You know, if you really think about it, our 200-year-plus experiment in self-rule has been something of an aberration. For most of humanity's existence, our governments operated on a very crude principle of reciprocity where you, as subject, swore fealty to some unelected emperor, priest-king, warlord, etc., who usually claimed to be operating under some divine or Papal mandate. In exchange for loyalty, you received personal security. Failure to swear fealty was seen as an affront to the sovereign's divine authority, and was met with harsh punishments to rid society of dangerous doctrines. You, the subject, had no rights per se, other than a right to exist in filth and squalor so long as you paid some measure of tribute to the sovereign---and for centuries, knowing that your lands wouldn't be overrun by hostile hordes of Visigoths and Vandals was apparently sufficient to satisfy the meager expectations of the peasantry.
This was, basically, a model of governance based on fear, with all power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a single bloodline or tribe.
It's only been very recently in the grand timeline of history that our collective philosophy of government has changed, and while many of us have heralded our civilization's post-Enlightenment optimism, with its democratization of wealth and its accompanying material progress, as a harbinger of a new day where moral arcs of history are ever bending toward justice, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that the older, fear-based Authoritarian Impulse has never completely gone away, that its hierarchical, top-down command structure holds great appeal to a great many people, and if we're not mindful and vigilant, we can easily revert to a nastier, more brutish time where the masses simply could not be trusted to govern themselves and must be punished should they deign to do so.
In a way, you can make a pretty good case that this has already happened to us over the past 40 years, and that it is happening now across Europe, the main difference between the Old Authoritarianism and the New Improved version being that our sovereigns no longer claim divine authority but instead portray themselves as humble servants dedicated to allaying "market uncertainty" and bolstering "investor confidence". Our punishments, likewise, are no longer inflicted with the intent of ridding society of heretics, but to improve the moral fiber of the lower social orders; our punishment is actually good and uplifting for us, and we should welcome it as a virtuous shareholder welcomes a quarterly dividend check---as just rewards for our appalling moral deficiency.
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Vitelius