Australia May Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Of course, we're also an apathetic people because we've had it so good for so long that no one will force any change, and it'll just keep getting worse.
It's also seen in our elections. There's no big visions. No bold statements from politicians about producing changes to make a better society. It's all attack ads and pandering to key demographics just to win votes and stay in government.
It's depressing and dire, because I don't see it changing in much of my lifetime and it's the exact reason why our leaders are completely dismissive of action even when we stare down the barrel towards issues like climate change. Hell, our current PM literally brought a lump of coal into parliament as a prop to taunt the opposition by saying "this is coal, don't be afraid".
edit: Another great example of the apathy I'm talking about is the collective shrug that most Aussies gave as incredibly intrusive anti-encryption and data-logging laws were introduced last year. Simply, no one cares unless it immediately and directly interrupts their middle-class suburban lifestyle.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-28/wind-farm-settings-to...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout
Soaring energy prices are because of privatisation, not because of green policies.
Or, in other better words than my own, exactly what sjy's sibling comment said.
edit: Climate change is a quintessential tragedy of the commons. It really should be our obligation to lead by example since we have the capacity to, even if our actions in isolation do not make a sufficient enough change. In fact, I'd argue that taking a lead on it is in our best interest. It helps to cement our position as a regional leader and exapnds our soft power, which is the best way we can hold regional influence outsized to our comparitively small population.
Talking about collective shrugs and apathy, I am still absolutely stunned by the complete apathy to half of the Great Barrier Reef dying. Here is this absurdly massive natural icon of Australia featured in all of its tourism ads while growing up. Half of it dies. And majority Australia basically doesn’t give a fuck. There’s no outrage. Nothing.
Out of sight out of mind, for the most part. You see this in nearly all countries.
It's often peculiar what people can have apathy about and what gets rabid attention.
The media and social frenzy about measles cases in the US this year as an example. There will be 1,600 to 2,000 cases in the US in 2019, and a few deaths. It's wall to wall media coverage, the world is ending, social media is on fire. Meanwhile ~25,000 people will die just from fentanyl in the US this year. Half a million Americans - more than died in WW2 - die in total from overdosing across seven or eight years, and well you know, it's just a thing that's going on, I guess we should focus on it a bit maybe sometime, shrug what can you do.
1. People have been getting addicted to things since ancient times, and those addictions often led to the deaths. In all the time since then, we've never solved the problem of addiction. So, it is not at all shocking or surprising that people are still getting addicted to things and dying.
People have also been getting measles since ancient times...but we did solve that problem. Hence, the very existence of measles cases is newsworthy.
2. Most addicts become so for reasons that most people can understand. It's a "there but for the grace of God, go I" situation. We can imagine how we could have ended up that way, and for most of us I think that only requires imagining a few small changes to our past.
Getting measles in a first world country, though, except for people who cannot be vaccinated because they are too young, allergic, or have weak immune systems, requires that you, or a guardian if you are a child, to be an idiot.
3. Politicians may disagree what do do about addiction and the associated deaths, but generally they all agree it is a problem we need to do something about.
With measles, there are some politicians who think it is not a big deal, or even that it is good for kids to get measles, mumps, etc., thinking that this makes them stronger and reduces there chances for things like cancer later. There are bills in several states to make it easier for parents to opt out of school vaccination requirements. In Texas, that bill also prohibits state health officials from keeping track of who opts out, which will make it harder to track and contain outbreaks.
> It's for the same reason Canadians largely ignore the extraordinarily vast environmental destruction in their resource extraction territories
If the world actually committed properly to limiting global warming to 2C, there would be no point in extracting this especially polluting oil.
Besides that, they are allowing some very unique forests to be cleared to have the oil extracted from, with the promise of later rehabilitation that never happens, as the intermediate company that is responsible to pay for it goes bankrupt.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/articl...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/14/canada...
If you identify an issue with Australian media, it’s almost certainly due to that.
Mining jobs have always paid better, and no one want's to change careers to work in tourism or reskill for supporting sustainable energy.
Places like Gladstone have seen a 50% collapse in property prices after a lot of mines shifted from construction to operational and demand dropped.
That same self-serving ignorance has now kept people like Peter "he who would be king" Dutton in Government.
It's not all bad though as there's currently money to be made in mine regeneration projects as mines are closed which is a good thing for jobs with hopefully environmental benefits.
