Comment by mikestorrent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestorrent | Hacker News Reader

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It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully.

In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.

The current term seems to be “guided democracy” (formerly “managed democracy”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy

Although I’d argue it is often just as much a failed technocracy.

It has more terms as well: neoliberal encasement, depoliticization or post-politics, it's designing a system in such a way as to protect private property, international trade and other economic orthodoxy from democratic influence. That is an incredibly potent theory to understand the EU by. Lots of work in academia on the subject as well, for instance:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129546

https://lpeproject.org/blog/neoliberal-encasement-infrastruc...

> In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people.

This is pretty much the exact argument that Hayek makes - socialism leads to fascism through political gridlock.

Did you mean to say liberalism?

The right actually believes the EU and the German government for example have a far-left ideology it's very common, I even once heard someone say they thought the World Economic Forum is communist. The right captures these resentments towards neoliberal corruption and undemocratic decision making and straight up funnel that energy towards anti-immigration, anti-woke and notably pro-russian politics.

It's not, not everything need to be a single word, because the world is full of nuances.

Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely.

Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again.

We are crying wolf, and we'll pay the price.

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