The most hideous ideologies are the ones we believe without realizing it
Hey! Here’s a thought! Do not yearn for the authoritarian school of social change! Do not force your ideas on anyone else! 💀
I love people, but a lot of them—maybe most?—yearn for their side to acquire absolute power. They seem to believe in the authoritarian school of social change: the only way to create a better world is for a strong central actor to force it on everybody else. They don’t think of this as tyranny, of course. They think of it as doing the right thing. And if a thing is right, well, duh, you should make people do it!
The most hideous ideologies are often the ones we believe without even realizing it. They feel like breathing air and eating food, so natural and necessary that the alternative never occurs to us. I think the authoritarian school of social change is one of those. (Hence why its acronym is ASS-C.) —Adam Mastroianni, Good Ideas Don’t Need Bayonets
- see also: we discount censorship when its motives are good, when a lil’ bitty censorship seems like doing the right thing (especially if it’s not labeled censorship)
- see also: all of us are embedded in our own safe “reality” — all of us have limits to our perception that we don’t even realize
- related: instead of changing the system authoritarian-style, think in ecosystems, not systems