In US federal elections, turnout is about 55%. Whereas in Australian federal elections turnout is about 90% [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/world/australia/compulsor...
Or on the flip side does it actually make it harder to use a small subset of the population to steal an election from an apathetic population at large.
I.e. you'd still be able to take advantage of the apathy but it'd be a much slower moving change towards extremes and polarisation which is pretty good for democracy in general.
Might encourage people w/ jobs who can't get to the polls to go and vote, but doesn't put unnecessary drain on their life.
They also should make voting day a national holiday, and give a tax deduction to companies who allow their employees to take as much time as they need to vote (given some lines can be hours long in places).
Edit: My comment is directed to the U.S.A. as that's where I'm from.
That and the revolving door of prime ministers over the years means we've endured a similar level of political turmoil as Trump has managed to stir up on his own home turf.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/fair...
The damage he contributed to by supporting the repeal of Rudd's emission trading scheme and the mining tax was right up there with Trump's rollback of EPA standards and attacks on renewable energy. He promptly retired and went back to his mining interests once he got what he wanted.
His reappearance at the last election was bizarre and pointless, but may have contributed to the Liberals looking likely to only need to deal with Jacqui Lambie to pass any legislation in the Senate.
Seems to me like the Coalition has done a really solid job of wedging Labor on National security to the point now they can introduce increasingly draconian laws and the second Labor speaks out against them suddenly Labor are "weak on national security" so they don't dare go against them.
Does anyone remember the Ads about terrorism they used to show on tv advising Australian's to "Be Alert not Alarmed" (I'm not kidding these actually aired) the government has done a really good job of conjuring up this atmosphere of fear whether it be terrorism, cybercrime or refugees and most recently "China" the electorate has responded to it ever time.
The Last politician I was excited about was Kevin Rudd when he stood up and declared climate change "was the moral challenge of a generation" mind you this was in 2007. He then promptly walked away from doing anything after he realized it would cost him votes, I've been completely cynical about politics in this country ever since.
Yes there seems to be some distaste among the public, its been a significant story. But people that really care about it are in your and our echo-chamber. This has happen before and will happen again, it is clear they are emboldened, there was just a big election, the good guy were going to win and then they didn't...
>Of course, we're also an apathetic people because we've had it so good for so long that no one will force any change, and it'll just keep getting worse.
Yes Australia implemented some pretty bad economic policies, yet very little of it has come due, some of it is because of our/your big seemingly kindly neighbour to the north, but well all pay eventually it will just be later.
>It's also seen in our elections. There's no big visions. No bold statements from politicians about producing changes to make a better society. It's all attack ads and pandering to key demographics just to win votes and stay in government.
Or stay out of government. Labour screamed harder about non existing terrorism. Promised to crap even harder on immigrants. They then went on to lose a completely unlosable election. You won't win in 2019 even if your Tony Blair. Sure as hell not with Ed Milliband... The economic policies was OK, if you read an economic professors blog. Quite incoherent. Raising taxes without raising anyone's taxes, huh? Not dumbed down, just dumb. To little to late. I can go on forever. They thought they were going to win anyway, so who really cares? And then they didn't.
>Hell, our current PM literally brought a lump of coal into parliament as a prop to taunt the opposition by saying "this is coal, don't be afraid". They are quite gleefully mocking you, they are enjoying themselves and this very much, they are "owning the libs" like never before.
Have we considered the possibility that this is what a mature liberal democracy looks like? Peak democracy was WWII, we seem to have been sliding towards authoritarianism since then.
You might say that they were at their peak for the majority of their population maybe, but I think that's the normal, intended outcome of democracy.
uh... Do you mean the time just before WWII, when most European nations were either Fascist or Communist? Or do you mean the time just after WWII when all of Europe was destroyed?
That being said, history is written by the victors.
As opposed to the democratic governments the Soviet Union supported? Give me a break here. The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology.
I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union.
Pointing out that the spread of democracy post-WWII was mostly confined the defeated states in that conflict, and that neither victorious side did much to support democracy elsewhere and even the "free world" often did the opposite, isn't a defense of the Soviets.
That's the point, though. The USA did exactly the same thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
I am not blind to the bad actions of the USSR. I'm just also not blind to the bad ones of the USA and its allies during the same time period.
It's in the interest of those who control the present narrative.
But WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations. It also produced semi-global representative-democratic “treaty organizations” in the form of NATO and the UN, which, again, were at least temporarily functional and taken seriously and used to enact changes by the will of their members.
(Really, though, the member nations of NATO/the UN just all had a good temporary working relationship due to being either on the same side of the war, or being made powerless by the means of their defeat, so these bodies were just a formal representation of the way their leaders were already talking to one-another at the time. As soon as everyone in these nations got newer leaders, these bodies stopped “working”—because it was never the bodies themselves that functioned in the first place.)
Outside of the Axis powers .. did it? How? Which countries? The more I try to think of a list the more I come up with examples that were due primarily to local action (e.g. India), their own wars (Kenya, Algeria), or happened a lot later than 1945.
Well, quite. Given the role of the Soviet Union in grinding down the Axis forces until the counter-invasion was feasible, and their subsequent seizing of half the territory, you could equally say it was a victory for Communism. No, the victory in the war wasn't really due to the political systems of the belligerents - and democracy was suspended in the UK during the war.
The real long-term benefit was the installation at gunpoint of constitutions written by idealists on the defeated powers, and the construction of transnational free blocs (NATO and the EEC, in contrast to the Warsaw Pact).
The democratic post-colonial transition in the victorious powers didn't really happen until about 1968. Britain and France had to shed their colonies, with another few hundred thousand killed along the way. America had to give up on Vietnam and grant civil rights to its Black citizens. Australia and South Africa had to give up on their official policies of racial discrimination. France had its collapse and re-establishment of the 5eme Republique, after a narrow brush with military dictatorship. Greece, Spain, Portugal remained as Fascist dictatorships into the 1970s! The UK had a small civil war, complete with security services murdering in secret, troops shooting people dead in the street, and the near extermination of the entire government in a terrorist bombing.
Post-war democracy in the post-colonial Middle East states was barely even tried.
To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
Let's not forget that the Soviet Union enabled WWII and was an initial aggressor along with Nazi Germany.
>To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
This underscores how much political systems are influenced by the empires of the day. When Soviet Union and America were the superpowers the world was split between democratic and communist governments. When America became the sole superpower, that accelerated the move to liberal democracy.
.. in the short term. And it worked for those countries west of Kiev. It did not stick in Russia.
The problem is that the US has always had its internal tension between the official liberalism ("all men are created equal"), the colonial racism ("except those guys"), economic freedom for the individual, and economic freedom for the megacorp. It exports all four of these, and sometimes the wrong ones win in another country. The banana republics got the racism and capitalism. Russia got hyper-capitalism with poor rule of law, enabling its collapse into a Mafia state.
It had a good stock of poor rule of law already from Soviet times, and hyper-capitalism - or even feodalism - was what it had before USSR was formed.
What do you mean in the short term? Since WWII there has been a steady global acceptance of democracy. You don't think that was something that just happened by accident? This is something to consider for those that want America to simply stay within its border and let nations fight it out to solve their problems.
Your characterizations are also highly skewed. They are reminiscent of conspiracy theorists that attribute all malice to one entity they hate. For example, American didn't export hyper-capitalism to Russia. The Soviet system was a humanitarian disaster for decades and when it collapsed it led to internal chaos until Putin showed up. There was good-faith effort on the part of America and Europe to stabilize the nation and bring it into the community (not just for altruistic reasons - Russia is a very important country).
I'm not sure what the distinction between individual economic freedom and 'megacorp' (your term) economic freedom actually is. America (just like Britain before it) has pushed for global trade - on balance that's a good thing.
Yes. The original label of the 'Third World' was applied to non-aligned nations. Those nations were still influenced by the global order created by US and Soviets, and later just the US.
>There were also plenty of military dictatorships, authoritarian one-party-states and theocracies, and a fair share of those were firmly in the USA's sphere of influence.
That's right, and not the point. The initial state of the world (for our purposes, let's start with the period between WWI and WWII but the earlier you go the more it reinforces my position) did not begin with all democracies. It began with a tiny number of democracies[1]. In the posted link you can see we went from democracies representing between 5% and 10% of world governments to more than half. Don't tell me it just so happens to be that the world adopted the political system of the major super-power. You can also look at it another way, America will exert strong pressure for democracy and market-based economy but it may not succeed and sometimes practical considerations take precedence (like the fact that the nation was locked in an existential struggle with the Soviet superpower - which had no qualms in pushing their ideology on the non-aligned world)
I completely agree that the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
Since then, every year the Western democracies resemble more and more with the socialist countries they were criticizing so much 30 years ago, both in their economies dominated by monopolies and in the surveillance of their citizens and in the restrictions of the citizens' rights.
