“You rise as high as your dominant aspiration. You descend to the lowest concept of yourself. Free your mind and your ass will follow.”
– Funkadelic “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts”
The highest form of democracy is one that empowers individuals to pursue education and skills in any field they desire- to become whoever it is they aspire to be.
You can’t simply jump straight from the womb to medical school, though. People have needs: food, shelter, a safe environment to grow up in, friends, interests, all that crap.
Think back to learning the hierarchy of needs in high school psychology. The bottom rungs of the pyramid represent immediate physiological needs. Above those are longer term and interpersonal needs such as a sense of belonging and love. Higher still are aesthetic needs: things like books, movies, music, feeling understood, developing taste, and understanding beauty. All of this is needed for self-actualization.
Modern liberal democracy (theoretically) attempts to provide citizens a path to attain each of the lower levels so we are free to pursue our identities and work towards actualizing our senses of self.
Physiological needs and safety most people agree the government can provide. We can drink water out of the tap and we don’t worry about someone coming to take away our toothbrushes. In the United States, the social security system provides a huge net to keep older members of society safe and physiologically accounted for. In Taiwan, like most other developed nations, the government provides excellent health care. I can go to the doctor for any reason and it only costs as much as a McDonald’s cheeseburger back home.
If violence were to befall our societies across a region or country, citizens would lose security in their base level needs- let alone worrying about self-actualization. Large scale violence in a society is antithetical to members of that society pursuing self-actualization.
In short, democracy, being the engine that allows us to pursue self-actualization, is entirely incompatible with oppression and violence.
Our society is founded on these liberal democratic beliefs. All men are created equal, we’re endowed by our creator with the freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, all that stuff.
In the 24 hours preceding me writing this, the ICC has put out an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity in the ongoing crisis in Palestine. These crimes are largely committed with U.S. weapons and aid packages.
This isn’t the full extent of the violence the United States and its allies have carried out against the rest of the world- in the 1960’s, the U.S. incited the Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse to begin destroy large sections of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. We still maintain a naval blockade against Cuba. On 9/11 1973, the U.S. overthrew democratically elected Salvador Allende of Chile in a military coup. The Biden administration has torn apart families with over 1 million deportations each year, and our next (and former) president promises to do outdo him.
In carrying out this violence, the U.S. destroys cities, families, and causes physical harm to the victims. That alone is a crime and one worth fighting against. Furthermore, this system doesn’t allow our victims to even pursue the equality, freedom, or self-actualization that we uphold as a cornerstone of our democracy.
By denying these groups of people from investigating who they are, what they think, and what they feel like they’re capable of, we are actually robbing humanity of the culture they would have produced.
I argue we are and will continue to be haunted by the ghost left in the place of this culture.
This denial of cultural output is corrosive to the foundations of what liberal democracy even claims to be, yet that is how the empire has always operated.
If we don’t allow these people to free their minds, how can we expect their asses to follow?
Stuff Cam Wrote 