Adam Ash

Your daily entertainment scout. Whatever is happening out there, you'll find the best writing about it in here.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Deep Thoughts: Invisible Dictatorship -- why America is a dictatorship cross-dressed as a democracy

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be blogging an essay in several parts on America as something new in the world: an invisible dictatorship.

It will be an angry, funny, all-out polemic of 20,000 words for liberal readers, which follows the path beaten by Al Franken, Michael Moore and Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy. But it presents a uniquely different vision.

It’s also a self-help essay.

Besides detailing how the American dictatorship works, the essay answers this question: how can you live a life of freedom under a dictatorship?

It will show you how to create power and freedom in your personal life, even at those depressing moments when you may feel publicly powerless to change the country in which you live. Think of it as a combination of A Purpose-Driven Life and The Communist Manifesto for our time.

Here goes.

Part One: We The Chickens

1. The myth of democracy.

You believe you live in a democracy, a belief you share with 300 million Americans. It’s a belief as strong as Christianity, yet as baseless as Santa Claus.

If you believe in Santa, you’re the kiddie victim of a harmless lie. But if you believe in democracy, you’re the adult victim of a fatal myth. A myth meant to keep you blind and helpless, like a fly stuck by the eyes to flypaper.

Relentlessly, your belief sentences you to life in a prison of the mind that cuts you off from your true potential – a sentence to which 300 million Americans have condemned themselves.

We may as well be chickens in a vast egg-laying battery, squeezing out our daily eggs in a totally controlled environment.

You have a choice: to live in myth or truth.

Learning the truth may be deeply unsettling, because you will have to change your life as well as your mind. For the dedicated couch potato, this could prove more unnerving than having an unreachable flea dig its pincer jaws into a tender hemorrhoid.

If you’re not up to this challenge, stop reading. But if you’re willing to face the danger of truth to achieve a life of true freedom, read on.

This essay will show that democracy exists inside our heads, but not in the real world. And while it lives in our heads, it acts like spider poison: it keeps us immobile while our bones are being picked clean.

Yet we are capable of more than lifelong victimhood, blind faith, and mute passivity.

We humans have the potential of angels. Our thoughts can encompass the universe, as Einstein did. We spawn artists who give us new eyes, like Matisse and Picasso. Authors like Beckett and Orwell rewrite the world for us. Poets like Yeats and Whitman blow up language. Composers walk us on new planets of sound, like Beethoven and Mozart, Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

We have the capacity of angels, yet most of us trudge along like sheep. We think we’re citizens of a liberating democracy, but instead we toil in an imprisoning dictatorship. In fact, you’ll find most of us sitting for the better part of the day inside the prison of an office cubicle.

2. We think we’re free, but are we really?

The weird thing is, none of these cubicle people think they’re in a prison. Yet if they had a free choice, is that where they’d like to be all day? On the weekends, when they have a choice, do people flock to go to their cubicles?

No, they try to get the hell out, to the beach, or the park, or somewhere that looks least like a cubicle.

But ask these people if they’re free, or if they live in a democracy, and they’ll tell you “yes.” They’ll say yes even if you ask them while they’re sitting in their cubicles, shackled to their computers, breathing stale air conditioned by machines, surrounded by other cubicle folk, each cooped in their own cage, their behinds connected to office chairs for hour upon debilitating hour. They’re like a fried omelet that thinks it’s still a live egg or a chicken.

The strongest bar of our prison is our notion that our prison is a “democracy.” We call ourselves a “democracy” and we think this makes us free.

What is a democracy? A democracy is a state or a community in which the will of the majority prevails. (Too bad if you’re in the minority: democracy is a numbers game, the biggest number wins, the majority tyrannizes the minority.)

What is a dictatorship? A dictatorship is a state in which the will of one person and his cronies prevails, no matter what anyone else thinks.

The two concepts are mutually exclusive, but this is not what happens in real life. In real-life states all over the world, these two concepts are blended. All dictatorships have democratic potential, and all democracies display dictatorship tendencies.