I don't believe a legitimate democracy can have any power greater than the individual. To extrapolate, "The government may do x." If you replace 'government' with an individual, that is the guideline. For example 'Jose may tax your income.' Obviously, Jose may not do that.
Until 1968, every new play in Britain required a licence from the Lord Chamberlain's Office before it could be publicly performed. There was no legislation attached to this, so the Lord Chamberlain could censor as he chose.
Can you imagine introducing such a rule today? How about applying for a license before launching a website?
It was the moral panic of the time.
In 1959 we got the Obscene Publications Act and that got used quite a bit during the Thatcher years with a new moral panic - video nasties. Video nasties weren't just Chainsaw Massacre stuff they also had a thing to say about society.
Police raided quaint little video shops and did their best to enforce the law, sometimes getting it wrong, well, often getting it wrong.
This only encouraged the market in 'Video Nasties' so in 1984 they brought in a new law to get this moral panic under control.
You could say that the law had been updated for the medium of the era - VHS cassettes - and that they could not be bothered with the stage any more.
However, the stage is a public place, you have people congregate in an audience and they could be a dangerous rabble. In 2000 we got the Terrorism Act and that followed on from the Criminal Justice Act that had came along earlier in the 1990's to make it illegal for more than four people to get together to listen to 'repetitive beats'.
There are plenty of laws regarding what you can and cannot say online and people have been prosecuted for saying not so nice things on Facebook. You might not have to apply for a licence to run a website but that is not so enforceable when you could put your website online in a country far, far away.
Actual censorship has got a lot more refined over the decades. As has propaganda. A lot has gone on over the last twenty years of widescale internet usage, however it will be a while before we find out what this is.
You don't have that, but in Germany and Austria you must include your full name and address in any website you publish, which creates sort of the same effect.
It's not a mature liberal democracy, maybe it was one time. It's just that power always tries to acquire more power and obviously any not __perfectly__ designed political system will always end up authoritarian and undemocratic.
(Personally, I'm happy to be an elitist, provided it's an open elite that anyone can join)
Or perhaps that was your point and I misinterpret your words.
The whole point of representative democracy is to put a firewall between the "the masses" and decision-making, while allowing them some influence.
Historically, party and other elites have also largely controlled who was in a position to become a representative in the first place, although that stops working when the elites become completely out-of-touch with the electorate (hence Trump).
We're so polarized that families are starting to hate each other based on their political views.
I think a successful government is one that ensures the highest level of education for the largest amount of people, spends $0 on international affairs until ALL domestic affairs (like poverty, healthcare, etc) are covered or at least miniscule as to affect less than 2% - unless a 'true' war is initiated i.e. we're physically attacked by a nation (not terrorists that are from a specific nation), and regime change 'just because' is not even a consideration.
I think a successful government would also give 0 kickbacks, deductions, and rewards to any specific business or industry (except perhaps food/farming as needed for weather/crop performance considerations as we all need to eat). Money and corporations should have 0 access to politicians.
The fact is if you look at a graph of politics over the past 100 years, and how often the people get policies enacted that are 'popular' vs how often the rich do it's basically a flatline for us, and a progressive diagonal for them.
Popularity has nothing to do w/ politics --until we get more 'popular' non-career politicians into D.C. BrandNewCongress is an interesting organization trying to do just that for both Republicans and Democrats. It's like if X-factor judges could be bought and some nazily person who can't sing at all wins instead of the popular vote. The show would be cancelled in a heartbeat. But that's how America is ran.
It's to lower the expected costs of power transfer from "catastrophic" to "routine".
Ballots, not bullets.
I feel sorry for the guy going down for the leaks.
A NewsCorp journalist was the first to be raided.
Surreal that needs to even be said.
I think that we are at a time where there is more public input, whistle-blowing, outcry over corruption, democratic processes, and so forth than ever before in history.
I daresay that we are also at an information age; a time in which we can identify authoritarianism, and argue and critise it from the comfort of our couches and for the larger part without fear of death.
