Like love, democracy remains a yearned-for, glorious exuberant – yet undefined phenomenon, about which far more is assumed than is ever clearly defined. It’s best known as a condition of freedom, another icon that remains unclear as to its meaning. What we do know about freedom is that it means to be liberated from the dominance of one person over another – of which there are many forms. They include slavery and various forms of servitude to kings, priests and royalty, employers – in fact any kind of unwanted control.
In modern times such dominance still exists, though we pretend otherwise. Oppression has become partial, and as such it’s also become largely invisible. The best examples are employment, particularly soldiering. Doing a job somebody else invented instead of one evolved naturally and spontaneously from within the worker, is far more oppressive to the evolution of human potential than we care to admit. Instead of facing the truth we live for holidays and vacations, avoiding much awareness of the fundamental problem – that most of work is employment. As it’s currently structured it dehumanizes us.
We’ve granted freedom to our children in a big way, in the 20th century making them politically equal to their parents. Indeed we give them more rights than we give their parents, perhaps in order to deprive their parents of any sense of owning their children, or their children’s lives.
The problem with freedom is that it always appears in the negative, expressed as freedom from something. We have become so intoxicated with emancipation that we find ourselves in a deepening quandary. Constraint is part of not only our human laws; it’s also an intrinsic part of nature. To hold the pieces of a constantly changing reality together, nature has put limits upon what is possible, without which chaos would ensue. Though we often ignore that truth by asserting that anything is possible, expressed to our children in the form of “you can be anything you want”. If we look at this claim carefully, it simply isn’t true. But we are so drunk with a sense of freedom, invested with the prosperity we binge upon, that we’ve given that sumptuous feeling of “be anything” in spades to the last couple generations of children, taking no notice of nature’s rules. Young people are hard pressed to fulfill our overblown expectations.
Though we have many faults, most particularly our arrogant belief in trial and error, instead of personal integrity and self-constraint as the best way to learn anything. But still there is no question that the greatest virtue of our country, even in the face of all our bad traits is that we never entirely conquer, acquire or dominate other people. We may torture some in the panicky throws of our fear of terrorism. We may insist other people become part of the United States; but we’ll give them the same freedom and benefits we give all Americans. That constraint of power, as incomplete as it is, tells the why we still remain such an appealing destination. It’s never been done before we did it – or happened so long ago it got lost in the sands of the rampant violence that has, until very recently, dominated human history. We defeat people, and then we rebuild their country, and, at least eventually, leave them alone. All of which means our heart is in the right place.
The problem with “freedom from” is that it gives lots of people the impression that democracy means they can do whatever they want as long as they get away with it-”on my own property” or “in our state” or “as long as I’m not hurting anyone”, etc. It defines rights, but no responsibilities.
The writers of the Constitution were trying to get away from constraints. Then they had to build an alternative. We’re still at it; though we’ve forgotten this is so because the process of building was shut down even before it began.
Thomas Jefferson knew more about change than the vast majority of delegates to the Constitutional convention. He wanted to write into the document the right of each new generation to change it. He lost; the Bill of Rights was his second choice.
We’re terrified to change the way government, economy, or anything else for that matter that’s political. We treat it all like a sacred cow that has to be both fed and never bothered – certainly never changed. Yet all the problems we keep trying to solve don’t change because we’re afraid to think outside the box of conventional wisdom about all these political forms. It isn’t bad people who make, or perpetuate huge social problems; it’s bad structure, meaning the way things are set up. Until we have the courage to do the unthinkable, we’ll keep floundering as we have for decades, slowly giving up our freedoms behind a wall of impermeability to what frightens us, using the very thing from which democracy rescues us to solve the problems those, now outdated solutions create – control!
