Also, many people are more idealistic in their youth - before they have families, careers etc and before putting food on the table becomes a bigger priority. That is why it is easier to protest as a college student, than as a 40 year old with a mortgage and two kids. But that is also getting harder these days - student loans, getting a record etc
And above all else, it is easier to numb ourselves these days than ever before with internet, video games, porn, TV, ebooks ("mental porn") etc. Why go out and do something (like protest) and put ourselves at risk, when we can watch Netflix comfortably at home? We are quickly becoming a species that values convenience over everything else, including privacy and civil rights :(
Edit: There is another thing - most people genuinely believe that bad things won't happen to them, as they haven't done anything wrong. While that is cute, we know it is not true but most of us have trouble accepting it
Sure, we understand why people are going along with it quite well at this point, but who and what are behind the push to remove civil liberties is the more interesting component to this issue in my mind.
If anyone has any resource on this topic, please post - this (and environment) might very well be the most important issues of our time.
There's no master plan, if that's what you're getting at. I think this general drift is the result of a few different things, most of which are older than we'd like to admit:
• A lot of people like authoritarianism • People blame government by default for any problem that doesn't have any more obvious perpetrator (see point 1) • The massive mismatch in military strength between western powers and elsewhere that results in oppression of weaker nations and resultant terrorism
In case you doubt the appeal of authoritarianism just go look at the popularity of Stalin in Russia, or the readership of the Daily Mail in the UK, or the overwhelming political support for the NSA / the PATRIOT Act. Lots and lots of people want to live in a highly authoritarian society and it's worth reflecting on why that is, and whether those people have valid reasons.
I was recently in a former communist country, and took a tour of one of the cities. The tour guide mentioned that a lot of older people weren't so sure that democracy/capitalism is better than communism. Sure, in the communist era people got executed for merely making rude comments or jokes about political leaders, but at least there was working social security, pensions, everyone had a job etc. Whereas post-USSR, often life got harder and the old certainties dissolved.
Authoritarianism is popular because it presents people with a simple deal: support the regime no matter how shitty it gets and in return the government will take care of you - and as long as they have absolute power, if something bad happens to you then it's the government's fault. That government tends to have simple, easily understood solutions for things that appeal to people's animal instincts, like picking someone to blame for something and then executing them. Additionally you will get a comforting story about how by simply being born in this society you are one of the good guys, as opposed to "them" who are the bad guys. All you have to do is not have strong opinions, not be weird, or gay, or a Jew, and fit in with whatever other random biases the leaders have and life will be, if not good, then at least straightforward. And how hard is that, really? Almost by definition most people find it easy to meet that criteria, because they're in the majority.
Contrast with the civil libertarian utopia: if something bad happens to you, it's probably your own fault. You have nobody to blame but yourself. It's not clear what you're supposed to do or how to be a success in life. The government is small and generally refuses blame for things, even if the population is under attack. There is no black/white good vs evil story to hold on to. All around you are people who aren't like you, who don't think like you.
That's just my guess. I would really like to read a well thought out book on the appeal of authoritarianism. I feel like it's an underexplored topic (at least in the modern era).
This is a really salient point and one that comes off as heresy to the standard conspiracy-esque narrative. The reality is that to some extent our slide into authoritarianism is democratic.
Look at the "Arab Spring" -- they got a little democracy and mostly elected totalitarian theocrats. In that case many people want totalitarian enforcement of social norms.
Another place you can see a strong preference for authoritarianism is at a local community level. Many people prefer communities with strong zoning regulations, regulations on the appearance of buildings, and (often indirect) mechanisms for excluding 'undesirable' residents. Without those things you get sprawling, ugly, and sometimes crime-ridden places that just don't feel safe and are not aesthetically appealing.
Yet another is the clear preference many people have for authoritarian computing platforms like iOS. It's the most restricted platform in the history of computing, yet it offers superior user experience and a lack of malware precisely for that reason. The fact is that there's classes of problems that can be easily and simply solved by authoritarianism that are not easily addressed in a freer society.
