Big government does not mean more Authoritarian

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by Kranes56, Dec 19, 2016.

  1. Kranes56

    Kranes56 Banned

    Joined:
    Feb 23, 2011
    Messages:
    29,311
    Likes Received:
    4,187
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Female
    Something has puzzled me for awhile, what is more free? Forced capitalism, or voluntary socialism? Really the question boils down to a thought experiment by John Locke. Imagine waking up and you find that all of your friends are in your room throwing you a surprise party. All of your favorite food, music, drinks are there. You can go to the bathroom and it looks like you don't want to leave it. However you do not realize that the door leading outside of the room has been locked. You could not leave even if you wanted to. Are you free? Intuition tells us no according to Locke. We are not free because we are constrained. A more contemporary version of this idea is the Matrix. Everyone in the matrix is free to leave it but not really because they never learn of the outside world.

    What this means for this thread however is that authoritarianism doesn't necessarily mean big government. We generally do equivocate big government with authoritarianism. That's our upbringing. Big government limits what people can do, thereby infringing upon liberty. But if we think of authoritarianism in turns of constraint, then even the most libertarian societies are authoritarian. You are still constrained by the society, you can't leave it. But this still seems weird. It's hard to think of libertarian societies as something that's authoritative. There does seem to be a distinction between libertarian and authoritarian.

    So what I propose instead is that when we are talking about Authoritarian and Libertarian we are actually talking about time. Libertarian ideas and concepts are new, they haven't been put into place yet or if they have are relatively new. Authoritarian concepts are not. They are much older, forming the bedrock of society. It is the constant pull between these two forces that we are talking about. This has to do with power, libertarian positions don't have much power. Authoritarian concepts do, they lasted the test of time. Because they have so much power, they are more constraining. New ideas have to be fleshed out, older ones don't. This helps to explain concepts like Libertarian (the political ideology) racism. It's supposed to free people from constraint of a big "Liberal government", even though they will replace it with their own constraining society.

    So what do you think? Is authoritarianism really just talking about time? Or not? Let me know what you think down below!
     

Share This Page