We should not confuse the matter: to think that the sum of our current challenges imply the lesser to be the sum of historic challenges.
There was the US and everyone else was a non-democratic empire or a colony of the empire.
From what I understand, Australia, Canada, NZ, UK, and USA intelligence agencies can all spy on each others' citizens legally and share the information with each other. That's not the intent of the agreement, but allows a loophole where the countries can spy on their own citizens by proxy. Correct?
The text of the original agreement was released to the public recently but annoyingly you have to pay for it. This article[0] has an overview though;
> The two nations – linked by common bonds of history, culture and language – agreed not to collect intelligence against each other
Consider also the quote at the end of this article[1]:
> France wouldn't be welcome in the "Five Eyes" alliance in any case, a former top US official told SPIEGEL ONLINE: "Germany joining would be a possibility, but not France -- France itself spies on the US far too aggressively for that."
i.e. it is a prerequisite of joining the agreement that you stop any spying on other members' citizens.
Basically, if you are American, then only the FBI (or DEA or whatever) can intercept your phone calls, and they can only do this with a warrant from an American court, they may however, get this warrant based on intelligence supplied by ASIS, (in a way) at Australia's "request".
The main point is, Five Eyes is not a mechanism for those countries to side step their own internal legal requirements for surveillance - it is essentially the opposite.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/25/intelligence-d...
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/germany-impedes-...
US offers the UK information on its own citizens: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...
Pre-2007: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jun/10/nsa-offers-...
UK taps undersea cable to listen to US-UK communications (not sure whose laws/sovereignty are not being violated here): http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/uk-usa-security-bri...
Edit: On topic with the OP, though, Australia happily spies and divulges information on its own innocent citizens: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/revealed-austr...
It creates the perfect propaganda for enemies when you criticize what they do and it's hard to see it perpetuating anything but a race to the bottom.
The country's mining and minerals sector is heavily dependent on exports to China, while its real estate sector would wouldn't be nearly as rich as it is without foreign capital from Asia's 1%, many of whom are involved in political parties the Australian government routinely excoriates.
This has been the case for a long time; it's only now that it's all out in the open.
And because of this it seems like no party should ever be bothered to push for what's in the voters best interests on these topics. Instead it only makes sense for politicians to push for what is personally best for them in these cases.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is or even if I fully understand the problem but this appears fundamentally wrong to me.
We're basically waiting for the boomers to die off at this point, before being able to fix the shit they left behind.
Where does idea that all problems in modern society are the fault of the baby boomers come from? We are talking about a very diverse group of people, with very diverse sets of ideas, as are the generations after them.
As long as humanity exists, there will be other humans who can and will exploit their fears and insecurities to gain power and influence for themselves.
Don’t rely on the next generation to be any better. The brightest and best of the new generation are busy selling ads and creating total surveillance systems. I don’t see much improvement.
I am more and more convinced each day that the true stuggle of our order is that of freedom versus order, not any particular ideology.
Those who favor order inevitably feel it's reasonable to cut back on freedoms to increase order, and don't seem to be able to acknowledge that a truly free society cannot be risk free.
Everything else is pretty spot on, unfortunately.
[1] https://theconversation.com/social-media-and-defamation-law-...
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-s-defamation-laws-...
It's interesting that they felt the need to qualify this as Trump leading the _verbal_ charge. But there's quite a distance between insulting and prosecuting journalists.
Trump's worse sin in this area isn't throwing around charges of fake news, but advocating for lower standards of proof in slander and libel cases. Hopefully Congress will never send him such a bill to sign. In my opinion another such demerit comes from this administration's continuing of the last's pursuit of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.
What other suppression of journalism by this administration am I missing?
The Obama administration had some worse black marks in this area with his use of the Espionage Act to prosecute Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden.
I think Rand Paul would have been more pro free-speech on this issue, but who in the current crop of candidates could be relied upon to keep their mitts off the press?
"But even among its peers, Australia stands out.
No other developed democracy holds as tight to its
secrets, experts say"
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-01/asio-takes-custody-of...
In the states, we make that distinction.
If the same person stole and published I'd expect they could still be prosecuted.
But others resharing it, (eg if someone posted a pastebin and others shared) would not.
It took them years to suddenly care to hunt for these sources, so the whole situation is... Odd.
