A bold statement. Because naturally I'm in favour of the argument I'm about to make, although the outcome is not a given and will more likely depend on the way the wind blows or a flip of a coin, if coins can still be had that is. Some of you might be reading this now and thinking 'what were coins when they were at home?' and would have turned to the 'Notes' section had there been one or to an Ancient except they're aren't any, because coins, whatever they were, are so long ago and not part of your humanoid experience; nor does present society value their once existence or acknowledge coins at one time held a value at all. Shillings, pence, pounds are all bygone currencies which can't be mentally computed and aren't even housed in any museums which earnest android scholars could attend, but now is not the moment to provide this lesson, if indeed we have reached that state.
Perhaps it's still to come...as is the undemocratic future I foresee, although we will think it democratic because we won't see that in our fight for equality we are actually procuring the opposite, by quietening voices, including our own, and cutting off our own and others' limbs. Being equal in all things has a cost.
And that cost is freedom: to be, to do, to think, to own as in to possess, to dress how we like, to speak as we find.
Democracy and equality can promote intolerance and the State clamping down so that more laws are passed and freedoms removed to form an equal society. The individual ceases to be. The minority exists but the majority has the vote. The will of the people is upheld, not that they realise the pickle they're getting themselves in. Pickle, as in jam as in a fine mess and not the conserves we British have with bread.
No, this particular pickle is coarser than even those that like it chunky like it, and often-times leaves a sourer after-taste than is usual, or it would but the senses that normally detect this are, in the majority, flawed to such a degree the sensation doesn't come as instantaneously as it used to, or even in some cases come at all; for the exhilaration that arises from exercising their democratic rights (and seeing it made it into law) has a similar effect to brainwashing in that sensibilities get benumbed.
People get high on democracy (it can be as addictive as a drug) and believe their own rhetoric, which is like a wave in that it joins with others if there's a common purpose as with equality, which once obtained could work against us in measures that removes every single quality that is considered to separate, from our style of clothing to its colour; from the length of our hair to how many metres tall we stand; from the origin of our given surnames to the level of our intelligence. Tyrants then, in a sense, would be able to honour democracy because we (as a people) would fulfil the role of dictator: report on each other, thereby enforcing laws we wanted made and were made because such was the demand they were passed into common law.
The notion being (and carried through), as C. S Lewis proposes as Screwtape in an address at an annual dinner: I'm as good as you. And although, as a senior devil, he's exploiting this expression in the negative as a means to creating earthly havoc, it's nonetheless true that this opinion, if held by enough people, could create open hostility and an unnatural order: an entirely equal world which is more or just as demonstratively unhappy and, paradoxically, undemocratic.
This future is by no means certain, yet it's far less uncertain than it was when others, aside from C.S Lewis, also asserted it as a possibility (see Jerome K. Jerome's The New Utopia), as if a powerful machine of falsehood (and desire) has since hypnotised peoples into believing what they conceptualised: that to live under (and abide by) democratic rule is to be like a field of corn harvested.
Picture credit: The Cornfield, 1879, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
