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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.
The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.
Both were fine, if not justified (the latter as the narrower question).
In general, people overestimate the risk of tyranny and underestimate the risk of anarchy.
How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred. You certainly wouldn’t want to be a dissident in Iran or China, but the vast majority of the population is not really ‘enslaved by the state’ (or ‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’) the way that people are in a true tyranny.
Even across the 20th century, true tyranny was rare. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB were capable of it, for example, nor was any CCP domestic intelligence agency, certainly until very recently. In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
By contrast, how many ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them? Many, many more. Half of the Sahel, Haiti and a large chunk of Central America, Papua New Guinea, big parts of Somalia and Northern Kenya, large parts of Nigeria and Niger, parts of Syria etc.
We should be much more concerned about anarchy than tyranny.
Romania and Albania were definitely worse (Albania was never major by anyone's standards for sure, but the GDR was also not somehow more major than Romania). Anyway, since you brought up the issue of state capacity, I'd point out that since member states of the Soviet bloc were modeled alike, so their state security agencies had roughly the same capacity as well; it's that some of those regimes enforced a less rigid system of conformity than the others that made a difference.
The central government, sure. On the other hand, they are also characterized by vigilantism, militia building and the emergence of organic local power structures.
On a different note, I'm not sure what exactly your argument is - is it that more people suffer from tyranny than from anarchy in absolute numbers, or that anarchy is overall a bigger threat to individual human flourishing, or both?
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Chechnya. Turkmenistan. China is more than capable of doing this in conquered territories, although you're correct they do not do this in Shanghai.
Chechnya isn't a state in the everyday sense of the word.
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Corrupt shitholes are actually tyranny too. If you do something with even the slightest economic value they will be all over you like a swarm of locusts.
There might be less total state capacity than north korea, but there will be more directed at you specifically than north korea spends on the average peon.
Sure, but as anyone who has peered at the relative tax burdens of women and ethnic minorities in the US will know, people who produce economic value are a tiny, tiny segment of the population. Regimes that persecute a small number of people a lot > regimes that persecute a large number of people a little?
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Your point of view is consistently that of a wealthy, entitled person who sees the police as her personal gendarmarie whose job it is to keep the riff-raff from inconveniencing her life in any way. From that point of view, yes, anarchy is a much greater threat than tyranny, because tyranny will mostly leave you alone, while anarchy threatens you. Not to get all "woke" (har) but this is exactly why "privilege" dialog took root. There was originally a legitimate point to it. You consider the lower classes to be undesirables to be kept away from you, and the only thing you fear is revolting peasants. So nearly any level of state crackdown is acceptable to you because only at North Korean levels would it actually threaten your lifestyle. Whereas those beneath you understand what tyranny will do to them.
From a Conflict Theory perspective, there is no reason you should care about this, or people who are not you, as long as your side maintains the levers of power. But "Let them eat
cakeboot" does have the potential to redound on you. Traditionally, rich people had some concern about oppression either out of genuine (liberal) conviction or self-preservation.I identify with 2rafa's POV. While I think what you're saying is true at the extremes, how does it apply to the US? The Jan 6th rioters appeared to me to be hallucinating a tyranny as much as the people opposing ICE's lawful deportations are now. I disagree with portraying me as a friend of the warlord because the warlord is about one guy's vibe about what's right and using his club, whereas rule of law is much more legitimate than that.
The anarchy here comes from people who are otherwise materially well-off and essentially free being made mentally unwell. While the state's rule of law corresponds to at least some attachment to reality: judges ultimately field test what lawmakers and the executive enact against the constitution and reality. Yes some judges are unhinged culture warriors but I think it's fair to say 1/3rd to a half still care about reality. And we are not yet at the point where judges are being assassinated for handing down judgments that powers don't want to see. Wake me up when that's happening, I guess.
EDIT: I asked SlopGPT for examples of states with solid democracy and rule of law that still underwent rebellion and it cited the UK w.r.t. The Troubles, Spain post-Franco w.r.t. ETA, and Canada w.r.t. Quebec separatism. Surprising. So I suppose I have some reading to do.
