[efficientsticks]

I agree that things should be considered ultimately as political (even judicial if needed).

But it’s not a given - Black Mirror describes worlds in which that reality does not win a survival-of-the-fittest competition against harsher technological regimes. It seems every time we describe these dystopias they become true, which for me is a reflection that it’s easier to destroy than to create, absent a learned culture.

[simonh]

I’m not so pessimistic, all this means is that freedoms must be actively fought for and maintained. That they cannot be taken for granted. However we have many times fought against supposedly more efficient autocratic systems and won. Napoleonic imperialism, and that of the great Central European powers of WW2, Fascism, Stalinism, South American military dictatorships. We’ve beaten them all. A successor to Maoism is still in power in China, but Mao would have been horrified by the reforms under Deng. We’ll see how Xi’s reversion works out.

I know there’s a strong current of left sentiment here that thinks billionaires are somehow taking everything for themselves, but the fact is the freedom of movement and association that enabled globalisation has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty. Those billionaires employ millions of people. I’d rather they ran these companies than government functionaries. For the first time more than half of humanity now live comfortable middle class lives. Progress in my lifetime has been breathtaking, and it’s been so fast a lot of people’s ideological assumptions about how the world is and works have been left far behind.

There’s still a lot more to do of course, 10% of people in severe poverty is still far too many. China under Xi shows how a technologically competent authoritarianism can achieve a stable steady state that will be very hard to break down. We must do it though, the future of humanity depends on it. If such a regime was to gain broad sway over humanity there’s a real possibility Orwell’s vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever could come to be. I don’t think it’s inevitable though. The fact is free and open societies are actually far more efficient and productive.

[efficientsticks]

Thanks for this great reply.

Ironic thing though - that 10% most severe poverty mostly lies on the African continent, exactly the place which could stand to benefit the most from China’s intervening, and of course before that it was Chinese people who were in great poverty.

Now I’m as aghast at the militant astro-turfing by that country on these forums as anyone else (and much worse inside), but there I’m not so pessimistic, perhaps seeing their own positive change effected on an outside group can cause some kind of re-evaluation for the culture.