It's almost like you need a strong constitution with heavy restrictions on what the government can do in order for democracy to not devolve into autocracy.
People are unwilling to oppose government control, and when they are they get crushed by outside forces. People in American continue to work for the government, it's even considered prestigious.
We can't even prosecute torture. People who believe in the government are dangerous idiots.
That might be true, but that's still my point-- it is to some extent democratic. If more people were genuinely and strongly opposed to torture, we'd be getting somewhere prosecuting it. I'd say a majority are weakly opposed and a minority are strongly opposed. If a majority or super-majority were strongly opposed something would be happening.
(Being weakly opposed is basically meaningless.)
In some ways all societies are democracies. A totalitarian society is where the majority either supports the totalitarian regime or at least doesn't dislike it enough to invest the energy and risk required to rebel against it. There's a minimum threshold of support that any regime must have in order to maintain control. At the very least you must have sufficient support among a society's wealthy and powerful (money), those who wield weapons (military and police), and those who control key infrastructure (operations). If those sectors of support fail, kings get deposed.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this as pro-authoritarian thinking is so foreign to me.
I'm sorry, but this is a delusion on the part of many people on the left - the idea that people act against their interests because they just don't understand, and if only they could be brought to see the truth, they'd vote/protest/whatever. The reality is that many people understand the left position just fine, they just don't agree with it. There is a large contingent of people (maybe 30% in the US; hard to gauge in other countries, but you have surely noticed the rise o reactionary political parties in many countries in recent years) who are entirely comfortable with the proposition that people of other races and social classes are inferior and should be institutionally discriminated against, who do not believe in the rehabilitation of criminals, who think pillage is a superior policy to stewardship, and who generally have a completely zero-sum outlook on life.
In some cases they simply believe the strong are entitled to subjugate the weak, and that if we run out of resources in home countries that sooner or later (their notion of) common sense will prevail and the world will return to a colonial model with the strong nations just taking over the territories of weaker ones and putting the people there back in their place. In some cases, they're religiously motivated, believing that the world was ordered a certain way by their God and that they should thus be in charge of things, and/or they consider the world itself a transient distraction from some greater spiritual truth, so any signs of long-term unsustainability are treated as validation of apocalyptic views. This is why very conservative Christians in the US are intensely interested in the Middle East, for example; for them it's not just another geopolitical theater with a complex strategic and resource calculus, but the site of Armaggeddon, the final battle between good and evil.
For example, the rise of the 'Islamic State' over the last year was greeted with considerable enthusiasm in US conservative circles - not approval, but very enthusiastic disapproval - because it seemed like the emergence of a clear ideological opponent who fits in neatly with western eschatology, and the extremist positions of the Islamic State itself evidence a similarly ideological consciousness.
Unfortunately many people feel like these are things that they must do. People who lead interesting and fulfilling lives without "settling down" are just to gawk at on TV and wonder what it must be like. Pursuit of the typical "American dream" causes people to neuter themselves in order to fit in.
Sure, some people don't care and are blissfully caught up in a manufactured world of consumerism, but that does not generalise to the rest of the population.
So .. no .. I'm no paid shill, mate - I truly think that Australia is a dystopian nightmare society, caught in a trance of consumption and lifestyle, and which I find less and less appealing as I get older. I'd love to see Australians care more about their rights - maybe you can enlighten me as to where and when that is happening? All I see is loss of interest, and a desire to simply keep calm and carry on, while it all gets eroded towards the feudal master-plan: Sell the resources, keep the change, and don't .. at any cost .. acknowledge the failure of modern Australian civilization to address the wrongs enacted on the natives, newcomers, and boat people.
All I see is a bitter person spreading FUD because you don't approve of how other people live their lives.
But, staying on the subject .. please, enlighten me: how are the Australian people not losing their rights due to their own ignorance? So far, all I see is disinterest in the subject. Total surveillance: this is okay with you?
