The many flavors of tyranny
By Tim Bearly
Reader Contributor
“When the government expands, freedom contracts,” or so the lesson goes at Dennis Prager’s so-called university, PragerU — a pseudo-college where critical thinking takes a back seat to reactionary dogma. Like others who operate fake universities, its “headmaster,” CEO Marissa Streit, isn’t in the business of educating so much as indoctrinating. She is, in short, a proselytizer rather than a professor. One might ask this pied piper of pedagogy to elaborate:
“But professor, of whose freedom do you speak? The blue-collar worker — or the corporate CEO?”
“Everyone’s freedom!” the snake-oil scholar would no doubt reply.
Scratch beneath the surface of the swindle, however, and the canard reveals itself. The freedom being defended is not the freedom to protest, to collectively bargain, to marry whom we please or to live without economic precarity. It is the freedom of the powerful — to extract, to exploit, to pollute, to monopolize, and to run roughshod over those too poor and too desperate to resist.
Like all childish, good vs. evil, black-and-white narratives, this framing conveniently lacks nuance.
In this laissez-faire fairy tale, government is the only form of tyranny, while private power — regardless of how vast, coercive or unaccountable — is presented as the purest and noblest form of individual liberty. “God bless those job creators!”
A Bushism from a few decades ago comes to mind. When a woman told then-President George W. Bush that she worked three jobs, he replied, “Uniquely American, isn’t it?” Unfortunately, he was right. It is uniquely American. More unfortunate still, it is also uniquely American to celebrate such an Orwellian idea of freedom.
Most of us agree that governments have always been — and likely will always be — a threat to our personal freedom. Differences arise, however, in what exactly we define as tyranny and in how broadly we recognize its reach. Some focus solely on government overreach, while others (particularly those forced to work three jobs) consider the many other institutions that are detrimental to our individual liberty.
Atheists often argue that even a Christian is, in a sense, an atheist when it comes to all the other gods — Zeus, Odin, etc. The only difference, they assert, is that the atheist applies their skepticism to one more god than the Christian. A similar logic can be applied here. We all oppose government tyranny (well, most of us anyway); the difference is that some of us extend our opposition to all other manifestations of tyranny as well.
Indeed, a principled anti-tyranny stance must extend beyond the state. It must include corporate tyranny, religious oppression and all other flavors of tyranny. If one truly values freedom — not just for themselves but for others — one should not focus exclusively on government overreach. But it seems there’s the rub. Despite their assertions, not everyone has a problem with tyranny; many are fine with it, so long as they are not on the receiving end of the truncheon.
Let us not forget that during the era of slavery, Southern slave owners spoke of their freedom, liberty and “property rights” being under threat because their freedom to own other human beings was at risk of being curtailed. Such examples illustrate that the issue of freedom is not always black-and-white — no pun intended.
Viewed from this prism, freedom can sometimes be a zero-sum game: granting liberty to one individual often comes at the expense of another. In cases like this, the irony and hypocrisy are glaringly obvious — much like seeing a politician waving a Gadsden flag, lamenting, “Don’t tread on me,” all while trampling the rights of others without batting an eye.
Imagine, for a moment, that — in accordance with the wishes of political activist Grover Norquist — we reduced government to the size where, in his words, we could “drown it in the bathtub.” Or perhaps let us take the libertarian dream even further, and imagine a world without government at all. Would life, as Thomas Hobbes suggested, become “nasty, brutish and short”? Or, in line with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thinking, would we revert to the noble savages we supposedly were before governments formed?
Perhaps it would resemble a Mad Max wasteland, with hordes of marauders scavenging for resources and enslaving the weak. Would corporations still exist? And what would become of existing corporations if government — our ostensible check on their power — suddenly vanished? Would tyranny disappear along with the state? The answer is clearly no.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does tyranny; when one form recedes, another inevitably rises.
Headmaster Streit, of PragerU, if she had more integrity might amend the aforementioned statement and add: “When the government recedes, private sector tyranny advances.”
Model it in a computer simulation and allow the unregulated free-market fantasy to play out. Watch as corporations buy up entire states as they accumulate even more wealth and power. Watch as the commons — public squares, libraries, beaches and national parks — become sectioned off so they can become playgrounds for the privileged few. Of course, you couldn’t complain, because you’d have the “voluntary choice” to choose to live under an Elon Musk-owned Texas or a Jeff Bezos-run Washington.
Political hacks on social media would insist, “It’s not tyranny, because it’s not the government!” But under the yoke of corporate overlords — subject to mass surveillance, policed by privatized AI paramilitary units, renting our land from them, working as vassals for them — what freedom would actually remain? When those in power are insulated from the rest of us in their own Elysium, shielded from all accountability, could it truly be called freedom? Or is it simply tyranny repackaged and privatized?
Unfortunately, how most of us answer that question is determined, at least in part, by where we find ourselves on the social ladder.
