I have a political theory issue that’s been bugging me in several facets of my life recently, some overtly political, some not. I keep running into people with an authoritarian bent, and the more of them I run into, the bigger my problem gets.
Sidenote: You know how as you get older, the negative aspects of your personality seem magnified? OK, well anyway, that’s my mom’s theory, and I have seen it ring true in a number of people I know. I can’t decide if it’s that at some point we all say, The hell with it, I’m going to quit apologizing for who I am and just be me, or if we lose some of the social skills that enable us to mask our baser instincts when we’re young and looking for a mate. Either way, keep in mind that this post may begin exposing those judgmental aspects of my personality that I have long preferred to share only with those who have to love me.
Across the political spectrum, I keep seeing people wanting to dictate how the rest of us live. I could make an argument how these authoritarian tendencies don’t make sense for either liberals or conservatives, but both camps are full of people who want to tell the rest of us what to do.
- People who want to forbid gay marriage
- People who want to keep the uniform policy in Metro schools
- People who want to restrict adoption to certain groups
- People who want to subject pregnant women to drug testing
I could go on. But without a scorecard, I wouldn’t necessarily know which side of the aisle some of those ideas originate on. And I think a lot, if not all of them, are well intentioned by most of their proponents.
But. [And here's where I'm going to go off the rails. Forewarned and all that.]
Did NONE of these people grow up during the Cold War? Did NONE of them spend much time studying authoritarian dictatorships? And really, maybe that is the thing. I can say I’m a bit of a geek on this front. I was a European history major who went to college in 1989. Seriously, what a great time to be that kind of person. History was happening every single freakin’ day. Worldwide political movements that began at the beginning of the 20th century and shaped most of the major events of that span were ending right as I was studying them. I spent a lot of time reading, writing and thinking about both National Socialism in Germany and communism, as it was embodied in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe.
And a few tiny, tiny things I took away from all of that are ideas like this:
- We are all a lot closer to 1984 that we’d care to admit.
- Evil is banal, and it’s all around us.
- We are it.
- A thousand tiny choices really do add up to monumental misdirections in the course of human events.
- Saying, “It doesn’t affect me,” is the worst kind of ignorance. They really are coming for us next.
I don’t mean to compare individual political positions people take today in the United States with Nazism or with Soviet-style communism. [Another soapbox, another time: Why it really is both stupid and bad to call someone who disagrees with you a "Nazi."] But I do mean to say that the little things matter. And I don’t understand how thinking people can look themselves in the eye and say, “Well, I just know better than you on this point.” Or, “It works for me. You shouldn’t have a problem with it.” Or perhaps worst of all, “It’s for the common good.”
The tyranny of the majority is very real. In this country, in ways big and small every day, we allow a misdirected sense of “democracy” to run roughshod over freedom. Taking a vote and forcing the 49 percent to live by the dictum of the 51 percent isn’t about liberty. It’s about exerting authority. I reject your authority over me. That’s not what I signed up for. I signed on for a country that celebrates individual freedom, liberty and respect for each other. That your rights end where mine begin and vice versa.