Building Community
Democracy is two wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
I always thought this was a weird quote that comes up from time to time. It is used at times to argue or imply:
The masses should not trample the minority - in how all should live together. We have to make space for those who can't carry a vote on their own.
That the masses don't know what's best for the whole.
This is why we need guns.
That democracy was inherently flawed and that's why we have a representational republic instead of a direct democracy. (A direct democracy would be where everyone votes on every issue, instead of electing representatives to do it for us.)
That a simple or raw democracy with no solid principle or spirit was prone to exploitation. Put another way, majority rule has to respect an individual's rights to avoid becoming barbaric.
I was surprised to find that this quote is not as old as I expected. And that it was originally #5.
Majority rule has to respect an individual's rights to avoid becoming barbaric. Dragon-rule is an individual not respecting the majority's rights, and always barbaric.
A society's majority may try to exploit or destroy a group of people. In the days of scarcity, this could be a problem of limited resources, but now we have of life's necessities enough for all, and so nowadays it is is a failing of community.
As a nation, we callously turn away from our borders people fleeing from their lives, just as we have in the past - and for the same stated reason - fearing they would do us harm. Why do we do this? Our leaders do this because there are significant groups of voters whose sense of community ends at their city limits, and more frequently at the end of their driveway or the doors of their church. It's very easy for us to lay blame on the president or congress for their monstrous behavior, but it's much harder for us to come to terms with the fact that these politicians represent the best our communities can come up with.
As I wrote in my last letters, we have a serious "dragon" problem - meaning the rich who hoard wealth and push policies that divide us and further enrich themselves. A dragon never has enough. But how does one fight back against dragons? The shining knight charging up the hill is incinerated, and the social groups forming at the bottom get disrupted by being targeted for:
aggressive policing and the school to prison pipeline [1] [2]
us vs. them mentalities that I've described previously
outright violence, such as in union suppression
This serves as a two-birds-with-one-stone situation for them as they turn around and use them again to create division among the exploited. [1] [2]
Who controls the narrative?
That last part bears another look - and a thought for why so much effort is spent pushing it on us. The wealthy control the majority of the media, and whether red or blue they use it extensively to divide us. It's why people think that gang violence is a "black culture problem" and why people mostly just carry on with their lives after looking at the body of a Syrian toddler washed up on a beach in the Mediterranean after a failed attempt to escape US-inflicted violence on their home. What better way to create field ripe for exploitation, than to keep the field divided?
After all, who would agree that their neighbor should accept a leaky oil pipe be built over their drinking water? Or that we should abandon families to the elements after they flee from imperial violence? When it's so profitable to break a window and then make the world pay you to fix it, while you let the locals die from infected glass wounds, why would anyone agree to support that nation, which acts like a mob boss from The Godfather?
The anesthetic of our comfort has worn thin, especially for later generations, who have access to far more information than those that came before. It's easier than ever to see how global politics plays a weird lurching game of "profitability Twister", rather than just walking easily down the path of human progress, and all so the rich can be richer - at any cost.
Building blocks
And what paths are open to us now? Are we willing to risk the elevated position we have and ask those questions of "What must I sacrifice" to prevent the exploitation of my brothers and sisters across the world? Fritz Lang's Metropolis tells the story of a prince who worked against his father's empire - to return life and dignity to the enslaved. While a single savior could never truly save us, it gives the inspiration for the journey of solidarity that must take us one day beyond the shadow of the dragon.
It's been said before that "real communism" requires a post-scarcity economy, meaning that once automation provides the necessities of life we can move beyond the need for capitalism and even money. It's hard to imagine how all the details of life could function because of the glasses we're looking through, but I find it easiest to think about how rural communities rely heavily on community (communist!) support for survival, especially before transportation solved the problem of distance. The Puritan ethic insists that work is required to be virtuous - but what then when no work is needed?
We have entered a global community with the increasing speed of transportation, communication, and the rise of automation and the connection of every major population center on the planet. Fostering that community is how we can, one day as a world, shame and reject and resist the rich just as the Plato desired, if they choose to horde their wealth or rest uselessly upon it like in the medieval stories of dragons.
This is why community-building, regardless of specific beliefs, is the most important avenue. It is communities that resist oppression, not laws, even if individual beliefs vary, and will unify against forces seeking to exploit any one of them, like when farmers turn away the sheriff who has come to evict a widow, on behalf of a dragon (bank). This is more fundamental and lasting than trying to change the laws (no matter how necessary) or shame politicians (no matter how deserved), when there remains chunks of the people who have been convinced that you are not their neighbor.
This must, as a necessity, mean more than "being nice to everyone" but rather seeking out those local places where there is suffering and getting involved, those places where healing has started and offering support. And perhaps the most important and most difficult part of all - building beyond our existing knowledge to identify and support the best paths for improvement.