this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
-19 points (30.6% liked)
Asklemmy
49826 readers
632 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Scale is the factor here. You could say that small places can benefit from a sort of benevolent authoritarianism. I'm thinking Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco. None of them are bigger than a postage stamp and the population will go along with it. The bigger the country, the more injustices authoritarianism accumulates, the harder it is to keep people in line, the more suppressive it becomes.
Ideally, democracy trumps everything. It is the only system that has the built-in power to cancel itself. It needs all the people to be aware and to participate accordingly. It's not perfect. It's not always fair either. But I'd rather live in a system that can decide to end itself than in a system that would try to end me if I wanted to be critical about it.
Usually when democracy decides to end itself, it's because it transforms into autocracy. Democracy doesn't work and can't work long term.
Democracy only doesn't work when the people in it don't want it to work. To not try is to throw out the baby with the bath water.
No, democracy requires active participation, you try to simplify this to either positive or negative actors, but no matter the issue, the vast majority of people simply won't care.
And the majority that doesn't really care enough to form an informed opinion is the bane of democracy.
Thanks for your thoughts. I don't see either one of us winning the other one over so let's agree to disagree.
Yeah, there's probably no other civil outcome of this discussion.