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freedom
Elon Musk and the Dictatorship of Feudal Freedom
Since the Modern Era, power has depended on virtual money. The more money, the more power.
Apr 14, 2024
Since the end of the last century, I have occasionally repeated five or six straightforward exercises in classrooms in different countries with students of different cultures, ages, and social classes―with the same result.
One (inspired in Africa) refers to the classification of geometric figures, where we always see the differences and never what they have in common. In another, in the United States, I draw a cube on the blackboard and, when asked what they see, they unanimously say that it is a cube. It is not a cube, but three rhombuses together. To the question of what colors the sky and the sun are, the answers have also been unanimous, for years. But the repetitive response is a question: “Professor, are you also going to tell us that the sky is not blue and the sun is not yellow?” After all, that’s how they are on flags, in children’s drawings, and in any other representation that is not modern art―that which made Hitler’s blood boil. Something that hasn’t changed much today. The sky is not always blue and the sun is never yellow. Not only is it white, but the dominant colors are blue and violet.
In any case, the examples show that we cannot see the objective world without passing it through the lens of our understanding, which is colored by the prejudices of a society, or a civilization. A more biological case lies in the perception of the nonexistent color yellow on TV screens, but it is still an illusion.
A real democracy is a zero-sum game.
The question “Why is the sun yellow?” inoculates the interlocutor with a false fact, distracting them with the search for the correct answer. The same occurs when faced with the question “Why did socialism die?” Even more decisive than in quantum and relativistic physics, in the human world the observer changes the reality that he observes, especially when he or she uses language full of ideolexics.
Today, a student asked me: “Why is Brazil on the verge of a dictatorship?” Why not Argentina or Ecuador? Why is the sun yellow? I remembered Elon Musk’s repeated attacks on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil for his audacity to question the environmental effects of the tycoon’s fireworks company.
This discussion escalated with the investigation and order of a Brazilian prosecutor to block some accounts on X (Twitter), considering them “digital militias.” As commander in chief of the digital militias, Musk requested the resignation of the minister of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes, and repeated the speech about Freedom―carajo!
I am not going to go back to the mercenaries who have been deciding elections since the beginning of the century (like Team Jorge) and whose outpost in 2010s was in Ukraine, as specialists warned before the 2022 war. But I want to repeat that there is no democracy with an extreme concentration of capital and without transparency of the media, for which we proposed international committees of experts to monitor algorithms, etc.
“I am a free speech absolutist,” Musk repeated. The proof? In his networks, a humble teacher from Angola has the same possibility of publishing as him. He says nothing about the most obvious: every time he promotes his mercantilist ideology on X, the most political network in the world, it is automatically consumed by millions of people. It is the same concept of freedom as the slaveholders: by freedom, they meant their freedom, which is what guaranteed universal well-being.
The same day, Musk published a graph showing the drop in audience of the National Public Radio, celebrating that the only noncommercial network in the United States that survives is dying, thanks to the budget cuts of successive governments.
NPR is the only national radio network that still has journalistic programs with content and investigation, even though we disagree with many of its criteria when exposing some controversial topics. In their beginnings, and after decades of development, most radio stations in the United States were public or university stations, not commercial. Although the majority of the population was opposed, an aggressive lobby managed to privatize them in the 1930s and then created a new majority in their favor. Classic.
Let’s close with a synthetic reflection. The ideological and cultural model of the right is the economic model in which prosperity is not a zero-sum game. The prosperity of one dominant group could mean the lesser prosperity of other groups. The idea is reasonable: on a prosperous plantation in the 18th or 19th century, slaves were better fed than on one that was poorly managed or less cruel. But in both cases they were slaves, and freedom of expression was protected by the Constitution. Even the constitution of the slaveholding Confederacy included the protection of this freedom because it was welcome as long as it was a democratic decoration and not a real threat to the dominant power. When anti-slavery writings became a threat, slaveholders put a price on the writers’ heads and closed their newspapers. The libertarians of the 21st century do the same. In the United States, they have been banning more than 4,000 uncomfortable books, because their ideas began to be accepted by too many people.
Different, in a real democracy that model does not work, which is why dictatorships have been the preferred systems of capitalism, except when they could control democracies, as was the case of the vampire empires of the so called “Free World.”
A real democracy is a zero-sum game. The more power a group has, that power is at the expense of the power of others. Freedom depends on the power that a group or an individual has in a society. Since the Modern Era, power has depended on virtual money. The more money, the more power. The more power, the more your freedom and the less the freedom of others. Hence the discomfort of equal freedom, because it requires the distribution of power (political, economic, and social).
The Progressive Era in the United States was followed by a privatizing and kleptocratic orgy of millionaires in the 1920s, which ended with the Great Depression here and fascism in Europe. Then another wave of social democratic left to get out of the chaos, from the pre-war Franklin D. Roosevelt, the welfare states in post-war Europe, and the rebellion of the marginalized and colonized world in the 1950s. Until the dangerous years were stopped in the 1970s and imposed the dictatorship of “conservative freedom” of the 1980s. The freedom of the former slaveholder, the owner of the means and ends that we live today.
