Category Archives: Authoritarianism

Romanian Revolution

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism

This building reminded me of the transition from communism to “original democracy.”

 

The Revolution in Romania did not happen all at once.  It really started in the city of Brasov where we had spent 2 days. At first it represented a revolt against Nicolae Ceaușescu’s economic policies. On the morning of November 15, 1987, a local elections day, workers at a local truck manufacturing plant in Brasov led to about 20,000 workers refusing to work and marching  toward the communist party headquarters.  There, what had been claims for wages turned into shouts for “Down with Ceaușescu!”, “Down with Communism!” They even chanted anthems of the 1848 Revolution that not everyone had forgotten about. For example, “Down with the Dictatorship” and “We want bread.” These were brave actions in the face of communist dictatorship.

 

Ceaușescu had started to curb food and energy consumption for the good of the country and to reduce workers’ wages. None of these measures were popular of course with working people. 61% of people in labor participated in industry in Brasov. The economic decline of factories in eastern Europe in the mid-1980s hit Brasov particularly hard and led to the collapse of the consumer market. It started when Ceaușescu decided he had to divert payments intended for food production to paying the country’s debts. The state began to ration food stuffs.

 

The protesting workers from Brasov were joined by ordinary people from the city, and the combined mob sacked the communist headquarters building and city hall “throwing into the square portraits of Ceaușescu, and food from the well-stocked canteen.” In a time of drastic food shortages, protesters were particularly angered to find buildings that had been prepared for official festivities with food in abundance in order to celebrate the local communist election victory, which of course was a foregone conclusion. So the protesters celebrated with a massive bonfire of party records and propaganda burned for hours in the city square.

By dusk, Securitate forces and the military surrounded the city center and disbanded the revolt by force. Though no one was killed, some 300 protesters were arrested. Sounds a bit like cities in the US doesn’t it? Meanwhile protesters were being detained and tortured by state “investigators.” The communist party decided to downplay the rebellion as “isolated cases of hooliganism, rather than rebellion so the sentences were relatively light.

 

Though the Brașov Rebellion did not directly lead to revolution, it dealt a serious blow to the Ceaușescu regime, and its confidence in the pliability of the trade unions. Historian Dennis Deletant referred to the incident as demonstrating “Ceaușescu’s inability to heed the warning signs of increasing labor unrest, plunging blindly forward with the same [economic] measures, seemingly indifferent to their consequences.”

 

The Brașov Rebellion showed there was growing discontent among workers against the Ceaușescu regime, even though he believed the people loved him and he could do anything he wanted and get away with it. It was a precursor to the popular uprisings that would bring down the regime and Communism in Romania only two years later, after the fall of the Soviet Empire.

 

 

In 1989 when the massive power of the Soviet Communist party began to crumble  thanks to the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev, anti-government demonstrations in Romania arose in December of 1989.  These were heady times. It seemed like a whole new world order was being ushered in.  Around the world people like me, were excited about the burst for freedom behind the Iron Curtain . A communist regime that seemed invincible, as autocratic regimes always seem, at least until they are not, was losing its grip on power. What would happen next?

 

Things were so bad in the country that many people had to resort to begging in the streets for food.  Sort of like people do in cities of the west today. Amazingly, Ceaușescu thought the people still loved him. That was how out of touch he was. The people hated him. Ceaușescu was told to give up power but he resisted, until finally the people resisted and turned on him and his wife and the Communist regime which had been so powerful people thought it would last forever.  But dictatorships never last forever. Eventually they fall. And when they do it is usually with a crash.

 

In Romania hundreds of Romanians were shot and killed or injured.  When it was revealed that Ceaușescu was responsible, massive unrest spread through the country. When the demonstrations reached Bucharest, it became known as the Romanian Revolution. And that is what it was. In fact, it was the only overthrow of a communist regime in the course of the revolutions of 1989.

Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled the capital in a helicopter, but were soon captured after the armed forces turned on them. When the military turns on its autocratic leaders that usually spells the end of the regime. And it did exactly that in Romania. Ceaușescu was very quickly tried and convicted of economic sabotage and, amazingly, genocide. His wife was included in the trial as well. As a result, both were sentenced to death and they were immediately executed by a firing squad on December 25, 1989. The regime was toast.

The dictator  had absolute power until he had no power. The life of dictators can end abruptly.  Until their power evaporates, they are feared and obeyed. After that they are revealed as little men. No longer giant autocrats.

According to Vio, our guide for this part of our trip.  Ceaușescu had interfered in everything in the life of the people and as a result ruined the country and paid a heavy price in the end. He paid with his life.

Soon, Romania would have “original democracy.” It is far from perfect, but better than communism and outright autocracy.,

 

Romania: From World War II to Communism

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism

 

This building has been called Ceaușescu’s office. Nicolae Ceaușescu was the Communist leader of Romania for many years.

 

Romania started out in 1941 as an ally of Nazi Germany when it declared war on the Soviet Union. They did not care so much about England or the United States, or lord knows, Canada.  Russia was their traditional enemy and their King was a member of a great German family. As a result, taking sides with Germany against Russia made a lot of sense to Romanians.

 

However, things change, particularly in European international politics. After the defeat of Germany at Stalingrad, Romanian leaders felt the winds of change. In Romania, on August 23 1944, with the Soviet Red Army on the march, Romania’s King Mihai forcibly removed Romania’s Marshal Ion Antonescu from power when he refused to sign an armistice with the Allies of World II. As a result, Romania brazenly switched sides.

 

Of course, you might wonder what good did it do Romania to switch sides, for Russia, its erstwhile new ally, invaded and took over Romania as soon as the war was over. Romania became part of the Soviet empire.  And, Vio, our faithful Romania guide and interpreter on this trip mocked how the Russians since then painted the Romanians as eternal friends of Russia, which, of course was total nonsense. But nothing prevails more relentlessly in international affairs than nonsense.

 

Less than 3 years after Russia’s takeover of Romania, its monarch, King Mihai was forced to abdicate and vacate the castle. The People’s Republic of Romania—a state of “popular democracy“—was proclaimed.  It of course was no democracy at all. It was a communist dictatorship. The newly established communist regime, was led by the Romanian Workers’ Party which quickly consolidated its power through a Stalinist-type policy aimed at suppressing any political opposition and transforming the economic and social structures of the old bourgeois regime into a typical communist regime that bore little resemblance to Marx’s dreams of a workers’ communist paradise.

 

In 1965 the communist leader of Romania died and after a brief struggle Nicolae Ceaușescu emerged as the head of government.  Like so many autocrats, Hitler, Orban, and others included, Ceaușescu turned into an autocrat after enjoying the power which he later did not want to give up.  As we have seen recently with Donald Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil, it is difficult for some democratically elected leaders to give up their power. It is intoxicating and addictive.

 

In the early 1960s, the Romanian government began to assert some small degree of independence from Soviet Russian domination. I don’t mean to minimize this. It took courage to resist the Soviet Communist foreign policies. Romania did not abandon its repressive internal policies which it of course called “revolutionary conquests” much like Donald Trump calls his slide into autocracy “greater freedom.” Such camouflaging maneuvers are common with every autocratic regime.

 

Upon achieving power, Ceaușescu eased restrictions on the press and actually condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that effectively quelled the Prague Spring and his popularity rose spectacularly.  That popularity however was very brief.

 

Soon the communist regime of Romania became totalitarian and was even considered for a while the most repressive in the Eastern bloc. His secret police, the Securitate, was responsible for mass surveillance and severe repression with human rights abuses being prominently featured in the activities of the regime. He controlled the press absolutely.  It is things like this in history that should give all of us pause when we see attempts to control the press as Donald Trump has done flamboyantly in the US without much opposition. These are not innocent maneuvers. They are at the heart of a dangerous path to autocracy and all of us who cherish freedom must be alert to them and oppose them with firmness and vigor. I am constantly amazed at how cavalier Americans have been about such encroachments onto fundamental rights and freedoms. Such actions by Trump, acquiesced to by his Republican cronies, are dangerous.

