Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between. Strong black coffee.
Democracy dies in silence.
People assume this silence comes during the rise of authoritarian regimes when those who should speak up do not. It doesn’t. The silence that kills Democracy comes before. You don’t notice it because it is wrapped in tolerance to the point where empathy is used as a weapon against it.
Elisabeth Bumiller wrote a piece for the New York Times with the opening title “People Are Going Silent”. I know it’s the @nytimes but it’s worth the read. It’s an analysis of the present situation, where those who should speak up see their convictions fade away in fear. This is the silence that comes after the one that is responsible for their cowardice. This silence is not Democracy’s assassin: it’s Democracy’s pallbearer.
Democracy is a Phoenix. It has in itself the power to rise from its own ashes; yet we must remember that among its ashes are those of many people, innocent and guilty, who are consumed by its burning death. History has shown us this over and over and I fear we have learned nothing from it. An ideal as strong as Democracy is eternal but humans are not. There will be no rising from the dead for us.
Courage is what makes us go into battle with this knowledge. Cowardice is avoiding the fight because of it. Before the silence swiftly expanding before us, carrying Democracy to its grave, came the one responsible for its death. The one that matters most. Now they tell us empathy is Democracy’s greatest weakness as if such aberration deserves debate and consideration. And yet it makes perfect sense.
We allowed this idea to grow among those who despaired watching Democracy fail to address its true weakness: tolerance. Not only are we inclined to tolerate discussions of how empathy is dangerous, we were inclined to allow the debate of the intolerable as normal democratic discourse. We did not silence hate when we could: we made hate acceptable as part of a healthy debate of ideas. We allowed hate to transform into an ideal and welcomed its ideologues to the table as equals.
We went as far as qualifying hate and ranking its disassembled parts one by one, as if some are less hateful or even not hateful at all but misconceptions of hatred. All lives matter became the quiet mantra of this trend, one that is unspoken and yet found in every aspect of this perverse behavior that mixes equality with equity and extends a hand to all human beings of “good will”. We so quickly forgot the lessons of the Civil Rights movement.
Dressed in our tolerant robes we opened our arms to all because free speech is the corner stone of Democracy and in doing so we crushed its true foundation beneath it: the law. It is much easier to break the law than to make it better. It is also easier to keep a broken law than to fix it. We brushed the law into the courts for interpretation and allowed them to become instruments of political interests, no matter which.
Our legislators were given permission to stop legislating altogether and what was left of our Democratic process was slowly handed over to judges, supposed to make up for the lack of courage of the lawmakers. And when the courts obviously failed this task they were accused of all our troubles and misfortunes. Fault became a ball thrown around and never to be held, and in doing so we transform the meaning of tolerance, weakening it to the point where empathy becomes “the problem”.
What is this tolerance supposed to accomplish? What are we tolerating that we should not? The root and the cause of all our problems: poverty and hate. We didn’t just become numb to hate but especially to its instigator: poverty. We wilfully ignored it and denied it. We still do. “No democracy this old or this rich has ever broken down”, says Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor. “Rich” is the key word. We’re not rich. Far from it.
We may be the richest country in the world, but we are also one of the most unbalanced, where the top 10% of households hold over two-thirds of the country's wealth. That makes us a poor country, outside of the illusion of GDP charts and stock market analysis. Housing, health, and education are luxuries too many can’t afford or can barely have. The poverty resulting from this reality is both material and spiritual, becoming a breeding ground for hate.
Even highly educated and truly rich countries face problems posed by excessive tolerance, but when the absence of education joins hands with unbalanced wealth distribution, tolerance and empathy wither to the point of rupture. Societies tolerant of poverty become tolerant of hate because they need escape valves for the building pressure that threatens them; and the most effective escape valve for the poor and the uneducated is hate.
Poverty and hate are intertwined and we ignore them at our own peril. In doing so we open the door to those who offer the ones affected by both an easy way out. They come with solutions that are simple and effective and immediate. The poor and the hateful are to be dealt with, they say, but not through messy legislative processes they quickly accuse of generating them. Law and Order is not the answer. Order alone can save us. Law is the problem.
Those pesky legislators are to blame (which is true) and as such must be replaced by an enlightened ruler who will restore Order. As appealing as this may be to the uneducated poor it is appalling to the few educated among us, who understand what it means. Poverty will not be eradicated, it will be swept away from view. Hate will not be eliminated from speech: speech itself will be destroyed. Those of us who claim to fight for the right of others to speak will perish with it.
Freedom of speech means nothing without reason and tolerance becomes nonsense when it allows the intolerant to grow strong in its warm embrace. When Democracy stays silent in the face of poverty and hatred, no matter which, it dies. The silence we face afterwards is nothing but that of hope, walking on the ashes of our foolishness, as we watch Democracy being laid to rest. It will rise again. But not for us.
Let us not die in silence.