EDIT2: although these time periods coincide with global trends in relaxed policing. Pinker's view would be that lax policing encourages disorder instead of cooperation by changing the payoffs
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I don't agree with the general argument you're making. In first-world countries, wealthy people generally have less to fear from increasing steps towards disorder than poorer people, as they can afford things like private security and to live in areas with non-violent and conscientious neighbors. It's poorer people who live next to violent crackheads who have more to lose when the local mayor decides to enct policies that make it impossible to lock up the person who just break into your house because of racism or whatever. This is also reflected in revealed preferences: it's almost always richer people who vote for soft-on-crime, restorative-justice (read: anarchic) policies and candidates while poorer, less educated voters choose candidates with a much more hardline attitude towards criminals.
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While you're not incorrect, for the low-level peasant the roving gangs are more dangerous. Big Warlord in the distant city can send his tax collectors round to seize your crops or pressgang your sons, but that's only every so often, like a bad harvest or a plague. It's part of life that bad things happen.
Unrelated gangs of thieves and small local chieftains who sweep through on an unpredictable schedule, and may happen several times in a row, are much more dangerous since they have no interest in leaving you anything until the next time. This is why people may and do prefer the Strongman who cracks down on the roving bands and then levies his tithes. It's why people could be nostalgic for Stalin or the hey-day of the USSR etc.
I'm not in any way endorsing anarchy. On the oppression-anarchy spectrum I'd be closer to @2rafa's POV than the typical DSA or antifa or what-have-you activist (and they would consider me as fascist as her). I agree that at a certain level of anarchy, it's better to have a brutal warlord who at least keeps the bandits at bay than a hellscape of marauding gangs.
That said, tyranny is bad too, and the Warlord's friends telling me life is better under the Warlord's absolute rule is not going to be very convincing.
Tyranny is bad, but the argument of my comment was to suggest that - right now - the long term political consequences of mass immigration (a lower trust, poorer, more violent, more unequal and more corrupt country) outweigh the risks that this almost certainly accidental death is a sure sign of descent into tyranny. I also just replied to wandererinthewilderness in this same thread, apologies for not tagging you.
I apologize for going in on you so hard. Against my initial, wiser judgment, I have found myself invested in this ridiculous case, and the more I am assailed by what I perceive to be low-effort culture warring bombs thrown by rightists and leftists alike (I genuinely do consider both sides at this point-at least at the edges of the argument-to be bad faith, dishonest, and actively destructive to this country), the more disgusted I am. For some reason that manifested in my response to your post, which I really did perceive to be kind of dismissive of the brutality of the police and the state wielded against its "enemies." While I do think you are frequently oblivious (or at least, indifferent) to people outside your social class, it was unfair of me to accuse you of being pro-tyranny.
If it's any consolation, you've had the best takes on it of anyone on this site by far
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You know how sometimes you learn a new word or concept and you start to see it regularly?
I recently learned the word "bulverism" :)
Pointing out that "What's so bad about tyranny?" is coming from someone who will benefit from tyranny is not bulverism.
Except that isn’t what the other poster did. The poster said we are so worried about tyranny that we don’t worry about anarchy enough and anarchy is worse than tyranny.
That is not what you ascribed to the other poster.
This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.
Why does he discount the rather obvious examples of Pinochet and Franco, for example? Genuine question, as I'm not familiar with his work in detail.
Fair point but Spanish and not Anglo world.
Interestingly people like Pinochet don’t command near the cultural respect as say Fidel despite Pinochet leaving Chile a lot better off compared to Fidel in Cuba.
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Right. Seemed a non-sequitur to go from that post to "guess you're cool with police tyranny." To steelman Amadan, that is exactly what you'd do if you're intelligent about politics and sensitive to the implications of its arguments. To strawman, it's a hysterically paranoid progressive reflex.
I like that Peterson point. I sometimes feel my niche or role in the conversational eco-system is to provide antibodies for the left, as the right is already vigilantly watched (in this sense, being correct in absolute sense is less important than providing some balance). I think Matt Taibbi made a similar point about why he's journalistically more fixated on areas of rule not under Republican control.
