Authoritarians LOVE the idea of everyone being forced (or as they call it, "helped") to live in dense, highly-taxed, highly-surveilled, highly-policed anthills where every individual needs to ask permission for everything and there is no room to spread out except for the wealthy.
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) August 22, 2022
Caligula once said, “Would that the Roman people had but one neck!” Tyrants have long recognized the difficulty of controlling large numbers of individuals, and since the beginning of the 20th century have made truly staggering efforts to collectivize, homogenize, and brainwash populations in order to amalgamate their subjects into one easily-managed whole (rather like the “nutraloaf” used to make prisoners’ lives even more miserable). One of the innovations which have allowed modern governments to outclass even the most oppressive of kings is the pretense that said governments are “democracies” or “republics” whose governments act “for the public good”, and every modern tyranny, no matter how foul, is supported by a host of useful idiots who will continue making excuses for their beloved “leaders” all the way to the guillotine. Among these are advocates of what we might call “forced urbanization” like the cretin above, people who wank to fantasies of forcing every individual into a tiny cubicle in an immense Ratopolis where they can never escape the probing gaze of the State and are never more than a few minutes from police summoned by some “concerned citizen” who saw something and said something. If you personally prefer to live in an immense anthill, that’s your choice and you are welcome to it. But I’d rather be dead than be forced to live in a tiny box surrounded by the psychic weight of tens of millions of others, with all escape routes closed off “for the greater good”.