 

For a while Ceaușescu was very popular for his efforts to remain independent of Russian foreign policy. But like all good autocrats from Hitler to Trump he grew increasingly authoritarian. That is what authoritarians do. His insistence on his monstrous People’s Palace shown in this photograph is just one example. He foisted it on the people whether they wanted it or not, because he wanted it. Like so many authoritarians, he also liked the grandiose, and insisted on building this People’s Palace, the second largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon in Washington even though Romania could really not afford it and no one wanted it.

 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Communist regime of Romania collapsed with startling rapidity. He thought his people loved him. He was wrong. Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were the victims of a series of anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe in that inspiring year. After a very quick trial they were found guilty and both shot.

 

This was not really a good start for what the new regime called “original democracy.”

Conclave: An Explosive Ending          

American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Movies, Populism, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

For those of you who have not seen the film Conclave and expect to, perhaps you should consider reading this post after you have seen.  The scene is quite shocking.

 

In the film  Brother Tedesco is the favorite of the conservative Cardinals who believed that the most recent Pope was much too liberal. They believe the Pope risked shaking the Church to its foundation. It would be shook to its foundation if any one of a number of candidates for the Papacy were elected.

 

The actual voting procedure in the film is quite interesting. At the exact moment that Brother Thomas Lawrence is delivering a vote in his own favor, because he seems to be the only candidate that might be able to stop Tedesco, like a bolt of lightning from God, there is an explosion and part of the ceiling of the huge hall collapses onto him and injuring him. It appears a terrorist suicide detonated a bomb that killed himself and also killed 52 people. Hundreds lie injured. There were also reports of attacks in Louvain and Munich. Perhaps it was a bolt of lightning from the God or the devil?

Brother Tedesco is quick to rise with a shaking finger:

 

“Here at last we see the result of the doctrine of relativism so beloved by our liberal brothers! A relativism that sees all faiths and passing fancies accorded equal weight. So that now, when we look around us, we see we see the homeland of the Holy Roman Catholic church dotted with mosques and minarets of the prophet Mohammed.”

 

Brother  Bellini says Brother Tedesco  should be ashamed. Father Tedesco replies,

“we should all be ashamed. We tolerate Islam in our land, but they revile us in theirs. We nourish them in our homeland. But they exterminate us. How long will we persist in this weakness.? They are literally at our walls right now. What we need now is a leader who understands that we are facing a true religious war…We need a leader who will put a stop to the drift that has gone on almost ceaselessly for the past 50 years. How long will we persist in this weakness? We need a leader who fights these animals,”

 

as he points to the crumbled ceiling.  Like so many political leaders, including Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump, he tries to take advantage of an emergency to grab absolute power for himself. Demagogic leaders love to take advantage of emergencies.

Sometimes, when people are fearful it is difficult to resist the authoritarian leader. Fear is a very poor guide for human conduct.

 

 

 

The Mythic Past

American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, Political Violence, Populism, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Invariably, fascist political leaders justify their ideas by destroying the common view of history and replacing it with a mythic past to which they aspire to return. Some thinkers have said this is the predominant trait of fascism. Fascists use propaganda to change the perception of them and disarm their opponents by promoting anti-intellectualism or anti-reason in order to insulate their false myths from reasoned attack.

 

As a result, they often attack the educational system to ensure that only their rosy view of history is taught and challenges are discredited. For example, although not yet fascists, this is what American conservatives have been doing in the US by making sure that their children only hear comfortable stories which won’t challenge them. They don’t want their children to be challenged. They want their children to preach the party line that Americans have always been good and their children need never feel bad about their history.  Again, the Nazis were masters of such techniques.

As Jason Stanley said in his book How Fascism Works, ,

“Eventually with these techniques and racist politics create a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.

As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and division solidify, fear fills in for a understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population.”

