Expectations can be swayed with careful enough application of restrictions. The idea here is that if we push someone down long enough, it conditions them to regard that oppression as a new status quo, from which the relaxation of any of the restrictions is enough to generate an undeserved amount of thanksgiving.
It's like the age old question: can one truly understand any specific state of being without first being in that state of being. Paraphrasing with a more specific analogy, it's akin to trying to explain happiness to someone who has never experienced it, or depression to someone who has never experienced it, or the colour red to someone who cannot see.
The idea of a liberal education is to provide enough stimulus to the person in question so as to open them up to more perspectives to cultivate their own way of thinking. It is a means to show them a world beyond the one that they experienced. There is nothing inherently good nor bad about this---all it does is to provide choices, and with it, the ability to exercise one's free will.
If, at the end of the day, the said person decides to go back to their comfort zone and not leave it, they do so knowing that they had made an informed choice, and not because they had done so due to not having seen any possible choices.
Cosmically, this is why I think that we must find our way to God through confessing our sins and accepting Jesus as the Christ and our personal saviour, despite God being all-powerful and having sovereignty over the universe. Some may reject Jesus for one reason or another after their exposure to the gospel---that's alright by me, since it is ultimately between they and God, and literally not for me to judge, while others may accept Jesus accordingly, which is also alright by me, since it is still ultimately between they and God.
But let's get back to the more mundane and secular world. A liberal education is in many ways, an anti-thesis to authoritarianism. It's not so much an anti-thesis because of the questioning nature that comes from having a liberal education, but that the authoritarian perceives the need to provide ripostes against any and all criticisms as a waste of their time, under the assumption that as the authoritarian, they are, by definition, the righteous, and therefore all criticism serves to distract them from the ``obviously right path forward''. So, the more a population has liberal education experiences, the more work the authoritarian perceives that they have to do to maintain the status quo of power structures.
Luckily for them, it is not the case that the majority of populations have the sort of thinking that comes from a liberal education. It is partly from a difference in aptitude of independent thought, and partly from either the existence of dependents that keep them in thrall with the status quo, or that they have been chained down with other obligations that they do not have enough energy to channel into independent thought and therefore assuming the bystander effect of ``eh, someone else will handle it'' even though they may agree that something is/has gone wrong.
Combine what I said in the last paragraph with an overtly oppressive environment, then the smallest of liberties that are revealed will lead to an over-reaction of thankfulness to those who had done the oppression.
This is true not just for SIN city, which is probably the likeliest conclusion someone might draw from reading this. It is part of the realpolitick playbook. There is a reason why the United Nations have tried to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as a means of leveraging on existing power structures to coerce some semblence of empathy/sanity towards the treatment of people. There are two big problems with UDHR though: first is that it is unenforceable because there is no one to enforce it, and the second is that the UDHR does not preclude exceptions that stem from the much stronger aspect of ``national security'' or ``national emergency''.
The public eye has a tendency to judge the effectiveness of politicians by the amount of action that they take on the current hot-button issues---the problem with that is that sometimes, when the best course of action is to literally do nothing, that cannot be done, a type of political zugzwang. This explains a lot of the behaviours of various politicians across the world in the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is safe to assume at this point that there are no politicians who are in politics just to serve the people to their abilities, and that everyone who is involved in politics are there for their personal benefit. With that kind of default perspective, many actions will make a lot of sense.
Is this a rather cynical view of the world? No, I disagree---it is a pragmatic view of the world. I can say that we live in Fallen times where Sin fills the world, but I will say instead that the types of social structures and rules that we put in place to select the people to tend to the public problems have selectively allowed this breed of politicians to appear. And to these politicians, we have ceded a tremendous amount of power in the hopes that they will do their duty as sworn in, but they have failed us for the most part, with some using the very powers that we ceded to them to use against us.
The only way then for any citizenry to fight back is to claw back the powers that were ceded. In that sense, Gandhi was right all along: nonviolent resistance at a large enough scale is the solution to change without forcing the chaos that comes from a breakdown of social structures the way violent resistance brings. That last part of the largeness of the scale, is my own emphasis. I put it there because I think that a critical mass is always needed in order to have something to tip over and change. So a small group of three people protesting non-violently can be easily hushed into silence, but if three million people did so, it would be many orders of magnitude harder.
Am I then, a dissident of sorts? No, I'm not. The world is full of principalities beyond the control of regular humans that act in human ways---they are, after all, the true immortals that can rival that of the gods of old. I have chosen to participate in the world to the extent that it is necessary to maintain this body I have, and will attempt to sway whatever part of it that falls within my sphere of influence towards a more righteous nature as thanksgiving to Christ who saved me from my sins. Other than that, I don't have any more stake in the world---I have no desire nor the ability to cause changes against the principalities at large.
Understanding how a principality acts is the first step towards innoculating oneself against their methods of bending people to their will. As the aeroplane safety manual says, save yourself first before assisting others.
Whether everything I said earlier makes sense or not does not matter in the least. Till the next update.
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