Every now and then a quote says it all. Behold!
“Regimes that are losing public support always make the same mistake: rather than fix the source of the loss of public trust–the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many– the regime reckons the problem is dissent: if we suppress all dissent, then everyone will accept their diminishing lot in life and the elites can continue on their merry way.
What the regimes don’t understand is dissent is the immune system of society: suppressing dissent doesn’t just get rid of pesky political protesters and conspiracy theorists; it also gets rid of the innovations and solutions society needs to adapt to changing conditions. Suppressing dissent dooms the society to sclerosis, decline and collapse.
Dissent is the relief valve: shut it down and the pressure builds to the point that the system explodes. Regimes that no longer tolerate anything but the party line fall in one of two ways: 1) the pressure builds and the masses revolt, tearing the elite from power or 2) the masses opt-out and stop working to support the regime, so the regime slowly starves and then implodes.” – Charles Hugh Smith
One reply on “Immune Failure”
Heavy handed, top down, power and control will ALWAYS fail. The primary reason that it fails is those who are in power eventually confuse themselves with god and believe they can dictate what is true without reference to what is actually true. A secondary reason is that those in power believe that by applying enough brute force, they can make things happen. Then, when (not if) they fail, they pretend all it takes is enough human sacrifice to make their whims to become true. Eventually the accumulated wealth is consumed, those who can produce wealth are prohibited from functioning, and the population of willing sacrificial victims is reduced to zero. As a consequence, all that gets accomplished is poverty, despair, death, and destruction.
See the 20th century for far too many instructive examples.