“authoritarianism isn’t real” is the funniest take I’ve heard this year. I suggest you take a break from the internet.
I work in the heavy industry. “Industry 4.0” is a buzzword. Does that mean that the actual physical thing that the word supposedly describes isn’t real?
Authoritarianism is the biggest buzzword of the generation, not because it isn’t real but because it is real and it’s all around you and yet you can’t realize it. If you live in the west, or in the imperial core, you live in the world’s largest panopticon, but you don’t perceive it. You don’t perceive it because you are not politically conscious.
Part of the reason that minorities in the west, especially people living in poverty, are so keen to latch onto a leftist understanding of the world (matrix of domination for slightly less radical, onto Marxism in the most) is because they are acutely aware of the authoritarianism that weaves the fabric of your society. I want to state explicitly that one of the primary reasons that you are not aware of it is that you’re most likely part of the ingroup, or you live within the green zone which your nation’s bourgeois has prescribed to you, meanwhile most minorities are face to face with it, suffering with an ailment that is invisible to you.
But here you are calling a country you’ve never been to, and will never ever travel to, along with every country ran by an asian or brownskinned person “authoritarian”. You don’t do it because of your political knowledge, you just regurgitate a buzzword you’ve heard on TV or on social media. You’re like my grandma asking me about “that ChatGPT thing”.
