No I’m not catastrophising.
The world is slowly lurching towards a fully fascist led America, India, Hungary, Russia, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Argentina.
Instead people are either ignorant or blaming “wokeism”* for their problems.
I have no clue what to do and this is literally a car crash in slow motion.
I’m despondent because I’m going to be crushed under the boot when the time comes and my morals get in the way of my survival instinct.
Humans are repeating the mistakes of the past. It’s just so anxiety inducing.
*Woke is a useless term promulgated by fascists to dog whistle the things they really want to hate - feminism, socialism, LGBTQIA+, immigration, brown/black people, equality and diversity.
If only this was that simple. A "Democratic country" doesn't just wake up one day vote for a bad guy and become fascist. This has been happening all over the world for last few decades. All the past politician created few policies out of fear, out of ignorance, out of greed, and out of malice that edged us towards this. And now most of the people have accepted this blatant abuse of our freedom, our privacy, our democracy as just part of life. There is nothing that anyone can do to stop this. Because we don't bother reading EULA because we don't demand the companies the governments to do better we just sign away our rights our freedom because we have better things to do.
Why do you think this is? What are the root causes?
Fear. It's that simple. An authoritarian mindset is one predicated on fear. After 9/11, Dick Cheney and George H. W. Bush used fear to drive their policies of restrictive freedoms. They pushed these through so they could amass additional powers and push government money towards their friends. Once these freedoms are gone, they almost never come back. The Republican party has been running on a campaign of fear ever since. Quite honestly, they've used fear as their driving force since the '80s. Back then it was fear of the Communists, and then it was fear of 'big government" and then it was fear of immigrants, or "the gays", or restrictions of the second amendment, or caravans of people coming up from South America. Fear is the only thing that they can run on since they have no actual plans to move our country forward.
But why? What's the actual, underlying, root cause? Fear doesn't appear out of nowhere.
Why do it? Money and power.
So we can track that back and see that the real reason is the system that motivates and allows for accumulation of wealth and power, not necessarily fear alone.
Having power over others is certainly not system-unique.
Not unique, certainly, but having a system built on it doesn't seem to be a good idea.
Stop edging yourself, you want to say capitalism is the problem so bad.
It is, I thought that was obvious.
I think Capitalism is also just part of the problem. China and north Korea are somewhat to not at all capitalistic but still none of the citizens who live there have any freedom.
I don't know what causes countries and their citizens who fought and sacrificed their lives for freedom to give it all up.
I don't know how we can fix this.
It's human insecurity (read: fear).
And maybe greed, too
It is. It was just funny how you were edging yourself with it.
Human stupidity and malice – they're an infinite resource that just keeps on taking. We've gotten this far despite ourselves, not because