Friday 20 April 2012

The Freedom Cycle

I was reading a report on China's curbs on its people's freedom when I hit upon a rather surprising analysis. I am sure that very few, if any, of my readers must have thought upon it this way. I'll try to present my analysis as clearly as possible... let's get straight into it... The Freedom Cycle!

Concept :

Countries in the world fall into three categories according to the level of freedom they offer to their citizens-
highly free, self regulated and authoritarian.
The highly free countries hold freedom in high regard and that is displayed both in their laws as well as in the attitudes of the people. The people in the self regulated countries have a moral code of conduct, apart from their laws, which is quite more important to them than it is to people in the highly free countries. The authoritarian countries have probably turned every whim into a law, written or unwritten, and can many times be classified also as orthodox or overreaching.
But I won't stop at only this.

High freedom, self-regulation and authoritarianism follow a cycle, with self-regulation being the golden mean, from which you can tip either way! Like this-

Reasoning:

I guess every type of rule has its own drawbacks. So people, in search for a better life keep adopting a different ideology. And when they discover the drawbacks of the new ideology, they can choose whether to revert to their old ideology or try something new yet again. And every ideology can also be fit into these three categories.

The transition between the rules has many evidences to its credit-
China transformed from Self regulated to authoritarian
USA transformed from self regulated to highly free
Jordan transformed from authoritarian to self regulated, and so on.

One more thing: These countries are distributed almost circularly throughout the world, with the self regulating countries forming a 'median' between the free and the authoritarian! Think I went too far? See this-


and now, this-

here,
s=self regulated
a=authoritarian
f=free

Implications:

Since self regulated countries seem to be a kind of balance between the F and A, they are probably more stable and thus can progress well.
India, I believe, is now transitioning from S to F.
China is now a fully A regime, so its growth is bound to slow in a few years and remain constant till it becomes an S regime, after which it will again grow.
The USA is now declining a bit, but it has a chance to grow again when it becomes as S regime in a few years or maybe more than a decade.
The will of the people is the source of transition. So the transition will be the strongest in the most populous regimes like India and China.

This was just something that came to my mind, and stuck like a parasite! Hope you found it worth a read!

2 comments: