<snip>
Governments should indeed be scared of their people. And, in fact,
they are. The currently preferred remedy is to make us all scared of
each other, too. [DF]
<snip>
That depends what you mean by 'governments'. In the UK, for example, for
*government* in the ministerial sense, the balance has shifted considerably
from the executive towards the affective. That is, to use current commercial
jargon, ministers are largely 'customer facing' functions (as are proactive
departments such as *marketing* or responsive departments such as *customer
relations*) _within_ something else. And executive power, _control_, has
increasingly been resorbed into the machinery, the technology, in which we
(and government in this visible sense) are embedded.
CW
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'Reading is either a moment of life, free, full and unselfish, or
it is nothing' (Gianni Rodari)
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