Sunday, August 03, 2025

Tocqueville foresees a slow death of freedom

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

The nature of dictatorship evolves with time, much like crime. While violent physical crimes have largely been replaced by sophisticated, non-violent, yet more insidious offenses, traditional physically oppressive dictatorships have given way to subtle mental manipulation. We are now witnessing the rise of "democratic dictatorship," where media and academia are co-opted to sustain control. The overt rigging of elections has been replaced by electoral manipulation, where people vote as intended, not out of free will but through orchestrated influence. This creates an illusion of choice, making individuals feel they have elected their leaders when, in reality, they vote like programmed robots. True democracy requires more than just periodic elections. It is undermined by this emerging form of democratic dictatorship.

https://x.com/MNageswarRaoIPS/status/1951281687910031861?t=OmjZenn642YIVyRseOQz0Q&s=19

This is precisely the rise of neoliberal economics, neoconservative politics and crowd control through mass media as well as social media.

The three founding fathers of modern media and propaganda are Gustave Le Bon, Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays.

Read Chomsky and Huxley.

https://x.com/salmanmohdkhan/status/1951374279867769208?t=YpmjZ_SVcWl8JFLXvtIn2A&s=19

The Bourgeois and the Samurai by Sri Aurobindo is also a good analysis in this context.

incarnateword.in/cwsa/7/the-bou

https://x.com/SavitriEra/status/1951493015672897680?t=UuPX1TosMaDi2yNi3MmZkg&s=19

[Tocqueville foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a lobster in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened.] M Ledeen

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2009/02/machiavelli-tocqueville-mussolini.html

https://x.com/SavitriEra/status/1951688234607714579?t=EHBtEpb-JOKnKOGx70f2eg&s=19

Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility. An individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self-restraint allows individuals to "yield to instincts" and to accept the instinctual drives of their "unconscious". For Le Bon, the crowd inverts Darwin's law of evolution and becomes atavistic, proving Ernst Haeckel's embryological theory: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le BonWilfred TrotterWalter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways.[8][9] Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

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