Comment by kaptainscarlet
5 days ago
Giving respect based on seniority is one of the major reasons why autocracies thrive unchecked in some countries as younger people are unable to hold older folks accountable.
5 days ago
Giving respect based on seniority is one of the major reasons why autocracies thrive unchecked in some countries as younger people are unable to hold older folks accountable.
In its extreme shapes maybe, but just paying respect to the elders for having lived much longer and seen so much more, is something that should be normal in my opinion.
It used to be a lot more reasonable back in the day.
When the world didn't change as quickly, or didn't change at all, the elders truly knew everything the young ones knew, and so much more. They had truly seen everything and had plenty of experience with the problems young people were struggling with.
This very much isn't the case any more. I'm in my twenties (technically part of gen Z), but I already feel like I don't understand the Tiktok-using, trap-loving part of my generation. The 14-18 year olds probably have very different issues now than I did at that age, and that wasn't even so long ago. People from my parents' generation are out of the loop completely, their world still revolves around linear TV, college as a path for success in life etc.
Oh, I am also not asking my grandparents for concrete life or technical advice. I am just talking about respect of their age, what they experienced and lived through.
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I'm not sure tik tok expertise implies worldliness or wisdom :)
Sorry -- "trap-loving"?
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It's a tougher sell when the younger generation gets the short end of the stick.
In a way that would be a good barometer of how that society thinks it's doing and how promising the younger generation sees its future, as prepared by their elders.
It's all the more interesting in countries where the population pyramid if fully reversed, and elders have way more power than the younger working class.
seniority as in rank, and respect for elders as in filial piety in East Asia are two very different things. Autocracy relies on execution of arbitrary power, and the latter places a limit on it. It's why after the revolution in China, Confucianism is the first thing they tried to get rid of. I stayed in Beijing during the covid lockdowns and there was one group of people that could do what they wanted "dancing grannies", old people who meet up to dance in public parks because messing with them was seen as too offensive.
Autocracy is usually driven by the opposite, unrestricted mobilization of the youth. In particular true in the West today. Bukele is not exactly a pensioner, and if the US has displayed one thing in recent times it isn't respect for the age of their leaders to put it mildly.
Yes, but traditionalist power structures are still authoritarian. Insamuch as they oppose autocracies, it is by virtue of having got there first and not yielding power to the new tyrant[0]. The problem is not the age of the ruler, or the legitimacy of the power structure, but the resulting distribution of power.
Insamuch as Confucian filial piety can be a check on upstart autocrats, that's useful, but not sufficient. There's nothing stopping the Maoist autocracy from embracing Confucius[1]; Mao just didn't want to for ideological reasons. Autocrats are ultimately building a coalition of scam victims that are all locked in the same room with one another. They don't care who's in the room as long as they won't unify against the leader.
In the US, we have Trump, the oldest US President in history, with, to put it mildly, "autocratic ambitions". His coalition includes old people, who vote early and often, and want to impose the social order of the 1950s upon the country. Almost[2] nothing about them suggests that they're going to meaningfully check Trump's power anytime soon; if anything, they're the only[3] faction of the Trump coalition that's gotten anything out of the deal.
[0] If the autocrat wins, they will eventually just become the new traditionalist power structure. Every pirate wants to become an admiral.
[1] Mussolini recognized the Vatican as a sovereign state purely to get the Pope to shut up about him.
[2] Insert clip of some old guy vandalizing a Cybertruck here.
[3] No, I don't count pardoning Ross Ulbricht. The Libertarian Party sold their soul for a donut.
Everyone in Yugoslavia was called "Drug" (pronounced droog, Friend), it'd be hard to claim it wasn't autocratic. Same with the USSR and China.
Communist Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc and China was supposed to be flat and everyone was "comrade". Did that prevent autocracy?