Nothing lasts: Lessons in a democracy

There's a reason why there is the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. If, as a politician, you were to make rules with the assumption that one day you will have to live under these very same rules, you'd build a much more equitable, just, and fair society.

However, one of the cardinal mistakes politicians in power in democratic countries make while accumulating more and more control over the lives of the citizens is forgetting the simple fact that the rules they make whereby they infringe on the rights of those not in power will, at some point in the future, be applied and used against them by the next person, party, or organisation to win elections.

The problem with this is that when they sense that they are likely to lose, or even have a small chance of losing, their status as the ruling majority, instead of urgently loosening the rules that give them such unbridled power over others and making it more difficult to accumulate such authority, they panic and go the exact opposite way of trying to consolidate even more control in their hands, to the point where some of them are known to have committed the fatal mistake of appropriating for themselves the power to rescind or deny elections, or to hack & manipulate them, or to control the counting or results, or in some way tamper with the democratic processes. This, far from making them stronger, makes the next regime (almost) unassailable!

It should be a lesson to those in power today that if you make rules that take away fundamental rights from citizens, intrude into their daily lives, remove any reasonable expectation of privacy, and create institutions to keep any dissent under check; that if you corrupt institutions and manipulate justice, if you browbeat and bend your sword arm into submission, if you coerce the media and other independent organisations into kowtowing to your whims & fancies, if you create a system where dissenting citizens are gagged, incarcerated, bullied, and even killed, then you are not just concentrating power in your hands, but in the hands of whoever follows you on that chair.

And one day, when you are weak (and you will be), when you are powerless (and you will be), when you are the supplicant (and you will be), when you are the one whose rights need protection (and you will be), and someone else is sitting on the very chair you occupied with such arrogance and misplaced confidence, you will have enough opportunity to regret it. But it will be too late by then.

And it will hurt. It will hurt even more so because the reason the people in power then will give you for appropriating and concentrating all the authority in themselves will be, "You did it too when you were in our place."

Why would that hurt more? Because when you were in power, this was the exact same excuse you threw at those that objected to your words and actions.

Indeed, this would be the unkindest cut of all, when your own arguments will be used to stuff your mouth and gag it so that you may suffer the same humiliations in silence as you heaped upon others once. Nothing shames and breaks a human as much as a caning received from the switch from the branch of the very tree one planted.

So, while you create newer and newer avenues to crush the opposition and focus all the authority on to yourself, you might do well to remember that one day, you could, nay you will, find yourself on the other side of the table. Nothing lasts. Not even Gods themselves.