 

I have seen this happening many times in the US and Canada. Dominant groups like Christians, or heterosexuals, or whites see any progress for minorities as taking away from their rights and privileges. They begin to see themselves as the beleaguered group, even though they are the dominant group. They feel unmoored by the perceived disappearance of their privilege. It is very disturbing to see privileges slip away. It seems not only unfair, but unreasonable. So long for a time they thought it was better. A time when their beloved country was great.

But we must remember that the mythic past is just that—a myth. It is unreal. We must hang on to reality. It is our only way to ensure that we get out of this mess.

When we are in the grip of such myths we ourselves, “us”, as lawful citizens, as the  good guys and “them” as criminals who are threatening the society we love. Stanley put it this way:

“As fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous. “We” live in the rural heartland, where pure values and traditions of the nation still miraculously exist despite the major  threat of cosmopolitan from the nation’s cities, alongside hordes of minorities who live there, emboldened by  liberal tolerance. “We” are hardworking, and have earned our pride of place by struggle and merit. “They” are lazy, surviving off the goods we produce by exploiting the generosity of welfare systems, or employing corrupt institutions, such as labour unions, meant to separate honest, hardworking citizens from their pay. “We” are the maker; “they” are the takers.”

 

These of course are myths. History is replete with them. Many countries have harboured them. Fascist Italy. Nazi Germany. America, Canada and many others. We have them. We must not give in to them. We must recognize their holes. Their big holes that weak leaders try to fill with bombast and lies. It happened in the 1930s. It is happening again today.

Let me comment briefly on the election for an American president tomorrow. I will feel the same unease tomorrow I feel today no matter who wins the election. Such feelings won’t disappear in a day. The myths are too engrained. They are deep. Millions of people in America and Canada and elsewhere believe those myths and are drawn to them. They must be challenged by an awakened electorate that is on its guard. Or we will suffer a heavy price. We can still do it, but will we do it? Only time will tell.

 

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Populism, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism

 

I have always been a bit reluctant to call Donald Trump a fascist.  But now something happened that is tilting me to go all out.

As reported on CNN and reported as well by the New York Times, John Kelly Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff recently said,

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that.  So certainly, he falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

As White House Chief of staff in the Trump administration in which he served as a loyal lieutenant to now come out and warn us that Trump is a fascist is a game changer.  He worked with Trump for a long time. He is not bleeding-heart liberal. To say his former boss is a fascist a very powerful statement.

Kelly is no bleeding-heart liberal. He is a former American General who served as Secretary of Homeland Security before taking the position as White House Chief of Staff in the Trump administration for about a year and a half. And he says Trump is a fascist. How can we not take that seriously?

There is even more. Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said this to CNN, “Clearly, he has a predilection for leaders he perceives to be strong. And that’s just how he breaks the world down. He breaks things down between strong and weak.”  That is precisely, the essential element of fascism, in my view.  Fascism is the political philosophy of the bully.  And Donald Trump is clearly the quintessential bully.

Jacob Heilbrunn the Editor of The National Interest said, this, “he fantasizes the strong man. And that’s the blue print. Crush the media. Eviscerate the independent judiciary and establish his own rule over the country.”

Trump himself, said, “as president you have extreme power.” In his own words, he makes it clear that he has a deep fascination with power and in fact, worships power.  And his own lawyers have persuaded the US Supreme court to adopt this view of presidential power.  No one should assume he won’t abuse that extreme power.  His words have made it clear that he intends to go after his enemies this time around, if he is elected president. Esper said we should take Trump’s words seriously when he says he will use the military against private American citizens. And, as his Defense Secretary, Esper knew Trump well.

Trump has said the country is being pressed by “leftist lunatics…who, if necessary, should be handled by the national guard…or the military.”

According to Kelly, Donald Trump also said, “Hitler did some good things too.” That might be literally true—after all no one is purely evil just as no one is perfectly good—but politically it is dynamite to say so without proper exceptions. How can America Jews vote for Trump? How can we avoid inferring that Donald Trump is a fascist?

