Friday, November 13, 2020

Overboard? People's bans on politicians

 A decent number of people are in favour of lockdowns. As I've mentioned before, there is definitely a small bias in human nature that makes moves toward castes and caste based authoritarianism more adaptive than not. It's the evolutionary selection arrow for larger polities.


Democracy curtails this trend in interesting ways. It puts the majority of the people in charge of leadership decisions.  In most cases this still results in a creep toward European style state paternalism. But, in the US, it resulted in a resistance to big state power.


Covid emergency powers (which never seem to be going away) supplant constitutional rights for individual liberty. If you want to lock someone down because they are sick - fine. But if you want to pre-emptively lock them down because you're looking at things at a population level, not individual level, then not-fine.


So I look at this tiny signal with a bit more interest than normal.



We know that facebook-twitter-google ban people for their identity and political/social views. We know gofund-me and monitary service providers ban people for wrongthink too (at least wrongthinkg that energizes a mob based upon journalistic threats like "please comment on your support for X's white supremacy views). We know that BLM and political machines try to ban people for wrongthink.  That's why it's interesting to see the populace thinking about doing the same thing.


Remember, during the American revolution, loyalists and patriots were banned from commerce and public social venues based upon their identity.  I suspect this is a fairly good way for the populace to let politicians know when they've crossed a line.

But, It will of course result in the hardening of political-identity groups. That seems to be the natural trajectory of things now. Something as historically simple as a minor plague may reveal more about tribalization and weak empire splits than we could have ever imagined.

No comments:

Post a Comment