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The world you are advocating is a very dark place indeed. In historical terms, it's France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship. You talk in grandiose terms of the social contract but you seem not to know much about history.
I am not advocating for the world that we find ourselves in, which is a dark place. This is the first of many events that are going to happen due to the lack of care of the C suite that is robbing us at every chance and turning the legal system against everyone but themselves. This is a world of their making along with the consequences. Yes France was bloody due to the financial disparity between the rich and poor, all actions have consequences. The Americans also went through this with unions, where business interests murdered union reps and workers on strike, we came to a deal eventually but as always the deal was reneged. The social contract I "talk about in grandiose terms" was to keep us, rich and poor, from each others throats. It is in their hands what the population does, keep taking and not giving back, it will be taken from them.
When all other avenues fail, there is only one choice left. Most are not there yet, but more and more are getting to this point. Buckle up, it is going to be a rough ride.
Yes, they do - bad consequences for everyone. If you take the law into your own hands it always ends in tears. Either you'll get a strongman who "alone can fix it", or you'll get some kind of revolutionary regime which tolerates no dissent and eventually collapses, hated by the very people it was supposed to represent. Every. Single. Time. There is no exception in history.
I am against extrajudicial cold-blooded killing, just as I am against the judicial variety (capital punishment). But this does not even need to be a moral argument: human history shows very clearly that vigilante justice is a dead end.
The only way forward is discussion, and compromise, and hard choices.
Well, there is a way out of this. They can stop the anger being rightly directed at them, but they won't. The law is not in our hands, the law is not there to help us, and here we are.
BTW to be clear, I am not advocating violence. I am merely pointing out what many others see, we are reaching a breaking point and if compromise is not reached it will push past the point of no return leading to what you are so worried about. Which seems to be happening anyway with the far right starting to take power across the globe
You already (probably - assuming you are American) live in a dictatorship.
Not really a dictatorship yet. More like a "Hybrid Regime"
You'll know its an actual dictatorship when Lemmy Instances is getting blocked.
It didn't "end" with a dictatorship. Social change continued for a century, in which the people gained more and more power to the detriment of autocrats, until the establishment of today's strong liberal democracy. The millennia-old institutions that opposed this change couldn't be replaced in a day.
Indeed, the dictatorship was followed by a restoration of the monarchy. And, after a few more revolutions, some of them bloody, by various other forms of regime.
In parallel, other European countries (the UK most famously) skipped all the violence and ended up at roughly the same destination of "strong liberal democracy" as you put it. A handful of them are today even stronger liberal democracies than France, with even better social protections.
What a waste of blood.
Ah yes, the peaceful and bloodbath free British empire.