Tags
autocracy, Democracy, Dictatorship, fascism, freedom, garden, life, nature, politics, truth, USA, writing
Consider the photograph below. Tell me what you see and think about what you infer based on the combination of your perception of the photo and your general knowledge. You might want to jot it down.
Let’s do a similar exercise based on the photograph below. Again, what is your take-away? I’ll give you a hint. I live in the San Diego area and these photos were taken just a couple days ago (early April, 2026) near where I live.
I took the first photo coming out of the grocery store after doing the shopping. What I “saw” pleased me. I “saw” that my car had an empty parking space on both sides. That makes loading the car from the grocery cart easier. My car is the dark Lexus just beyond the large red pick-up truck. I can recognize my car from almost any small portion of it.
I took the second photo on a Wednesday afternoon. It shows me that it’s still sunny out. It also shows that the gardeners have done with the work and left. The last thing they do is to take out to the curb the lawn trash, the garbage can, and the recycling bin. I can’t see the bins, but I can see the shadows of the bins. When the gardeners come, I open the gate to the garden. Since they are now gone, I plan to take the dogs out in the back. I will first have to re-shut the garden gate so they don’t go bounding out of the garden into the street.
There’s very little chance that you would have any way to figure out what these stimuli mean to me in my context and constraints and goals. And that’s okay. You have hundreds of goals, constraints, and habits that I know nothing about.
It would be absurd for me to try to direct your life and it would be equally absurd for you to try to direct mine. Luckily, we live in a free country. Of course, there are some constraints on that freedom. It’s not legal for me to go steal stuff from my neighbors nor is it legal for them to steal things from me. But in many areas, large and small, each of is free to do as we wish. My neighbors might take their own trash cans out to the street and do it on their own schedule.
Not everyone on the planet is lucky enough to live in a free country.
A dictatorship seeks to control everything about your life. They do not take into account your goals, your context, your habits, your preferences, your constraints. They don’t care. They have neither the knowledge nor the desire to put in place controls that will be right for me. They won’t be right for you either. They won’t be right for anyone.
Except themselves. That’s what dictatorships do. They take power in order to control you, enslave you, and steal from you.
And, if they feel like it, they’re perfectly fine shooting you in the face after you wish them a Good day.
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petersironwood 