We all may be familiar with tyranny from the government.
Since government is centralized it is easy to point out cases of tyranny and
abuse. They have a monopolization on the use of force and it is easy for a
government to abuse this power and slip into tyranny. It is because of this
concentration of power that we are vigilant against it.
Yet the tyranny of the majority is just as dangerous and
even harder to combat. It has no centralized power or structure; instead it
manifests itself through that actions of each individual in society.
Warnings from the
Past
Liberty has been under attack all across the western world.
People calling for hate speech laws that limit free speech, more gun control,
and increase social pressure to fire people because they have the wrong
opinions.
Yet attacks on liberty are not a new phenomenon. They have
been going on throughout human history with varying degrees of success. From
Rome to the enlightenment and event in the modern day.
John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty explains it best when he wrote, “Protection, therefore,
against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection
also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the
tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas
and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the
development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not
in harmony with its ways, and compels all characters to fashion themselves upon
the model of its own.”
What Mill is pointing out is that you not only need to be
vigilant against the tyranny of government, but also of society. We saw this
form of tyranny on full display during the 2016 election. The media, Hollywood,
academics, and activists all tried to use social pressure to paint Donald Trump
and anyone that supported him as the worst parts of society.
The SJW’s want to “impose…[their] own ideas and practices as
rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” This is why you get mobs of
people protesting anyone who dares be an individual. People as politically different
as Bret Weinstein and Ben Shapiro get the same level of outrage.
The people targeted are also not random people, but are
people of ability and talent. Tacitus the Roman historian warned that “When men
of talents are punished, authority is strengthened.” SJW’s target these men of
talent through the use of shame. Not shaming the person of talent but rather
shaming society for being associated with that person of talent—who is a bigot
if you did not know.
This allows them to control who is
seen as an authority and thus control what is said by that authority, giving
them the control they want.
Reaching the Limit
John Stuart Mill in On
Liberty wrote that “There is a limit to the legitimate interference of
collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and
maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of
human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”
The SJW crowd, the Progressives, Antifa want to push that limit
to the extreme. They want to use the power of society to exercise control. Some
social opinion is good, we do not want people pooping in the street, but too
much is tyranny.
It is too much when they try to put their own morality into
law. They try to hide this control behind words like safety and ideas that we
need more laws to make things better.
Tacitus brilliantly points out that “The desire for safety
stands against every great and noble enterprise.” As well as “The more numerous
the laws, the more corrupt the government.” These two quotes produced almost
2000 years ago are as relevant now as they were when he first wrote them down.
Bravery is required for freedom. That is why the land of the
free has to be the home of the brave. Why we need to be brave enough to say no
to the allure of imagined safety promised by the government. To be brave enough
to endure the slings and arrows of social tyranny and say something offensive.
We need to stand up not because we want to be right, but
because we want to be free from all forms of tyranny.
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