| Sounds good so far.
I'd also add: privacy. Too much privacy can be a shield behind which the strong abuse the weak. But not enough privacy becomes a means to exert a tyranny of the majority.
Also, in a society that is not culturally uniform, there needs to be separation of church and state, and I would also say separation of subculture and state these days, which works out to be much the same thing.
The wrench that has been thrown into the works in the U.S. is that Republicans have decided they don't need to separate state from church/subculture. Consequently, the Democrats have become the party of Everyone Else. This formula means that fascism is metastasizing across our military, police and intelligence services almost entirely unchallenged. They have just enough built in authoritarian support in the civilians to get away with it.
So we see that any society that loses its ability to speak aloud against authoritarianism, cannot survive as a free society.
I'm learning not to read the comments whenever I read a newspaper article about police abuse. The number of people who are willing to cheer when some homeless mentally ill person gets murdered is sickening. How is this not a cleansing of a class of people? |