Totalitarian rules - no more drinking, smoking, and ... kissing.

Dear friends,
I'm sharing this here because I find it very important that everyone behaves like a model citizen. In Leuven (Belgium), city employees are no longer allowed to criticize policy decisions (see comments).
And it is strongly discouraged to give kisses in the workplace for birthdays and other biochemically unnecessary events.

Whenever I read something like this, I genuinely wonder for a moment whether it’s April 1st. Unfortunately, it’s February 6th.

Take special note of the phrase: "These examples partly come at the request of the employees themselves." It's not just Klaus who has totalitarian tendencies; every person who considers eliminating risks in life more important than life itself is navigating by a totalitarian compass.

In a society where smoking, drinking, kissing, shouting, and laughing are forbidden, the fully totalitarian model citizen finds pleasure in only one thing: strictly ensuring that everyone follows the absurd rules.

This is one factor contributing to the popularity of snitching behavior in every totalitarian society, alongside the process of mass formation, which erodes solidarity between people in favor of allegiance to state ideology.

The crime of the totalitarianized subject is the opposite of 'ordinary' crime, dixit Hannah Arendt. Ordinary crime consists of breaking rules; totalitarian crime consists of continuing to follow the rules, even when the rules themselves become criminal.

Sometimes, rules are only good for one thing: to completely ignore them.

Mattias