A repressive society?

Most of us reflect some time or other on our own small roles in the great machinery of the world around us. We read our newspapers, visit blogs, look at TV, surf the web and perhaps engage in some idle conversation over lunch with people we find have more or less the same outlook on life as we do ourselves. We choose our own battlefields and usually end up winning a social or political battle over people we will probably never meet or for that matter even listen to. Very few of us will put ourselves in a situation where we honestly listen to someone who has a greatly divergent opinion from our own. We act this way out of intellectual sloth and perhaps some lack of social gumption.

We cherish our individual freedoms, but don’t reflect on them very often, because most of us live in a society where we are daily reminded of our “rights” by those we have chosen to be our proxies, our elected politicians. Our representatives in government also tell us that our individual rights are inherently dependent on consensus, i.e. subjugating our own liberty for the good of others. This is the core of the welfare state, and is only possible where we relinquish our individual freedom to the – shall we say – whims of a legitimate government.





As one of my blog colleagues so wisely has pointed out, the Constitution of the United States supposedly guarantees a number of individual freedoms from the government. In Sweden we ourselves abrogate many of our own civil liberties for the government, which in turn is supposed to act on our behalf for the good of all.

That this abrogation or cession doesn’t work we can see all around us, even in the United States. There the government has instituted the Patriot Act. Section 215 of the Act modifies the rules on records searches so that third-party holders of your financial, library, travel, video rental, phone, medical, church, synagogue, and mosque records can be searched without your knowledge or consent, providing the government says it's trying to protect against terrorism. In Sweden, where a fifty percent or more rate of taxation befalls a large portion of the population, where sales taxes are twenty-five percent on most goods and where each individual’s personal ID number can be found in countless governmental and private databases, these infringements are excused by political mumbo-jumbo about the “good of all” and even worse “solidarity” a well-worn term for political repression.

Solidarity? Oh, come on.



The word solidarity entails an active choice on those involved. Solidarity by proxy is often an empty illusion, but is extremely convenient for the bolstering of political power. We saw this for example in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and expressly manifested in May Day parades. We see it in Sweden where the trade unions entertain an almost incestuously political relationship with the ruling Social Democratic party. We see it in the United States where anti-terrorism measures become a panacea for the adverse effects of politics engineered by a thirst for power.

In both countries, politicians use a whole battery of euphemisms in order to placate worried citizens. What is surprising is that it works, and works well. Citizens in the United States relinquish civil liberties for the protection of all. Citizens in Sweden relinquish civil liberties for the common good. The euphemisms used by our elected representatives to excuse this repression are boundless. In the US, religious catchphrases and clichés work well; in Sweden, the litanies are more secular. What is common to both societies is the seclusion of power. Politically appointed civil servants align themselves with the politically correct philosophy of power and do their work behind doors, immune to the scrutinizing of private individuals.




What it boils down to is a need for a reinstatement of a wider freedom of information and also a need for a greater opportunity of “calling” political bluffs.

Unfortunately, we don’t do this. We gripe and then sit down for lunch and gripe some more with people who agree with us. If we really listened to others, we would also be able to hear ourselves more distinctly and in turn, ask of ourselves: What is the price of my civil liberty? What is my place, my real place in the society around me? Until we do engage in this kind of intellectual decontamination we will be “blessed” with a continuing stream of power-hungry leaders, more interested in furthering their own good than yours or mine.