In last week’s essay I wrote about ‘there being no democracy without freedom.’
That was the first line of this:
There is no democracy without freedom;
there is no freedom without equality;
there is no equality without justice;
there is no justice without truth;
there is no truth without knowledge;
there is no knowledge without curiosity;
there is no curiosity without empathy;
there is no empathy without kindness.
This week I’m writing about the second line:
‘there is no freedom without equality’.
Do you think of your freedom?
Do you think about what it means?
Do you see how precious it is?
Have you considered the differences between liberty and freedom?
Does this mean anything to you?
If so, have you asked ‘who owns your freedom?’
What interest do they have in the nature of your freedom?
I believe all of this is about who controls the wealth of our societies.
It is they who define labour laws,
free speech,
human rights,
education policy
taxes and etc.
A small group of the very wealthy people
own and control the media, the popular culture and the news.
Therefore it is they who control what we have,
what we think and what we believe to be true.
It is they who limit our freedom and encourage,
in fact prosper from our inequality.*
Our increasingly militarised, armed-to-the-teeth police
along with other national forces (CIA, FBI, NSA, MI5, MI6, etc.)
have created national security states,
which have been slowly but surely curtailing our freedom to speak,
to demonstrate, and to be different.
This is an achievement Stalin would have been proud of.
Beneath these restraints,
there have been unseen, misunderstood technical,
political and economic changes
going on for over forty years.
They have been picking up momentum and intensity,
interacting with each other,
instigating wars,
spiralling consumption
and wasting resources, including human resources.
By now, contrary to politicians telling us that we are better off,
many people recognise their own growing impoverishment,
their disintegrating neighbourhoods,
rising mental, physical and emotional health problems
and a general sense of aimlessness, dismay and powerlessness.
These are all a consequence of an ever more fragmented society
fuelled by ever greater inequalities
and surrounded by a simplistic, banal and spiritually empty culture.
As the left-wing American folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote,
“some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.”
When the oligarchs rejected God as part of their moral narrative,
they chose ‘the necessity of history’, to justify their opinions and actions.
Choosing history without God** present offers an amoral explanation
that the suffering of the working class is a necessity to build a better world.
Choosing history justifies repression, dictatorship,
arrests, torture and inequalityto serve the oligarchs narrative,
which favours its own framing of history.
They used a distorted version of Darwin,
taking as truth that the biggest bloke in the room rather than the smartest
deserves to control state power.
Thus, they say, the richest, the most well-armed etc. are our natural leaders
to whom we must bend a knee.
How does a nation, a region, a people, a group or how do individuals
identify and define themselves as equals with a common cause?
Too often history has produced simplistic destructive codes
of blood, race, nationalism or other ideologies of hatred.
Too often within history, demagogues have produced simple dualities:
brown skin people are all violent therefore criminalise society;
Moslems are terrorists therefore destroyers of our otherwise safe society;
immigrants accept low wages, therefore drive down our wages…and so on.
Read history carefully and you will discover
these ‘conspiracies against the sacredness of life’***
arise from economic inequality.
These conspiracies are formulated or at least supported
by the oligarchs and their politicians
to divert people from understanding their true enemies
of peace, justice and freedom
are usually their own bankers, politicians and munitions traders.
In Europe there has been, until recently,
at least a partially held post-Enlightenment,
post-World War Two set of political and cultural values
about the need for personal freedom,
equality under the law,
fair play and for equal opportunity.
But the rise and then failure of neo-liberal economics,
spawning as it has, gross inequality,
unfairness and self-interested sociopathic discordance throughout society
has damaged a one-time idealistic unifying humanism.
Meanwhile many social democrats, trade union leaders,
intellectuals, artists and academics –
those who should know better –
have bent their knees to the rich and powerful as if their rule is our fate,
allowing their delivery of the worker’s movements
and the poor into the service of electoral politics,
thereby diffusing justifiable demands of oppressed people.
The left has been silenced by the overwhelming wealth of the rich
and made uncertain about their own beliefs.
The left has forgotten their idealism and forsaken its leadership role
in the general progress of human history.
For abused individuals, the only option that lies beyond criticism,
objection or capitulation is rebellion.
It is a consequence of frustration with the status quo,
a belief that the institutions have been completely corrupted
and that tinkering no longer works.
It is also a response to inequality that seems to have become institutionalised
within what may once have been a representative and legitimate state.
The rebel has lost faith that there is neither equality under the law
nor equality of opportunity for them.
This has opened these potential rebels
to the bombastic, hateful anti-establishment prejudices
of boisterous psychopathic proto-dictators (Johnson, Trump, etc).
That is why fringe right-wing populist groups are moving toward centre-stage.
In Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel, MR SAMMLER’S PLANET,
he asked, ‘what overriding idea or concept do we presently have
to bind all of us, this lose league of humanity, together?’
Perhaps this is too big an ‘ask’ and we can only imagine what this means
within the borders of the US, the UK, Indian or wherever.
I would wish it to be universal.
We know that Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela
spoke about equality,
freedom and justice for all,
which influenced many others beyond their own countries.
Perhaps, with the advances of the internet,
it may be possible that we, the less well known,
may also be able to find identity,
common cause and solace across great distances,
unregulated by local conditions, governments and media corporations.
The answer that is given to the people’s unhappiness
is to shop or to pay for counselling,
as if either could change the underlying condition of inequality
that supports this vapid unquestioning culture and soulless society.
What is the true heritage of equality in Anglo-American Democracy?
Is it this distorted inequality,
the injustice of being hemmed in financially and educationally,
of being ill informed about the real events which describe our lives
and having aspirations for our young
and having our own dreams for a better future
decimated by a very small number of people
who have literally stolen our wealth, jobs, futures and self-respect?
Is it working and middle class people so drowning in all the above
that they/we lose site of the great openhearted beauty
and cultural/emotional joy
in understanding we are all equal in terms of our very existence,
regardless of colour, religion etc.
Meanwhile they, the hugely wealthy 0.1% have desperately weakened our cultures and our countries.
Next week, line 3: there is no equality without justice.
NOTES