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Looks like a textbook case to me. Wikipedia:
Bulverism is only bulverism if it side-steps the speaker's argument entirely. Arguing that the speaker's motives caused them to make a reasoning error at a particular step in the chain is not bulverism. As I understood it, @2rafa argued that "so-called 'tyranny' short of North Korea isn't worthy of the name, because in practice it's very easy for ordinary people to live with unless they actively go out of their way to antagonize the regime"; and @Amadan retorted "no, in fact you are over-generalizing from the experience of a privileged few; living under USSR-style tyranny is very disruptive to actual ordinary people's everyday lives even if they keep their heads down, it's only the upper-middle-class who might get by alright if they're apolitical enough".
Would you mind taking the post I was responding to and quoting the part which is NOT an attack on the previous poster's motivations? TIA.
I will grant you that this post, taken out of context, was very easy to interpret as straight bulverism. It's Amadan's original, longer reply to 2rafa which I believe can be more charitably interpreted as a more valid argument.
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All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.
In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.
This is true; but then one might argue that the ability to pursue terrible ideologically-driven policies absolutely unconstrained is a key danger of tyranny, not something else that various tyrannies happened to do by coincidence.
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This doesn't seem like a germane definition of "tyranny". We get the word from the Ancient Greeks, while your definition would imply that it was more or less impossible for a pre-modern state to be a real tyranny, for lack of adequate surveillance technology. There is a reason that "surveillance state", "totalitarianism" and "tyranny" are all different words, and just because a triple-whammy is appreciably worse than each in isolation, doesn't mean I want to live in a "pure" tyranny (or for that matter a "pure" surveillance state).
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The failure state of tyranny has the potential to be much more deadly. The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
Even in Somalia it's not clear that the anarchy of the present is any worse than the tyranny of Siad Barre.
And of course, to bang my usual drum, lockdowns were tyranny, so that made the number of tyrannical states be at least 100 just a handful of years ago.
I don't what method you used to arrive at this figure but I'd mention that according to the Pol Pot biography by Philip Short, about 3/4 of all excess deaths in Cambodia attributed to the Khmer Rogue were due to malnutrition and disease, in turn caused by government negligence and incompetence, plus the wholesale collapse of state capacity after five years of brutal civil war during the US-aligned military dictatorship.
With regard to Somalia I won't disagree with your point outright but would mention that the repression during the last years of Barre's rule was pretty damn bad by anyone's standards: the wholesale slaughter of "treasonous" clans, indiscriminate aerial bombing, mass rapes, the destruction of water reservoirs and livestock.
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I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?
The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.
Taking GDP per capita as a rough proxy, NK is considerably worse than Haiti.
This just goes to show how bad GDP is as a measure. There is no way this is correct.
I don't think this is a problem with GDP as a measure, but a problem with measuring North Korea's GDP. Kim's regime doesn't exactly put out accurate economic reports.
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I'm not a political science expert, but I tend to agree with this. Another factor to consider is that tyrants are always tempted to start wars with other countries as a of holding on to power.
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While I sympathise with your broader point, I don’t think that you’re making the argument well. People are afraid of living with the equivalent of the Gestapo or the KGB, so saying that they weren’t real tyranny is just going to get ‘well, I don’t want not-real-tyranny either thank you’.
And indeed one of the problems with tyranny is that it can coexist perfectly happily with anarchy.
It just seems manifestly obvious that the failure state where enforcement melts away is vastly more common that the failure state where the entire country is, essentially, imprisoned. Anarchy and tyranny can co-exist, but anarcho-tyranny is a conservative/reactionary concept precisely because it describes a failure of liberal democracy in which protected, left-friendly groups aren’t prosecuted while unprotected ones are.
The question isn't 'what's more common in world-historical terms'. The question is 'what's more likely in the modern west'. And modern western countries are tightening the noose around dissidents, they're not giving up their monopoly on violence.
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My point is that you are excluding the vast majority of what people consider 'tyranny' from your list and then saying there isn't very much tyranny in the world. If we include the Gestapo, the KGB, COVID lockdowns, anti-Catholic burnings during the Reformation, the Terror in revolutionary France, Jim Crow etc. then it's still broadly true that people underweight the harms of anarchy compared to 'you can get along as long as you don't do anything to upset the government', but the picture is more complex than 'really there are only two tyrannies in the world and they're both tiny'.
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We recently had much of the world fall into the failure state where the entire country was imprisoned by stay at home orders with lockdowns.
The enabling part of anarcho-tyranny is the tyranny part, not the anarchy part, because it describes the power of the state pressing on the scales. Can't go the other way.
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