Some, perhaps, but it's clearly not universal. These guys [0] rank Australia equal to the UK, right between the ratings of the USA and Canada.
[0] http://data.worldjusticeproject.org/opengov/
(I'm not sure if it count as ironic that they don't support HTTPS.)
We'll sort these bastards out.. it'll just take time.
Watch "Secret City" ... it's fucking nuts!
See also: Pine Gap
Example: Look at New Zealand after the mass mosque shooting. People support the actions taking which include banning owning or reading the guy's manifesto. Owning it means up to 10 years in jail and/or up to $50,000 in fines.
They are not morally equivalent positions. Stop treating them that way.
I've personally read a few shooter manifestos, including "My Twisted World", and don't see why it's a big deal to do so. I found it to be a fascinating insight into a world of mental illness I would never have imagined.
You want to believe this is black and white, but its not. There is no more blurry line in existence.
Actively promoting murder? Eliminate free speech for that, threw em in jail. But what about promoting violence? Violent protests? What about rape, is that worthy of eliminating free speech? What if a high schooler is bullied and then commits suicide? What about microaggressions that make people feel uncomfortable and like they may be in danger? What about people born without advantages that change their chances of "success" from 60% to 10%? Are you actively promoting death and suffering by purposefully ignoring the homeless people you walk by?
To put it differently, how many people are actually championing individual rights for every issue?
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.
>People want authoritarian governments >we have different points of view or agendas
You say people want one thing, while contradicting that statement and saying people have different points of views and agendas - so we don't all want one thing? It could well be most or a few or some or a minority want authoritarianism; but the only constant I can see in governments throughout history and modern society is their inconsistency.
To say it is the natural way of things is, in my eyes, completely ignorant. If that were the case we wouldn't have seen numerous people's revolts throughout the entirety of human history [1]. Humans are adaptable, and we adapt our governance depending on the times. In times of war we might pick a dictator. In times of peace we might pick a democracy. In times of fear we often find ourselves in an autocracy. In times of religious ferverence we chose theocracy. Just as a human seems to be able to thrive on a number of diets, we thrive on a number of ways of group governance. I highly recommend to everyone to read "Pathways to Freedom: Political and Economic Lessons From Democratic Transitions." It's a bit text-booky, but there are some great case studies as to why various new governments have gone various different paths, and why democracy has blossomed in some places but failed in others, as has authoritarianism.
In the words of Alexandre Dumas Pere - "All generalizations are dangerous, even this one."
I my opinion the main reason we're seeing authoritarianism seemingly increase in popularity is because fear in the media has become so profitable. It distorts our perception of reality. We can be in a wealthy, 1st world society with all our basic needs met, however if we're told constantly in a barrage of information everyday that everything is going wrong - regardless of the fact that as the individual or group there could easily be almost nothing objectively going wrong in their life - they'll believe that they're on the brink of destruction and that the only way out is to adapt to an authoritarian government that will "sort everything out". The old phrase "what they don't know won't hurt them" comes to mind.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebell...
"You say both say people want one thing, while contradicting that statement and saying people have different points of views and agendas - so we don't all want one thing? It could well be most or a few or some or a minority want authoritarianism; but the only constant I can see in governments throughout history and modern society is their inconsistency." -- I never said everyone wanted one thing. My comment was that most people would prefer a more authoritarian government that agreed with their point of view or agenda.
>People do not want freedom and democracy, they want authoritarianism that favor their point of view or agenda
Those were your words, not-
>I never said everyone wanted one thing.
The way I read it, you made the implication that everyone - see "People" - don't really want freedom or democracy. Nowhere was "most people" or "some people" or some other semi-quantifiable variable used to convey your meaning. We can argue all day about what percentage of people want one form of governance over another, and don't get me wrong while I don't agree it's "most" I'd say a decent amount do prefer authoritarianism of their own taste over democracy, to say "people" out-right is what changes your argument from a discussion starter to hyperbolic ignorance.
But of course as a supporter one would not see it as such. Many people honestly don’t realize the authoritarian part until their interests no longer align and the regime targets them too.
It brings to mind jokes that people should nobody should ever listen to monarchists because that is what they want - their opinion on government to not matter.
People want a stable life to raise their family, they want stable work, stable housing and enough cash left over to enjoy life with family and friends. They will vote for whoever appeals to that and lately it seems to be only the authoritarian leaders that give a fuck.