I don’t think our society has widespread knowledge about this basic fact of reality…and I think there are bad consequences to this.
Unironically, I’m arguing for moral relativism.
The government can and should have data and information on citizens. Citizens should not pry into such things in each other - that kind of violation of privacy would be considered wrong.
Leaders IRL can be mean. You can’t be mean to employees in thinking jobs, since it ruins thinking. And you can’t be mean for no reason. But you can be mean to physical workers. This includes a bit of intimidation at times, and also, firing people. It’s mean to fire people. People always really need the money from the job. Insane levels of intimidation is not ok, but a little is expected of leaders. This is especially the case if one lower-ranking person is ruining the social environment. The leader has a responsibility to devour his follower in order to “protect” the other followers. This behavior is really not acceptable for a non-leader - if people do that to equals, you end up with a bully society.
Governments can violate many freedoms (freedom of association). Messing with people’s space IRL is just being a harasser.
Governments can play the role of Robin Hood.
A government can build something noisy at your doorstep if it has the property, and you have to put up with it. If your neighbor does it, you might be able to force him to stop, using some kind of “disturbing the peace” law.
The list goes on and on.
I think normies have a hard time conceptualizing of this reality that Leadership is a different way of operating, and that this also implies different morals.
Our modern society is predicated on people wanting the government to usually behave according to individual morality. For example, you and I would really avoid giving the death penalty to a person in a murder case far removed from our own lives, because we’d be dizzied by the challenge of determining the right suspect. What if we put the wrong person to death! We simply would not do it, and would not let others do it. And this is the biggest argument against the death penalty. But the death penalty is probably right, and governments should probably do it.
I won’t really explain why leaders/governments have different morality, here. It suffices to say that it’s a matter of maximizing the good of all people.
Pre-modern society was likely built on the opposite belief - the leaders were fully aware that they had the “right” to “be mean”, and also the responsibility, and they allowed themselves to be quite mean, indeed. Too mean, in the case of the West.
The ordinary people genuinely need to be able to grok this reality that morality is different for leaders. I think the moral cowardice that characterizes a lot of Western liberal/libertarian politics is coming from people not being able to accept this fact. And I think it comes especially commonly from people who have spent generations at the bottom of society. They have never led, and nobody in their family has ever led, and they have created an entire mentality that seems to resist thinking about being a leader at all (otherwise they’d have some leaders in their lineage).