Escape by Boat (2020) Dessin par Edwin Loftus

All over the world it is too often true, the greatest threat to the people lies not in crime or natural disaster or invasion by foreign forces, but by the governments that rule over us and not in death but in a life lived without hope that things are getting better.
Smart governments, whether outright dictatorships or bureaucracy and oligarchy corrupted democracies use the heavy hammer of power rarely. In the era of monarchical governments, a "good ruler" was most often the one that did less rulemaking and taxing of those subject to their rule. Those that did more of these things tended to be remembered as "bad rulers".
To address this, the movement called, "Classic Liberalism," proposed that we should be ruled, not by men and their self-serving perspectives, but by written law. This began the era of constitutional government and in Classic Liberalism, (no relationship to current Liberalism), the primary purpose of a constitution is to limit the power and areas of authority of government.
Unfortunately, many constitutions have failed to actually achieve this, and those that did have been subject to subversion by the advocates of corruption and authoritarianism.
Bad rulers have always generated attempts by their victims to escape from their bad rule. Today, in a period of increased awareness of conditions in other lands and increased abilities to cross long distances, the better places to live are experiencing various degrees of an immigration pandemic and the residents of those countries are justly concerned that immigrant influxes will destroy cultural cohesion and political values, with the effect of rendering their homelands no longer more desirable, either for them or for their descendants.

The naked human beings, stripped of their national/cultural identities in this image are meant to be symbolic of both, those who flee their countries seeking a better life, and those that fear to lose the better lives they have and find themselves needing to flee their countries as a result of too much influx of people that do not share their values and views.
Countries that excelled at providing better lives for their people attract refugees and are losing the coherency needed to maintain those better systems, while countries that lagged behind on building better lives for their people remain unchanged, or fall further behind, with those who support their inferior systems become greater percentages of their populations with less modifying opposition.
The effect of this will be to lower the sum quality of governments, undermining those that made more progress in human happiness and reinforcing those that made the least progress.
This is regression, not progress.

There is slight tinting in this image that was not well reproduced in digital translation. So, this is chiaroscuro with coloring, not the black & white on gray it appears to be.

Thèmes connexes

RefugeesGovernmentsProgress TwartedRegression Coming