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Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

The question is how we can keep our own countries from going down similar routes? With tech being what it is, it will become harder and harder to resist the state over time, so we will need better and better ways of keeping our houses in order so that things will not “decay,” to use a slightly classical term

With ai and surveillance / mass-manipulation tech, it will be extremely hard to come back from authoritarianism soon.

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The authoritarianism won't come from the government, it will come from the people around you.

It's honestly terrifying how fast the media whipped up the craziness a year or two ago. It makes me wonder how much harder they shilled to shame people into the military during wartime. I remember reading Céline's Journey to the End of the Night and getting disgusted at how the state and media managed to screw that many people into literal suicide. It reminded me of how the Aztecs normalized human sacrifice to the point where people actually wanted to be sacrificed. There's something inherently violent about mass society

The next time the people around me suddenly start insisting on the same idea and foaming at the mouth, I'm dropping everything and moving somewhere where mass psychosis isn't the norm

The only thing keeping our society from totalitarianism is a benevolent media that's decided it isn't time yet. If they fire on all cylinders again and for a long enough period it's entirely possible

> The authoritarianism won't come from the government, it will come from the people around you.

Exactly. If it wasn't for those cop shows, the government would be more critical of them. Media and pop culture seems to be the driver for any societal change. Even for Covid vaccine obligation the idea came from the media first (i'm not antivax or anything, i am also pro vaccinal obligation for public schools to be clear, i'm not even against mRNA vaccine, it is just that i understand that people can be shy to test brand new vaccines).

I am forever wary of any mass media privately owned.

Vaccine obligation is less of an issue for me than the actual social dynamic at play. What bothers me most is every TV channel, every news site, all of social media telling people to think the same thing, do the same thing, and attack anyone who disagrees like a bunch of white blood cells

Not only this, but the sort of sadistic, authoritarian tendency that this brings out in people. I can only imagine how much more extreme this is when a country is trying to send people off to war.

I don't think the problem is private ownership, I think it's herd mentality. For some reason whenever people get into groups they get way more aggressive. I remember reading Freud's little book on group dynamics and minus the Oedipal BS it rings entirely true to how people are

Just look at past historical examples, e.g. the Salem witch trials, slavery, the Holocaust, any genocide period. If people are capable of doing this, who's to say they won't do it again? We're just supposed to assume that today's society has moved passed all of this and give the status quo the benefit of the doubt? I'd rather not

No, the issue is mass media. Private ownership of mass media just allows moguls to dictate their ideology to the mass. Slavery and holocaust are very, very good example of what happens once this ideology is dictated.

Ya 100%, but it's been pretty interesting to see how many people now seem to share this sentiment and are trying to look out for it. The fact that I see these types of responses on Hacker News is a testament to that. I think part of all this non-sense legislation is the Governments response to its lack of control.

The toothpaste is out of the bottle for the media, unfortunately, and I'm not sure it's going back in.

We would need to limit the state in some way so that it would be unable to grow beyond a certain set of powers. The populace would also need to agree that such an arrangement was a preferable alternative to being subject to a state which attempts to control every aspect of life. Of course, in order for the populace to have a unified agreement to such a thing they would need a shared set of values and morals that transcend the idea that "might makes right". Essentially, we would need an agreed upon moral code that is superior to the state which could then be used to limit the state.

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