“Liberty
consists of being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the
exercise of the natural rights of every man or woman has no bounds other than
those that guarantee other members of society the enjoyment of these same
rights.”
Declaration of
the rights of man and the citizen, French National Constituent Assembly, 1789
The Chateau of
Versailles is a magnificent monument to absolute monarchy and hereditary
inequality, the most opulent among many royal palaces built by European
dynasties. If you haven’t seen it, it’s spectacular. The complex includes the
largest royal palace ever built in Europe, two “smaller” palaces (the Grand
Trianon and the Petite Trianon), an opera house, a church, two massive stable
complexes and miles of manicured gardens with fountains, forests, canals and
statuary. It was originally built as a hunting lodge for the Kings of France,
and became an official royal residence during the reigns of Louis XIV and XV.
Compared to it, the White House is little more than a log cabin. The New York gilded
penthouse owned by the Trump family would be dwarfed by one of the two stables
of Versailles, which housed as many as 1500 horses and 2000 grooms.
Versailles is Baroque
opulence at its best. Elegance, unimaginable wealth, priceless art, pomp and
circumstance designed to overwhelm commoners with the notion that someone so
wealthy and powerful as to inhabit such mansion must indeed have been chosen by
God to rule upon mere human beings.
Now, imagine this
enormous palatial complex being stormed by a mob of angry, starving women
chanting “Bread! Bread!”, armed with kitchen knives, pitchforks and muskets,
moved by the primal anger that only desperation can arouse in humans. This is
how Versailles ceased to be a royal palace and became a symbol of popular
revolution. On October 5th, 1789, approximately 7000 Parisian women
attacked Versailles, overwhelmed the 20000 National Guard troops and forced the
King and Queen of France to adopt the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen, a document heavily influenced by French and English Enlightenment
ideas and promoted by American Thomas Jefferson, in concert with Lafayette.
This moment in history marked the end of France’s absolute monarchy. Two years
later, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded.
Those momentous
events produced the first Republic in Europe since Athens and Rome. The most
enduring motto of the French Revolution, initially one among many, was
“Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” (Freedom, Equality and Fraternity).
After the
American and French Revolutions, liberal democracies based on the Enlightenment-derived
notion of individual freedom have progressively become the most advanced and
prosperous countries on Earth. But particularly in America, the principles upon
which such democracies were originally built have been distorted to justify
inequalities every bit as grotesque as those that existed between the occupants
of the Chateau of Versailles and French commoners in 1788.
The United States
suffer from abysmal and worsening inequalities in wealth, education, health care
and life expectancy[i]. A
similar phenomenon preceded the Great Depression, and after a brief period of
middle class growth in the aftermath of World War 2, the country has returned
to the levels of inequality that characterized the Gilded Age. A small financial
elite controls the majority of available wealth and lives in its own world of mini-Versailles,
while millions of people have no realistic prospects of escaping a life of
poverty through bad schools, degraded infrastructure, fraying social bonds and
a pervasive sense of hopelessness. The middle class created by the post-war
boom is shrinking. Life expectancy for poor whites is actually declining, as
suicide and drug abuse increase in a group that finds itself in a socioeconomic
ghetto once reserved only to minorities.
In other words,
we are going back to a society built on hereditary privilege and ruled by a
small elite that uses wealth to buy power and religion to manipulate the
masses, just like the aristocratic elite that existed before the American and
French revolutions. “Prosperity gospel” preachers are no different from the
church that sanctioned absolute monarchy and hereditary privilege as the will
of God. If you are rich, you are blessed by God. If you are poor, you probably
deserve it, because it’s God’s will.
What went wrong?
A possible answer lies in the fact that we forgot the other two words in the
French Revolutionary motto: “Egalite” and “Fraternite”, and we twisted the
definition itself of “Liberte”: freedom.
The freedom
sought by eighteenth century American and French revolutionaries was from absolute
monarchs, aristocrats and the oppressive priesthood that supported them. Modern
American conservatives, influenced by the sociopathic rationalizations of Ayn
Rand, have re-interpreted that concept in a way that negates its very own premises,
confusing freedom with hyper-individualism and irresponsible selfishness.
Enlightenment-inspired
rebels sought freedom from selfish elites. Modern conservatives claim that we must
be free not from oppressors but from each
other.
Let’s re-examine
for a moment the definition of freedom in the Declaration of Rights of Man: “Liberty
consists of being able to do anything
that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of
every man or woman has no bounds other
than those that guarantee other members of society the enjoyment of these same
rights”. In other words, the concept of freedom includes that of
responsibility towards other humans. I am free to seek wealth, but not by
poisoning the environment other humans depend upon, or by manipulating markets
and causing other citizens who have done nothing wrong to lose their life
savings. I am free to believe whatever I wish, but not to impose my beliefs
upon others. I am free to state my opinions but not to insult those who don’t
share them.
In the exercise of my freedom, I must consider the
consequences of my words and actions upon others and society at large.
This concept of
freedom encompasses the implicit admission that humans are a social species
that must assure harmonious cooperativity to survive, not just a crowd of isolated
individuals competing in a zero-sum game. Responsible freedom is not absolute.
It is circumscribed by the freedoms of every other human.
Right wing
conservatives envision a completely different kind of freedom: freedom to act
in one’s own self interest irrespective of the consequences suffered by others
in the short or long term. This “freedom” is what Paul Ryan repeatedly referred
to in his botched attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act: I am free to be
irresponsible and spend my money on whatever I want rather than paying for health
insurance. In so doing, I am making my
health everyone else’s problem. If I get sick and can’t afford to pay for
my care, society will absorb the cost. Even if I were to be denied care, the
loss of productivity resulting from my illness or death would be paid for by
the rest of society. This isn’t freedom. It is merely a euphemism for
selfishness, just as the “Freedom Caucus” is a euphemism for “Group of people
who wish to be selfish and not give a fig about anyone else”.
This concept of
“freedom” is merely a hypocritical rationalization, a weak alibi for human
selfishness. And the reason why it’s ultimately self-defeating is that it
implies that while we all have a right to be free from tyranny, we also have a
right to seek to become tyrants ourselves. Taken to its logical consequences,
this “freedom” inevitably results in humans replacing the Ancien Regime of
hereditary monarchs and aristocrats with another one just like it, made up of
hereditary plutocrats and their cronies and devoted to the exploitation of
everyone else.
This “selfish
freedom” has been tried before throughout human history. It invariably results
in monstrous inequalities, which in turn lead to unrest. A woman whose children
are starving won’t be afraid to grab her pitchfork and storm Versailles,
because she has nothing left to lose.
American society
is spiraling backwards towards the very same unimaginable inequity that caused
the collapse of European absolute monarchies. A happy ending is highly
unlikely.[ii]
[i] http://inequality.org/income-inequality/
[ii] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615
