When the State Turns Against Equal Rights

The old divide between left and right no longer explains the deeper conflict between individual rights, state power and institutional decay.

A Gattopardist Fracture of Totalitarianism That Still Attacks Equal Rights
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

The true fracture of the twenty-first century, created as a demand for liberty, equality and fraternity in the nineteenth century, is the old dichotomy of “left and right”.
An axis born in the French National Assembly of 1789 falls short, almost like a theatrical backdrop, when it comes to explaining the true tension of our time.
Today, the dividing line is not so much ideological as institutional and moral: it is the boundary between the constitutional order of law and the arbitrariness of state power used as an end in itself.
Three key factors intersect here and explain why the traditional axis has collapsed:
The Instrumentalization of the State
The State as a Weapon
When the priority of a government ceases to be the guarantee of equality before the law, the framework in which everyone plays by the same rules, the State becomes an apparatus of capture.
The law is no longer a shield to protect the citizen from abuse, but a club used to grant privileges in exchange for political loyalty.
It is the degradation of politics into a system of clientelism and submission.
The Fallacy of “Social Justice” as an Excuse
The concept of social justice, in its idyllic narrative, presents itself as a redemptive mechanism.
However, historical experience, and economic reality, show that every time political power arrogates to itself the authority to “redistribute” discretionally, it needs to accumulate hypertrophied power.
In the end, supposedly in order to “balance” the scales, it ends up violating the equality of fundamental rights.
Some are dispossessed not to raise others, but to enlarge the structure that sustains the ruling caste itself.
The Awakening of the “Worst Demons”
The great irony, and tragedy, of populisms is that they end up unleashing the most severe crises upon the most vulnerable populations, precisely those they promised to defend.
By suffocating private initiative, destroying the value of money, emptying institutions of meaning and persecuting dissent, the result is not equality in prosperity, but the democratization of misery.
The “defended” become the first victims of systemic collapse.
The real debate today, then, is reduced to a fundamental question:
Should political power be limited and subordinated to individual rights, or is the individual merely a malleable instrument at the service of the State?
Those who understand that liberty and institutional order are the only real guarantees against abuse are no longer defined by a position in the legislative chamber, but by their distance from authoritarianism.
Institutional and moral anomie, the breaking point at which a society is induced to devour itself, occurs when the system accustoms a sector of the population to living off the abuse of the rights of others, through arbitrary subsidies, corporate privileges or state favors, thereby completely distorting the notion of effort and reward.
This phenomenon generates a vicious circle that destroys the foundations of development through three devastating stages:
The Inversion of Incentives
The Penalization of the Value Creator
The engine of any prosperous society is the confidence that honest work and investment yield protectable fruits.
When the State becomes the executing agent of fiscal and regulatory extortion in order to sustain the clientelist framework, the implicit message is lethal: producing is a mistake; being an obligatory partner of the State is carrying an enormous dead weight; parasitism is a success.
The producer, the merchant and the formal worker discover that they work “until they are left without resources” in order to finance their own suffocation.
The Breakdown of the Time Horizon and Regression
A society only progresses when it thinks about the future: when a grandfather saves for his grandchildren, when an entrepreneur invests for ten years, or when long-term infrastructure is planned.
But in the face of legal insecurity and institutionalized plunder, the future is cancelled.
Society enters a mode of pure survival.
The accumulation of capital, both economic and cultural, is halted.
Social involution begins: the loss of the culture of work and educational degradation, dragging the nation toward economic regression.
The Dilemma of Violence and the Institutional “Hinge”
Returning to the “hinge”, that is, restoring order, legality and equality before the law, is a titanic and conflictive task.
Those who have become accustomed to living off the rights of others perceive the restoration of justice as an “attack on their acquired rights”.
Therein lies the violent dilemma: the resistance of corporations and subsidized sectors against the necessary purification of the system.
Extortion becomes street-based or institutional.
However, prolonging submission to abuse out of fear of that conflict does not prevent disaster; it only makes it slower, more agonizing and inevitable.
Breaking this Gordian knot requires immense civic courage.
It implies understanding that authentic social peace is not peaceful submission before the extortionist, but the unrestricted validity of the law.
When the network of abuses has penetrated so deeply into the social fabric, the corporate and clientelist mafias act under political or social clothing.
When a violent group discovers that blocking streets, besieging public services or paralyzing production is profitable because political power yields to its demands, extortion becomes institutionalized as a method of negotiation.
The mechanism of these groups operates under a purely extortive logic.
The Capture of the “Points of Asphyxiation”
These sectors do not seek to persuade or compete under the rules of law; they seek hostages.
They identify the neuralgic nodes of daily life and the economy, such as transportation, children’s education, energy supply or free circulation, and threaten to destroy them.
The premise is clear: “Either you finance our privileges, or we make your life impossible”.
The Complicity or Cowardice of the State
This blackmail only prospers when the State abdicates its primary function, which is the legitimate monopoly of force to guarantee order.
When rulers, whether out of weakness, electoral calculation or ideological affinity, validate extortion by calling it “social protest”, they are abandoning the ordinary citizen.
The message they send is devastating: the violent actor who imposes chaos has more rights than the worker who respects the law.
The Destruction of Civic Coexistence
The long-term consequence is the erosion of the social fabric.
The honest citizen begins to experience deep defenselessness and justified resentment upon seeing that his fiscal effort is used to finance the very same groups that attack him.
Society fragments and demoralization spreads; people begin to feel that decency and respect for the norm are attitudes of unprotected citizens.
This is the definitive symptom of a degraded State: when the law no longer protects the one who produces, but becomes the mechanism for transferring that person’s resources to the violent actor who threatens chaos.
When street and corporate blackmail replaces institutional deliberation, the republic gives way to the law of the jungle, disguised as “addressing social dialogue”.

The old ideological divide loses meaning when law gives way to arbitrary power.
Clientelism turns the State into an instrument of privilege and submission.
Corporate extortion weakens civic life and degrades the republic.

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