If you want to gauge a society, see how it treats people who tell the truth. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:
The real measure of how free is a society is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated, but the fate of its actual dissidents.
Persecution is not typically doled out to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class.
Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will — in every society, including the most repressive — usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. They will be permitted to live their lives largely unmolested by authorities, while many will be well-rewarded for this servitude. Such individuals will see themselves as free because, in a sense, they are: they are free to submit, conform and acquiesce. And if they do so, they will not even realize, or at least not care, and may even regard as justifiable, that those who refuse this Orwellian bargain they have embraced (“freedom” in exchange for submission) are crushed with unlimited force.
The real measure of a free Society is found in the areas of the lives of its citizens which are beyond the control or influence of the governing body. It is as simple as that.
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Yup.
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And some people don’t have a choice. Working class who played by the rules get kicked in the face anyway. The state conscripts you as a dissenter unless you are stupid or a masochist.
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