In the previous post, I mentioned seeing two ongoing events that are potentially destroying democracy in America. The first one is the fact that the losers in the 2016 election are refusing to lose. They are doing all they can to prevent the winners from governing. The previous post expounds on that theme.
That brings me to the second ongoing event that I see as potentially destroying democracy in America. A democracy is predicated on certain freedoms the citizens in the democracy have, by law, given themselves. The most basic of these freedoms is the right to free speech. The citizens themselves have agreed to limit their freedom of speech by making it against the law to falsely accuse someone else or to make false claims about a product. These are objective claims that can cause harm and can be proved or disproved in a court of law.
In America today, the right to free speech has been limited much further, not by a majority of the citizens imposing limits or restraints on their own speech, but by a few judges and public and academic administrators labeling certain speech as “hate speech” spoken only by “haters” and, by declaration, making it against the law in their particular domain. The problem I see for democracy in America is that these types of restrictions on free speech are subjective and predicated on people’s feelings and emotions. Feelings and emotions are subjective and impossible to prove in a court of law. In America, no one has the right to slander or libel another person. But in America, a person used to have the right to call someone a creep if they thought they were a creep. In America, people used to have the right to say “I think you are wrong”, if he thought the person was wrong. Those are subjective statements, expressing an opinion, but were not against the law. They had to be ignored if offensive to someone’s feelings.
How that has changed in America! So many people are not secure enough in themselves to be able to ignore someone else’s opinion. They get their feelings hurt and they must be protected. Feelings now dictate the laws and when one is governed by feelings, the intellect is shut down. Once the intellect is shut down preferences become phobias because definitions, being of the intellect, are ignored. Nowhere in American society is this more obvious than in the area of sexual preference (by definition meaning to like better or best). One person’s sexual preferences has become another person’s phobia (by definition meaning an exaggerated or illogical fear), and only the ones with the “preferences” have a right to speak against the ones with the “phobia”. It is against the law for the ones with the phobias to speak against the ones with the preferences; that would be “hate speech.”
What is ignored, because the intellect is ignored, is the fact that preferences and phobias are based on feelings and are therefore, subjective and are impossible to govern by law. Feelings are governed by what is inside a person. Also ignored is the fact that everyone has preferences. To label those that have the opposite or different preferences to yours as “phobic” and “haters” is childish, and when these subjective emotions dictate the speech laws, the freedom of speech and freedom of our democracy is doomed. Preferences are personal and cannot be legislated.
For example, people on both sides of all social issues have dogs and/or cats in their homes. However, none (or certainly few) have pigs in their homes. Why? Is it because they have piggyphobia? Or that they hate the idea of pigs and, therefore, are haters? Are they discriminating against pigs? No! People have dogs and cats, but not pigs, as a matter of preference. To prefer one and not the other does not make the person bad. Democracy gives the freedom to have personal preferences and to act on those preferences. When someone does not like, or agree with, someone else’s preference, that is freedom. If, by law, they cannot express their dislike, or lack of agreement, i.e. their opinions, that is repression. That is how people in Russia, China and North Korea live.
Rousseau did not get everything right in The Social Contract but he did understand what holds a society together as a body politic. He states:
In fact, each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary, or dissimilar to, the general will which he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest: his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will do less harm to others than the payment of it is burdensome to himself; and, regarding…the State…, he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfil the duties of a subject. The continuance of such an injustice could not but prove the undoing of the body politic.
That is what I see going on in the aftermath of the 2016 general election. The losers have determined that the cost of losing to them is greater than the harm they are doing by preventing the winners from governing. Are they right? Time will be the judge and America will be the ultimate loser.
Rousseau states on page 1 of The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” That about sums up the natural human condition. Natural man is born with a body of flesh that is never satisfied and an ego that is never subdued. Therefore, man is in chains to both. Those chains are destroying democracy in America. The ego of the losers will not permit them to acknowledge the reality that they lost. The flesh’s appetite for pleasure will not permit those with unnatural appetites to say “no”. Not being willing to submit one’s flesh and one’s ego to something greater than oneself is itself a bondage to flesh and ego. It keeps them thinking that it would harm them more than it would harm society if they broke those chains. Therein lies the deception of their bondage and the danger to democracy in America. How the losers of the 2020 election react to losing will either put the final nail in the coffin of democracy in America or resurrect democracy to new life. Let us hope for the latter.