Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthoiland | Hacker News Reader

>On the one hand, and for the most part, people have expressed an urge to restore certainty ... Politically speaking, citizens have looked to strong leaders for containment and control, a phenomenon some call the “authoritarian reflex.” And the uncertainty vacuum has been filled by conspiracy theories, war rhetoric, the denial of scientific facts, and an increase in surveillance measures.

Interesting take on the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

View on HN

Interesting take on the fact that there are basically no scientific facts for people who claim to support them.

A list of questions that should have been answered before any response was put in place.

What is the death rate per infection.

What is the asymptomatic rate in the general population.

What is the transmission rate for asymptomatic carriers.

A small army of less than 10k researchers sampling the whole population of the US at random would have been able to answer those questions in a week and we could have decided on an actual scientific response. Instead of whatever ideological response we get depending on who is in power at whatever level of the government.

It could be that letting the virus run wild as fast as possible is the best possible response. It could be that we need to take a note from China and weld people in their houses. We don't know, and no one wants to find out.

Anyone who says 'scientific facts' with a straight face when making a suggestion about the pandemic with the state of knowledge we have is at best clueless and at worst a charlatan and should be removed from whatever position they currently occupy.

I feel this is true of most things governments do.. ideological responses where we could just research the correct response.

Another segment of citizens is looking for predictable leadership, one that has a discernible, cohesive strategy in handling both domestic and foreign relations. To me, that sounds far more certain-- or there are two competing definitions of what 'certainty' is.

Liberal democracy is on a downward slope ever since the 2008 recession. Individual economic uncertainty in wide groups of society has been fueling anti-capitalist sentiment, while left liberalism was entirely fixated on sexuality/race/gender, without ever acknowledging deeper problems under the surface causing economic exclusion and divide.

Liberal democracy has been on a downward slope since reaching a high-point when communism collapsed in the early 1990s. There's no longer a need for countries with marginal commitments to the principle of democracy to keep up a democratic pretext in the interests of keeping communism at bay.

I've made that point before in a different way. Capitalism has achieved an ideological monopoly. There's no competition left from communism. It is not an accident that capitalism delivered the most for the average worker when there appeared to be an alternative way to run things. That's the period from about 1920 (the Russian Revolution) to 1980 (the USSR was still hanging on, but nobody believed in the promise of communism any more.)

China is interesting. It's theoretically communist, but in practice mostly capitalist now. It's authoritarian, but more by constant bureaucratic pressure than random hits by goon squads. There's central planning, and five-year plans that have real effect, yet most of the movers are private companies. Finance is tightly controlled; manufacturing less so. People move up in the government by starting in low-level jobs and getting promoted; there is not much movement between business and government. So far, results are reasonably good.

I would say that the decline was imminent following the collapse of communism, but I only started to notice a severe regression of civil liberties and liberal attitudes after the 9/11 terror attacks. I live in Germany, mind you. The changes have been even bigger in the US as it seems.

Even most of the current leftist ideas seem strangely authoritarian and dogmatic.

According to some historians, it is by design. I mean the left were perceived as a real danger, and were deliberately poisoned through academic types, to accept more and more the identity politics.

Not sure if they’re correlated though by timing? Authoritarianism has been increasing before Covid.

Authoritarianism is a reaction to the perceived failures of (classical) liberalism to address modern challenges.

Authoritarianism is a naked grab for power for personal gain.

It definitely is on the part of would-be tyrants, but a popular shift to it is due to perceived failures. There's a really cool quote from the (second book of?) the Three Body Problem, which goes something like "alone in the emptiness of space, fascism becomes everyone's first resort".

Note that I do not think we were doing that badly before Trump and other authoritarians. It's just that a lot of people perceived the world was getting dangerous for them (probably because it became more inclusive, and also because they watch Fox news).

Can certainly be both.

> Authoritarianism is a reaction to the perceived failures of (classical) liberalism to address modern challenges.

Or authoritarianism is a reaction to the perceived failures of (classical) liberalism to counter modern realities that are perceived as challenges because it suits would-be authoritarians to present them that way.

If you're on the left, I'm talking about immigration, and if you're on the right, I'm talking about climate change...

Liberalism can’t fail on its own - it can only be taken advantage of via subterfuge. Mainstream politicization of critical theory has deceived liberalism by using its freedoms but not respecting its counter-freedoms. Authoritarianism is the reaction to this abuse.

And really if by critical theory’s definitions that everything is relativist then what’s the problem?

Nah, it’s a reaction to critical theory / PC convention dominating the culture. This philosophy of everything is socially constructed and nothing is objectively true has fueled a reaction that at least feels like our feet are on solid ground. This has nothing to do with classical liberalism.

Classical liberalism can under attack from critical theory over the last 40 years and has manifested in mainstream adoption of this type of thinking. This betrayal and dismissal of classical liberalism has forced the right into authoritarianism as the norms of liberal democracy have been dismantled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com