Tyranny thrives in twilight
Mutually assured destruction has kept the world's superpowers from slugging it out openly on the battlefield. Sure, there have been proxy wars, but nothing on the scale of destruction humanity is truely capable of.
The infeasibility of using raw power directly has not stopped countries from engaging their rivals, though. Only the means have shifted. For example, advanced reconnaissance satelliteshave been deployed to spy on one another, to monitor missile launches, to guide one's own missiles and to facilitate communication to troops around the globe. This has spawned research into direct-ascent anit-satellite weapons, anti-satellite lasers and other counter-measures.
Another domain of the not-so-cold war is in the information space.
It has been recognized for a long time that influencing the population of another nation might bea far cheaper and far more effective means of changing that nation's leadership and politics than more kinetic forms of war. The internet, especially social media, has worn the traditional gatekeeping institutions down. No longer is there a managable number of TV stations and a handful of media outlets, instead anyone can potentially reach hundreds of millions, even billions of people now. One good meme can potentially topple a ruling elite. This has not gone unnoticed by intelligence commuities, which were presented with and eagerly tried entirely new means of toppling governments for (hopefully at least) their national interests.
It has also spawned counter-measures, many of which are not compatible with what we have come to expect from a democratic republic that has enshrined free speech as its founding principles.
Openness: The means of correcting errors
Freedom of speech is the very bedrock of an open-society.
Without the ability to say what you think, you lose the ability to think. The ability to think is required to detect errors. And that's what you need to have any hope of correcting them. I find it highly unlikely the massive, man-made famines and purges could have taken place in the Soviet Union or China, without the extensive apparatus for censorship and propaganda. It insulates rulers and ruled alike from seeing and hearing the consequences of the elites' actions. It prevents the ruled to coordinate in their own interest. Speech control makes life convenient for those in power, it will make life miserable for those at the receiving end of it.
Once the apparatus for destoying the means of correcting errors is in place, nameley the rejection of free speech and its replacement by assigned opinions about the predetermined results of the manufactured reality, there is too little friction to stop the pathologies of ideology and virtue-dominance status games.
Free speech is the the pre-condition for all our rights. It's our best, maybe our only safeguard against the devastating effects of ideology running wild.
It is also the not-so-secret incredient for innovation and devlopement, because it allows for correcting errors of the past to improve things in the future.
On the other hand, this strategic openness of democratic republics creates and asymmertry that can - and very probably is - used by adversaries with more closed societies. While those can "shield" their population and parties from any inconvenient truth, they can inject convenient memes into the minds of the adversaries' populations.
It seems like this attack vector has not eluded Western intelligence organizations., on the contrary, it seems very likely that they have already used the experience gained in controlling other countries' governments (see for example the color revolutions) at home. But this brings us to an age-old problem: who makes sure that those "guarding" the republic do so to increase its - instead of their own -flourishing?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
@MikeBenzCyber might be one of the most vocal proponents of this line of thinking. As outlines in a recent inverview with @TuckerCarlson, he suspects that many institutions, which are considered to be democratic, feel threatend by public opinion coming to different conclusions and ideas than said “democratic” institutions' leaders. Challenging those leaders or institutions, even voicing “doubt”, is spun as “attacking democracy”.
Social media platforms have been declared to be critical infrastructure for the distribution of information, and because they are used for “attacking democracy” by spreading "misinformation" , doing so is akin to "cyber terrorism". Intelligence agencies must take control and “combat” “propaganda” and “misinformation” - or else they wouldn't really be doing their jobs.
Because the network has swept away the gatekeepers and virtually anyone can become viral and influence a great many number of people, it’s not sufficient to control a few choke points. Instead, it’s important to deploy tools for censorhip at a sufficient scale to control almost anyone. All in the name of doing good and protecting democracy from "harmful" ideas.
The problem is that their conception of good and evil is not necessarily aligned with the public’s. Or even popular. To the contrary, many "attacks" on democracy are nothing but criticism of stale and increasingly corrupt institutions, which are captured by a malign ideology, social-justice fundamentalism, alternatively called wokeness.
The mechanisms codified by the constition in order to reduce the likelihood of large scale violence, namely elections, representative governments, the rule of law, etc., threaten to “transition power” (monitary, military) away from those occupying these institutions. But given their belief that they are the good guys after all, it follows - clearly and self-evidently - that the democratic republic is in mortal danger of being taken over by the bad guys.
Therefore, to protect democracy against the population's misguided and misinformed opinions, an insidious form of "military rule", and "inversion of democracy" is called for, maybe already implemented, that would to justice to the dystopian visions of Orwell, or Huxley's even more nefarious ones.
Nullius in verba
A major problem arises from the fact that just because someone claims to be wanting and doing good, does not necessarily mean that they are doing so. In fact, after 70 years of denial, research is beginning to emerge that shows that a lot of ostensibly anti-hierarchical aggression is infact "associated with antagonistic narcissism", while "neither dispositional altruism nor social justice commitment was related to left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression." The research found a strong correlation between left authoritarianism and dark triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, pyhchopathy) . It did not find greater altruism or committment to social justice. The researchers conclude that for these people their left-wing views are simply a way for legitimizing the use of force to gain power over others.
As @jordanbpeterson observes: "The correlations reported here are so high (.60) that, given measurement error, the constructs of antagonistic narcissism and left wing authoritarianism might be literally the same thing.”
What is the peaceful solution to such a situation, where positions of power and discretion are held by people who are not commit to democratic ideals anymore?
I think without free speech and open debate, there are slim chances of one. That's why @elonmusk ’s acquisition of Twitter/X has preserved hope for many people opposed to the censorship-industrial complex1, formed by the world's most powerful nations and some of the world's most valuable companies. It wasn't free for him, neither monetarily, nor socially. His advocacy for free-speech has painted a target on his forehead.
Many European laws for censorship have already been passed in order to "fight misinformation", which will surely find their way back to America (“How can you be against senisble rules to protect democracy?”).
It falls once again on SCOTUS to weigh conflicting values and ideals in what might be one of the most important and consequential cases of our lifetimes.
If free-speech is sacrificed on the altar of "security" and "state capacity", the twilight will have set upon the "shining city upon the hill". It's were tyranny thrives.
Do I claim that everything you read on X is true? Or nice? Or without malice? Of course not.
There are tons of bots, stupid ideas, propaganda and lies. The problem is: this applies to all media.
The idea is: It’s better to have all ideas out there and to give people the means and voice to challenge official narratives, than to give governments control over the flow of information.
Unsurprisingly, this idea is immediately obvious to anyone when asked, if they would be comfortable, if a government run by what ever ideological group they deem the most dangerous, should be allowed to unilaterally declare truth, censor dissent , ban research pointing in different directions and ultimately jail and silence critics.
Suprisingly, this thought is forgotten as soon as it looks like people they are ideologically aligned with could seize the reins of power.