… is from page 74 of David Mamet’s 2022 book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch:
The virus, here, is government. Absent intervention it will, like any disease, eventually kill the host organism. The problem is not that the electorate may choose badly, but absolute power will not admit of any change at all.
DBx: Yes. Authoritarian exercises of power, even when imposed and accepted for the best of reasons, have a strong tendency to dangerously self-replicate.
Social life isn’t lived in a series of discreet time units, with the happenings at time t2 being unaffected by what happened in time t1. Among the most surprising and disappointing features, to me, of the world since March 2020 is the apparent supposition by many people – Progressives, conservatives, liberals, libertarians, whatevers – that government can be trusted with enormous, unprecedented powers to stop the spread of a respiratory disease without those powers themselves becoming not only dangerous, but becoming both endemic and far more dangerous and widespread over time than is the respiratory disease that the powers grabbed and exercised were meant to halt.
