The initiative is always the same. Control.
"Right"? "Left?" Two wings, one bird.
There is a small group of people who wield a great amount of power. So much so that money is meaningless to them - when they want something, they simply demand it and it is provided to them. It is up to the underling providers to work out whatever trinkets need to swapped for the demanded good.
This is a great deal for those powerful people. They have access to literally any earthly item at any time. But the difficult part is keeping that power. Needless to say, many would covet the same power if it were available to them.
World population makes the task of maintaining control even more difficult. Managing a few million people in ancient Greece is one thing. Almost eight billion souls is quite another.
Force is not an option, at least not without a panoply of "force multipliers" - things or actions that can be controlled easily by a small group but wield power over many.
Hence, we have things like "government" - especially "representative" government, in which the proles place power in the hands of a "representative" few, who are then controlled with compromise, bribes (remember, money is infinite to the powerful) and false promises. Bottlenecking power is a great way to create force multipliers - control the one or few in power and have power over all. It's difficult, but not impossible. to bribe 350M Americans, but a couple of hundred in DC? Piece of cake.
Dictatorships and royalty? Even better. Just one target to bribe.
There's lot of other things: powerful bombs, real or imagined, diseases, real or imagined, weather modulators, et cetera, that also assist in both curtailing population growth and maintaining power over the living proles.
ah, that felt good. Now where were we? Oh yeah, censorship.
Censorship is just another force multiplier. George Carlin spent his life explaining the relationship between words and ideas and experienced a very public debate over censorship many decades ago. He knew that censorship is but another tool in the arsenal of the force multipliers of the powerful. His main premise is that by limiting our words, the powerful limit our thought.
Sadly the days of questioning our masters, despite all of the hubbub regarding red and blue and orange and pink, are gone as we fight over the last cookie on the plate which was cleared by the powerful ones centuries ago.
My pessimistic side says that final clampdown won't be dramatic at all. We'll simply slip into a Demolition Man - style society of "peace and safety", having gladly given up all freedoms, including freedom of thought, for Taco Bell and commercial jingles. Maybe we're already there?
