was fear of 'big government" and then it was fear of immigrants, or "the gays", or restrictions of the second amendment, or caravans of people coming up from South America. Fear is the only thing that they can run on since they have no actual plans to move our country forward.
But why? What's the actual, underlying, root cause? Fear doesn't appear out of nowhere.
Why do it? Money and power.
So we can track that back and see that the real reason is the system that motivates and allows for accumulation of wealth and power, not necessarily fear alone.
Having power over others is certainly not system-unique.
Not unique, certainly, but having a system built on it doesn't seem to be a good idea.
Stop edging yourself, you want to say capitalism is the problem so bad.
It is, I thought that was obvious.
I think Capitalism is also just part of the problem. China and north Korea are somewhat to not at all capitalistic but still none of the citizens who live there have any freedom.
I don't know what causes countries and their citizens who fought and sacrificed their lives for freedom to give it all up.
I don't know how we can fix this.
It's human insecurity (read: fear).
And maybe greed, too
It is. It was just funny how you were edging yourself with it.
Human stupidity and malice – they're an infinite resource that just keeps on taking. We've gotten this far despite ourselves, not because