But beware. All of that also has an expiration date. The days of the end of the kleptocracy of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and BlackRock are numbered. If it’s for the good way, the better. If not, it will be the hard way, as history teaches us it always happened, while the prophets of power are always in charge of denying and delaying.
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How Free Market Mythology Denies Us Freedom
How can we hope to empower ourselves when we are shackled by the false promises of deregulated capital and exploited by Wall Street greed?
Jan 25, 2024
The headline of this column makes a big claim, but I’ll go even further. Free-market mythology denies us not only political and economic freedom, but psychological liberty as well.
In his 1980 inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem: government is the problem.” Soon, in the Reagan White House, neckties sporting an image of 18th century philosopher Adam Smith—oft touted as the founding father of free market ideology—became all the rage.
Reagan’s message was clear: Lower taxes, minimize government regulation, cut social programs, and the outcome will be a strong economy with more jobs. With less government intrusion in our lives, we’ll all be free to do better.
Unfortunately, Smith’s insights were oversimplified to the point of distortion. His 1776 The Wealth of Nations was used to justify the premise that a society works best when we each act solely in our self-interest. What’s virtually never noted is Smith’s judgment that “subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible…in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”
Free-market mythology prepares the ground for polarization, often at the expense of those already struggling to stay afloat.
Contrary to the view that acting for self is only “natural,” Smith noted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that it is the “precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor.”
And today studies confirm that humans enjoy giving more than receiving.
Yet, blind allegiance to a myth that puts innate selfishness at our center still undergirds the almost sacred notion that unimpeded-market competition is not only superior, but natural. For believers in the free-market myth, public involvement in the market is a grievous sin.
The consequences are harsh.
For one, we are made to doubt the essential, positive role of democratic governance in enabling and protecting widespread economic prosperity, as well as in achieving many essential public goods—from healthcare and education to environmental protection.
Market mythology ignores the fact that all markets have rules, even if unwritten. In a capitalist market like ours, what is the unspoken “rule”? It’s simple: The more you have, the more you accrue. The pursuit of wealth thus becomes not merely a means to an end, but the end—the sole aim justifying personal enrichment at the expense of others.
The result is wealth inequality in the United States that does not comport with our self-image as a beacon of fairness. Of 200 countries ranked from the most extreme wealth inequality, we come in 28th from the worst, between Peru and El Salvador. Here, the top 1 percent control about a third of household wealth, the bottom 50 percent—over 165 million Americans—control a meager 2.5 percent.
Moreover, such a market ensures tightening corporate power, undermining the very competition touted as a prime goal. Between 1985 and 2017, yearly corporate mergers jumped almost sevenfold. So today the top five healthcare companies enjoy 99.4 percent of market revenue. Three companies control over 94 percent of carbonated soft drinks. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo alone account for 69 percent of the retail market.
The harms from such concentrated wealth show up in citizens unable to afford decent housing as well as in deprivation of essential public goods. No surprise, therefore, that in both access and outcomes, our healthcare ranks last among “high-income countries.”
Sadly, market mythology also leads to self-blame. Once swallowing the myth that—regardless of circumstance, anyone in America can make it if they work hard—self-doubt and shame become unavoidable.
And that’s a big problem for any society. Shame is among the most painful of human emotions, which we often fight by seeking others to blame. Maybe it’s immigrants who will take our jobs. Maybe it’s those liberals who want to reward the lazy. In any case, free-market mythology prepares the ground for polarization, often at the expense of those already struggling to stay afloat.
Thus, to build a strong democratic culture, let us challenge the pernicious mythology of a “free market” purporting fairness but thwarting opportunity.
How?
We can start by facing the sad truth that the United States ranks 60th among the world’s nations in political rights and civil liberties, between Panama and Samoa, according to Freedom House—co-founded by Eleanor Roosevelt. And, as we have in the past, we can create rules that break up monopoly power and strengthen the labor movement. We can expand social services to right the shortcomings of the “free market” and bring us closer to the standards of our peer nations.
Once debunking disempowering free-market myths, we are free to embrace our empowering, widely shared values—those putting human and environmental wellbeing first.
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'Sixty Years Since the March on Washington and We Are Still Demanding Jobs and Freedom'
'Our legacy of resistance & building never ends'
Aug 26, 2023
Tens of thousands of Americans converged on Washington Saturday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a turning point in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement at which Martin Luther King Jr gave his galvanizing "I have a dream" speech.
Organizers say today's march was not a commemoration but a continuation of the demands made in 1963.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s only grandchild Yolanda Renee King, 15, told the gathering that if she could speak to her grandfather today, she would say, "I am sorry we still have to be here to rededicate ourselves to finishing your work."
"Sixty years ago, Dr. King urged us to struggle against the triple evils of racism, poverty, and bigotry," she said. "Today, racism is still with us. Poverty is still with us. And now gun violence has come for our places of worship, our schools, and our shopping centers."
"When people say my generation is cynical, we say cynicism is a luxury we cannot afford," she said. "I believe that my generation will be defined by action, not apathy."
“We have made progress, over the last 60 years, since Dr. King led the March on Washington,” said Alphonso David, president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. “Have we reached the mountaintop? Not by a longshot.”
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