Please Control Our Lives

Browsing through social media, it is alarming to see how many people want to give up voting rights and a representative government in favor of a dictatorship.

Like the people who supported Mussolini because "he made the trains run on time," many of these people seem to think dictators will provide them with amenities like cleaner streets, and these things are, in their minds, worth giving up basic freedoms. Other dictator fans imagine that the dictator will share their world view and religion, and will create a society that enforces those ideas on the entire population. They think it's a good idea that dissenters might be imprisoned, expelled from the country, or executed.

It never occurs to them that (a) the dictator will not actually do what they imagine, (b) historically, dictatorships do not create prosperity for average citizens, (c) someday, the tables will turn and the former in-group will become the out-group.