Did they react this way during the Troubles? I don't think they did. I was in London in '92 and there was a bomb threat called in at the tube station one stop over. It delayed the train for a bit, but that was it and everyone continued on like normal.
This time the US freaks out because the world came to their doorstep and they flip out because they have no idea how to handle it. The leaders flip out causes the population to freak out and they trun around and grant legal weight to every stupid idea that comes flying out of polititians mouths.
It seems the UK learned from this, so when there is a little bomb plot in London, the leaders go full retard, the people get scared and do the same thing.
It's like everyone figured out the best way to get more power is to act like you've been caught with your pants down so that you're the one who scared the population, not whatever actually happened. After everyone has finished running around like a chicken with it's head cut off and the dust settles, the government finds itself with all these extra powers.
During the Troubles, the UK had its fair share of "freaking out", banning public bins (only recently re-introduced), criminalizing the Irish community, and basically allowing police and military to do whatever they wanted in Northern Ireland (with lots of abuses being recognised and pursued only today). A famous Irish comedian joked a few years ago that he loved all Muslims, because they've now replaced the Irish as standard bogeymen ("... and now us Irish are just those funny people from Riverdance!").
They were banned in train stations and other similar areas, for the fairly sensible reason that they'd been used to hide bombs in those locations in the past.
Mainland UK was left largely alone, although the news was subject to bizarre censorship (Gerry Adams having to speak through a proxy, for example) and they took all the bins out of railway stations.
Northern Ireland was subject to military occupation, with overt armed checkpoints, occasionally military firing on civilians (although not with the same level of impunity as US police), secret police and informants running around, and widespread street violence.
We had certain other reactions that were themselves troubling. Such as this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%9394_British_broadc...
On a personal level, that meant if you were Irish you had to expect your passport to be checked very rigorously, expect different treatment from police, and endure a fair degree of social static; back in 1992, for example, people might exhibit a stiff upper lip when it was announced that the tube was delayed, but when I would meet them at work later I'd know there had been a bomb scare because I'd hear a crack about whether I had a bomb in my briefcase or somesuch. furthermore, Irish terrorism was different in a few ways. First, in Northern Ireland it was counterbalanced by unionist terrorism against the Catholic/Irish republican minority, so a lot of the terrorism you'd hear about there was of the tit-for-tat tactical variety. In London, the IRA called in far more bomb threats than it detonated bombs, and it generally avoided bombing civilians but struck political and military targets - with a disproportionate level of effectiveness, which is one reason that London is awash in CCTV cameras. IRA terrorists killed a lot of senior people in the British establishment, from government minister to members of the royal family. They launched very few attacks on civilians on the mainland, and virtually all attacks on the mainland were carried out in London, the seat of government, or at places where high-value targets happened to be. Most of the country never saw a bomb threat because it was too far from any sort of political/military target. The IRA understood asymmetrical warfare extremely well and had no desire to provoke a wave of popular resistance or anger of the kind that comes from indiscriminate civilian bombing.
Saying the UK had this sort of thing all figured out and then US reaction to 9/11 caused them to turn dictator is just hopelessly un-anchored from reality and at odds with the long historical context. I see why it seems that way to you, but I assure you that things were/are quite a bit more complex than that.
Well, except for the one that devastated central Manchester (which was called in, and backfired spectacularly, but was still extremely significant).
This is the real mystery. I can't count the number of times I've had conversations with smart people that just don't seem to care. After the PATRIOT ACT was passed I was livid and knew it would be used for non-terrorism things. As we know now, it's mostly used for non-terrorism. People would look at me like I had some tin foil on my head. It couldn't even get people to talk about it. (Lest readers think I'm sort of conversational pariah, I don't recall any other subject that causes this effect.)
Very nice straw man. I didn't mention FB. And these were conversations in person.
But participation in the farce of modern democracy is exactly what you're intended to do. You somehow feel like your talking or voting matters. It doesn't.
