Basically, authoritarian rule shows its nature with the swiftness you are punished if you try to go against the flow. Usually if things go wrong, if you want to change things against the grain.

Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.

However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.

That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.

This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.

All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.

Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.

That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.

Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.

This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.