The Greatest Peril To Democracy

The Undefining of Personality

Now we have suggested that to those of whom they do control there is less fear, but that there is a joint recognition that none will have power if the “masses” are allowed to compete, or unite.  This is why unionism is opposed–not because they might have to pay more, but because they might lose some of their power;  that unions can give voice in common strength against management.  Starbucks’ offer to pay more to workers in stores that don’t unionize is just the latest example of businesses offering more to scabs to cross picket lines than they are willing to offer those who struck against companies.  But all of this can be maintained only by preventing unification of those who are being controlled and so just as they might try to use scabs (or the law when it would support their needs) to bust unionism, they use artificial fears to create distrust and disharmony within the community.  And to eliminate not just Nat Turner but Wat Tyler.  These rebellions cannot be allowed to stand and will create a unified intolerance against them.  By maintaining divisions they maintain conflict.

This creates a certain amount of volatility that maintains control, and preferably from the perspective of the empiricists, only enough to maintain unchallenged authority.  The Wat Tyler’s and the Nat Turner’s (there are multiple, multiple, multiple examples of failed rebellions, I just like the alliterativeness of those examples) ability to unify discontent always fails by creating a unity amongst those in power of control over those whom they are trying to control.  But the problem is in how they can maintain division and not themselves lose control.  At this point I will refer the reader to Thomas Paine The Rights of Man.

https://archive.org/details/PaineRightsOfMan

But there are several problems that arise from this deflection that can create too much instability.  (It might be noted I am referring to democratic governance, an autocracy might create opposition but has other means to suppression—of course that leads to even more oppression which creates more opposition that leads to even more suppression, and possibly, though it can take  decades, or even centuries, the eventual downfall of the suppressors).  But a democratic that is built upon a structure of democracy itself is a pareto structure, but with a promise of certain (shall I say inalienable?) propensities of human genetic evolution.  The promise of individual “freedom” is one that resonates with most democratic governmental entities, but when the promise of such freedom does not give the equitable voice within the community that individual freedom requires, and the structure, maintained by pitting sectors against each other, can lead to opposing threats—by those bent towards redistributing wealth, and those who might be susceptible to the same desires of redistribution, but would rather the redistribution be redirected in their favor and against their so-called enemies that they have been propositioned to believe are preventing their own access to more of the power within the society. And if we examine American economic paradigms we see that for a very long time there were certain alignments of those who felt themselves individualistic achievers of their own wealth and those who felt they were forced into a total dependency on the powerful.  This was sort of a farmer-laborer divide, but not quite that simplistic.  But those who saw themselves as having earned a greater share by individualistic efforts that still resulted in those efforts not having succeeded in granting them that individual respect and those who still had to work in laborial pursuits that granted them little more individuality than remaining chattelized.   So American history of progressive labor and conservative individualism became another division on the direction and meaning or purpose of identifying the needs of individual importance within the community.  The individualistic approach leaves out that, individualism, apart from the community, suppresses the importance of the community that the individual must be important to.  The contrary approach, probably better identified as the anarcho-syndicalist rather than leftist socialist or communism, centered so exclusively on equitable communitarian wealth redistribution, it denied all individual relevance within the community.

Now I spent the first portion of my “work” life basically attempting to survive as a dependent (paid chattel) of others, and the next forty years trying to remain independent, or adapting the individualistic approach.  In consequence I developed the perspective from experiencing both.  What I am attempting to do is to develop a pattern of inclusiveness towards both perspectives that explains the reasons how American democracy has continually failed both individualism and communitarianism.