We’ll take America as an example. It happens to be the most interesting example around, because the American people pride themselves on their democracy more than any other citizenry in the world -- while in actual fact America displays the greatest dictatorship tendencies of all the states that call themselves democracies.

3. America and South Africa

I grew up in apartheid South Africa -- one of the most notorious dictatorships of the 20th century.

I know something about how dictatorships work, having had the unfortunate good fortune of living my material. I was born into the Afrikaner master race – the deep, dark heart of the regime. My father was a high-up apparatnik. We were the elite of the white elite. Once I came home and told my mother about a new girlfriend – “her father knows Pa” – and she said: “At last you’re going out with a girl of our class.”

We not only ruled the country as vicious racists, keeping the blacks downtrodden and God pure in His High White Heaven -- we were snobs about it.

There are clear parallels with certain families in the US – the Bushes and the Kennedys spring to mind – but we’ll leave that for later.

Meanwhile, you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking forward to another jeremiad by a disaffected Bush-hating liberal sorehead.

This is more: a blistering attack on the very foundations of American belief, shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. It’s an overdue analysis based on firsthand experience of what a dictatorship smells and feels like -- the truth about America made visible by someone cast up outside its myth, in a faraway dictatorship whose traits were plain for all the world to see.

Today, the rest of the world feels the same way again, but this time about another country: our America.

4. Fascism Lite.

However, we in America live in blissful ignorance of our reputation. There are enough of us to keep each other warm, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

But this warmth is the coziness of ignorance. Pluck the scales from your eyes, and you’ll notice there are connections between dictatorships. They’re the same, although they come in different versions. Germany’s Nazi dictatorship was different from Italy’s fascism, and both were different from Soviet Russia and apartheid South Africa’s, and different yet again from today’s Burma or Singapore, and the American version is the most different from all the others.

You might want to call it Fascism Lite. America starts wars, lies about them, locks up people without a trial, tortures – things done by dictatorships – but it wears a smiley face. It has achieved the art of the invisible dictatorship. It artfully conceals its true nature, dressing itself up in democratic frippery to cover the steel body of its dictatorship. It manufactures a consensus that shields its people from the truth that America is more of a dictatorship than a democracy.

Strangely, this is a belief shared by the people and their rulers alike. They both think they live in a democracy. The dictators don’t know they’re running a dictatorship; they don’t recognize their own monster. And the powerless don’t apprehend how powerless they are. The dictatorship is invisible to both the rulers and the ruled.

How can this be?

Let’s begin by asking this personal question: how do you exercise your will in America’s “democracy”?

The concept of democracy works in a number of ways for any American: you have opinions and express them freely; you vote; you organize; you protest; you run for office; you gain office; you make laws; you govern; and so on.

These are all concepts that make you believe you live in a democracy. Let us examine how they work one by one, and how they add up to an invisible dictatorship.

1 Comments:

At 5/06/2006 3:15 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Democracy always leads either to Socialism or Dictatorship.

If the will of the people prevail, then the brute masses win and steal the wealth, art, science, and all other civilized accumulations that the elite "unfairly" possess. The envy of the common man is appeased at the expense of human civilization. This outcome always leads to entropy, just as in the old USSR.

If the leadership can use propaganda to control the opinion of the masses, then any governmental action is "mandated" by the supposed will of the people. As this continues more and more each generation, eventually reality itself can be dictated by the leadership. This outcome leads to Fascist or Orwellian scenarios.

The present government dynamic is a sly combination of both of these outcomes, as if there were two factions vying for supremacy, benefiting from the other's actions in the interim before one of them finally destroys the other.

The Problem here is democracy itself. It is stable and safe in the short term, but it ultimately leads to complete chaos. When you rely on the consensus of the people to create and enforce policy, then you have an incentive to warp truth and reality and history to match your intentions. Pure socialism and dictatorships don't rely on changing the past and the truth to the same degree as democracy because only democracy cares about what the common man thinks.

The consensus of people who are too busy, too uninformed of real facts (not propaganda), or too unintelligent, is not a wise way to rule a nation.

Democracy is an organized form of mob rule, where the setting of policy is determined by whichever faction can more successfully lie to the voters. There must be a more rational way.

 

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