I think you'll find that the rule of the mob in a Third World country is considerably more arbitrary and draconian than anything you could possibly expect from a Western democratic government. Flawed though the West may be, if Pakistan is your idea of a free society, then your definition of freedom needs some serious revision.
Pakistan is also a democratic country... of some sort. If you mean elections to choose members of parliament and the president, they're democratic, but you're sticking to form without minding substance. I can just as well use an openly authoritarian shithole like Eritrea (one that, by the way, conscripts you for up to two-three decades to build roads), it wouldn't make much of a difference.
The point here is how integrated a people is with its government and what tools that government has to impose its will on people.
What has been used here to integrate the population? Moderate wealth, for some time (we're in the process of being destituted from it, slowly enough that most can't perceive it), mass media, public education, widespread high-speed internet, you name it, development in other words and all things that have their downturns; middle class lifestyle? Excellent tool to make people superficially satisfied and complacent. Mass media? Good entertainment but specifically meant to turn off your brain. Public education? Well it's nice to see those literacy rates numbers go up but school isn't there to allow your personal fulfillment as some constitution might state, but rather meant to prepare you to be a citizen, someone compliant and accepting of the country's values, and our values are objectively shit. Workable high-speed internet? It's nice to speak with others half a world away, but while people can swear that they know that an internet relationship is not the same as a real one, they become content with it to the point that they use it as a surrogate, and this is how you end up with a lonely people, detached from each other, with no sense of mutual trust or community. What have I said? One of our biggest issues is our lack of mutual trust. Dude, developed countries have a ticking time bomb in the form of incels, we might be superficially well-fed and there might not be cannons shooting out the windows, but our youth is among the most miserable in the world.
All of these factors and even more (think bureaucracy, meant to provide services to the public) that also interconnect with each other and shape citizens the way a state sees fit, because it is the state that manages them, not the citizens.
Totalitarianism - everyone within the State, nobody against or outside the state - is the direction that every state pursues, it HAS to and it will make use of every technological mean at its disposal that could otherwise be used by the public to emancipate itself, or it will become useless and fade away. It's about making itself necessary when it isn't, and in order to do so, perfectly "workable" societies have to be domesticated and turned dependent on the state, so that it can have a proper function and reason to be.
I'm not opposed to development in principle, but it is clear that development TODAY is used to the benefit of people who have every interest in dehumanizing us in every way possible, and since abolishing the state is out of the question for most people (they just don't have the correct analytical tools to see reality), I'm more than willing to leave Civilization to emigrate to some ape country that isn't entirely familiar (yet) with the trappings of modernity, and I know the risks here.
Call it mob rule, I personally think it's just a statement that reeks of hobbesianism (which I absolutely detest) and maybe it really is many things, like a more violent system, but at the end of the day custom rather than law is how we worked for most of our history, and we worked just fine.
I want to go back to nature, and by this I don't mean the woods.
