As a follow up to my previous post (and harkening to a regular theme in my writing), consider this:
Used as the basis for authority, repression obeys a form of Newtonian Law: it wanes over time. You cannot repress the same amount of people with the same amount of force forever. Their numbers will grow and your ability to repress will drop unless you further increase the use of force. That only aggravates the situation. If the only response to dissent is more and wider repression, then less people have something to lose, even if it is their fear.
Repression must be justified ideologically and accepted by the majority for it to work as an instrument of social control. In other words, using mass repression without commensurate public consent is a brittle club. Despots try to shape narratives via lies, disinformation and propaganda in order to alter that inescapable fact, but the truth is that partisan spin or silence may obscure reality–what our eyes have seen and our ears have heard–but they can never replace it. It forms a memory that cannot be erased even if suppressed or delayed in its activation. It is the memory of what is and was real that forms the conscious basis of mass contingent consent (contingent because we do not give consent once, forever, to any given leader, government or administration).
That is why public acquiescence does not equal popular consent. That former is a short-term solution, born of silence and submission to superior physical force. The latter is the basis for political legitimacy and stable democratic rule. One is temporary, designed to break resistance to or reinforce a particular political project. The other is long-term in orientation even if contingent on material and social expectations being met.
Trump and co. appear to not understand this basic axiom and in fact seem blind to it given their slanderous and false accounts of the ICE murders in MN. This augers poorly for their longer-term prospects.
That gives me a basis for hope.
Your referencing of Newton in relation to to repression reminded me of someone we studied in Law, Heraclitis, the early BC Greek philosopher. We looked at Heraclitis in relation to the Pacific, particularising Fiji, at the time beset with coups and increasing militarisation. This on a much smaller scale is what Trump is currently doing. Heraclitis gave us a huge legacy with many ideas that hold true today. The idea of LOGOS, truth, the word, discourse; his theory of cycles and a certain inevitability in life. The current US situation under Trump, contaminated by blatant lying, mis/disinformation, press collusion which is polluting the public discourse cannot last. Trump can’t live forever. New cycles are inevitable, hopefully more positive.
Thanks Barbara, for sharing that nice academic memory. Alas, studying the likes of Heraclitis is a lost art in NZ academia these days, so consider your self fortunate to have done your university studies before the current academic Taylorist era, where everything is about extracting monetary value from “clients” (students) by offering them simplified courses and automatic pass standards in exchange for pieces of paper that allow the clients-turned-waage labourers to ask the most existential question of our times: “would you like fries with that?
Because in NZ, STEM and even STEAM academic focuses have given way to STAP: Stop Teaching Anything Profound.
Pablo: it’s the predictable outcome of higher education being devolved from a public good fostering intellect, to a perishable good prioritising butts on seats at the expense of all else.
And it looks like a term has been found for the post-War on Terror disaster nationalism period: The Great Rupture.
https://fintechpulse.co.uk/2026/01/22/the-great-rupture-mark-carneys-blueprint-for-navigating-a-fractured-global-economy/
The Press: How NZ fits into a brave new world
Martin van Beynen, 30/1/2026
https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-press/20260130/281728390939924
http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/great-rupture-5-hard-truths-our-fracturing-world-order-sookermany-ukb7e