Soft despotism?

Yesterday I thought about the concept of freedom, freedom with responsibility. I went through my own situation in terms of how free it was and tried to compare it to how the Iranians might define the concept. Dr. Harvey Mansfield at Harvard writes in The Weekly Standard about soft despotism. I guess Iran suffers from hard despotism. To understand what seemed like an interesting article I started out in Wikipedia.

Soft despotism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by 'a network of small complicated rules' might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people. Soft despotism gives people the illusion that they are in control, when in fact they have very little influence over their government. Soft despotism breeds fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the general populace. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that this trend was avoided in America only by the 'habits of the heart' of its 19th-century populace"

Well, are we degrading? Are we degrading as Human Destruction Inc. and their servers hammer away on societal control? Nothing is as powerful as an idea who's time has come? Is this idiom correct? Mansfield discusses whether an idea always has consequences or whether the time that provides context also must be right. Do we have "habits of the hearts" here in Sweden right now?

Mansfield also brings up the question if rules for a republic can be the same now as in ancient times. If it only is dependent on human psychology that has not changed in historic times or whether technology in society also might create difficulties. I believe that the technological factor is important because it changes the way psychology expresses itself. People with alternative skills are in power.

Soft despotism, according to Tocqueville, "it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them and directs them". I have heard of a term called "system therapy"!? Is Human Destruction Inc. involved in breaking people's will. It certainly seems like this.

Mansfield continues "But the prize of the benefits is to hinder and to discourage all political and associational activity in the people, leaving democracy in the condition of a mass of dissociated individuals governed by an "immense being" known today as Big Government." The low voter turnout seen in the US and the EU today might result from soft despotism?

Do we have "habits of the heart" in Sweden to avoid what Tocqueville mean is soft despotism? Sweden does not have that reminder Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Life for me includes social context which the individualism of Human Destruction Inc. is destroying.

Tocqueville called for a "new science of politics" something I have also done. What I mean with new political science is what psychology have given the last 40 years when it went from behavioral to cognitive. It so happens when new methodology comes around that it is used to produce new knowledge, which in this case unfortunately is secret, and has created a new aristocracy in charge of the information and its use. I guess Tocqueville at the time was intrigued by the biological sound of the American Declaration of Independence. Its natural qualities.

Perhaps therefore one might ask whether man has created reverse democracy, or a "democracy drift", and that we face a new revolutionary phase to set democracy in order again? Maybe this is why people cry for change and not for freedom?