I'm no different, of course. Our lives are too comfortable. There is only one form of political action that ever works to depose despots, and it's a form that's not worth interrupting our comfortable lives to engage in.
At the end of the day, you need to either take real action, or accept that you're too comfortable with your affluent life to risk losing your comforts, and enjoy these comforts without complaint. You've chosen this path, as have I, as have we all.
Life is too good to meaningfully rock the boat.
A lot of issues are met with the mindset of "It would never happen to me". Terrorists blowing something up make the front pages, so people think it might happen to them (even though the odds of it are tiny). Slow erosions of civil liberties usually do not make the front pages, so people don't pay much attention and assume that only bad people are going to be arrested, denied due process, shot, or otherwise the victim of a resulting injustice.
A lot of issues related to freedoms and civil rights also take second place to much more immediate practical concerns, particularly in an economic downturn, like whether your kid has a good school to go to, or whether your parent gets looked after properly at hospital. The old "It's the economy, stupid" line is as true in politics today as it ever was.
To be fair, it is also true in the West today that just as the risk of being a victim of terrorism is low, so the risk of being a victim of government abuse or incompetence in applying these anti-terrorism measures is also low. A rational and objective citizen looking at the practical reality right now might consider that neither issue is that significant and there really are much more important things to worry about.
The strongest arguments for promoting civil liberties and reducing government powers are generally those of equality (just because something bad is unlikely to happen to you, it doesn't mean it's unlikely to happen to someone equally innocent but in a less fortunate position) and long term risk (just because today's governments and security services and police forces don't routinely abuse these capabilities and legal powers on a wide scale, that does not mean tomorrow's won't, and history shows that the risk of such abuse is real and the consequences can be catastrophic).
What is an interesting and useful game is to imagine a scenario which would trigger massive public outrage over the use of mass surveillance. What would really drive the point home that this is a truly dangerous amount of power? To be honest, I don't think a single major mistake with a citizen would do it (e.g. killing someone based on mass surveillance). Too many apologists would make the case that this is cherry picking and that it's just an exceptional case. A pattern of mistakes would perhaps be better (putting thousands of people on the no fly list for no reason), but these kinds of stories tend to be too cerebral for the general public to focus on (although people like Colbert and John Oliver are really good at solving that problem!)
I think the only thing that might do it would be a Watergate style scandal where one group of powerful people use the machinery to mess with another group of powerful people. Consider how much more seriously Feinstein took the CIA when it became clear they were spying on her and her staff during the torture investigations. Or Angela Merkel's reaction to her cell phone being tapped. So, unfortunately have to wait for the machinery to be wielded against the powerful because it's (clearly) easy to get away with wielding it against the rest of us.
If the abuses of Hoover's FBI weren't enough to make the American people (and especially their Congressional representatives) say "Never again," nothing will. I'm sure Australians can point to similar abuses of government power that are not considered a problem going forward, because, hey, we're all progressives here, right?
People are funny. We won't build nuke plants on the grounds that there is a small but finite chance of something going wrong and killing a lot of people, but we'll cheerfully let our politicians put the mechanisms of 1984 into place for our "safety." And we don't even get electricity in return.
Oh come on - how many people did Hoover kill? There isn't even a number. Not because he was a great guy, but because the abuses of government power that have taken place in the US are quite mild in historical terms, when compared to the excesses of colonialism and various dictatorial regimes around the world.
Because a lot of people are assholes, thinking they'll be better off by keeping people of whom they disapprove in an inferior position. I apologize for stating my views so crudely, but I think it's politically naive to assume that other people don't care because they don't understand or haven't thought through the long-term consequences. In many cases, they understand just fine,; they don't care because they are selfish and want others to be forced into compliance with their views by the power of the state.
Citizens do care - this is a sentiment I hear a lot from a lot of people.
The politicians are sometimes nearsighted but are also more often than we think imbued with some sense of long term tradeoff.
I've left Australia. I don't really plan to go back. Most of my friends are doing the same.