Now I am convinced that none of this will make any difference to Trump’s support, except perhaps to inflate it.  His supporters don’t take anything from liberal chatter except that they are out to get Trump and every time they mention such things his support just rises. The more liberals yell, the more Trumpsters are joyful.  Liberal squealing is the music they want to hear. As CNN commentator and Republican strategist Erin Perrine said, “Everybody has already seen this before from Donald Trump or stories about Donald Trump and it hasn’t moved the voters.”  She said Kamala Harris should not waste her time trying to drumbeat opposition to Trump. She should instead push her positive optimistic story instead. Others think it will remind Democrats why they must show up to vote.  We will have to wait for election results. Let me say, I am not optimistic about that.  I fear that deep racial unease and hatred in the US will rise to the surface and hand political victory to Trump. I hope I am wrong. Thank goodness I am wrong so often.

 

Everyone needs an Uncle Abe”

American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism

 

A friend of mine has an uncle Abe. We should all have an uncle Abe. Uncle Abe told my friend, “you know, I know about Stalin.”  Uncle Abe said Stalin could talk about himself for 2 hours straight and people would listen. The same thing happened in Germany where they had Hitler who could talk for 2 hours straight about himself and people listened with rapt attention. Now America has Donald Trump and he does exactly the same thing. These men all love themselves exorbitantly. Watch out for men who like themselves that much!

 

Another person who understands autocrats and fascists is Anne Applebaum. She is an intellectual who has studied autocrats for many years and written profoundly about them. She is sort of an intellectual Uncle Abe.

 

This is what she said in an article in the Atlantic, where she is a frequent contributor:

Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

 

History is important. We must remember it. We must not make the same mistakes again that we did when Hitler and Stalin came to power. Hitler was elected the leader of his country, but soon after being elected he deep-sixed the democratic garb.  And the people of Germany bought his rhetoric just as Americans have bought, and seem to buying again, his despicable rhetoric. What I have called the rhetoric of the bully. It is hateful rhetoric and every civilization must guard against it. This is what Applebaum said:

“This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

 

As Anne Applebaum said,

“Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

 

It is remarkable and deeply troubling the extent to which Trump’s rhetoric mirrors that of Hitler and Stalin. The people of Germany and Russia bought into it.  It could happen again in the United States. According to Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, Trump is a fascist.  We must constantly guard against such rhetoric because it lessens their humanity in the ears of the listener. We don’t empathize with such people because they are different from us. They are not really human.  If we believe that, we can do anything to them with impunity. That is the danger.

Releasing the Young from their Handcuffs

Authoritarianism, Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Media

 

Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is one of the most brilliant thinkers around. I first encountered him at Arizona State University where Chris and I have attended various lectures over the years during our winter stays.  I missed his lecture there by a couple of days, but thankfully got to hear his recorded lecture.

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) joined New York University Stern School of Business in July 2011. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, based in the Business and Society Program. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. I have been reading his articles and books for about 10 years and I still don’t know if he is a conservative or a liberal. I don’t think he is a socialist. He is an independent thinker. He wants to apply his research in social and moral psychology to help important institutions work better. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including Heterodox Academy.org. He doesn’t like orthodoxies.

His most recent research is teen mental health and how that is related to political dysfunction. He notes that we have deep political dysfunction that current teens will be stuck with even though they did nothing to create it. This reminds me of climate change. Same problem. According to Haidt the older generations have effectively prevented the teens from gaining the capacity to deal with the problems the older generations created and passed on to the teens. That’s not very nice.

Haidt has said that,

“Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat.”

 

The current adults have programmed the upcoming generation to fail, by bringing them up to be unable to think and act freely.  The new generation was forced to rely too much on their parents—the famous helicopter parents or even worse bulldozer parents. As a result, the teens are unable to learn how to deal with the world they have to face.

Haidt has learned a lot from an essay by an economist Steven Horwitz who argued that the loss of free play posed a serious threat to liberal societies because the upcoming generation has not learned the social skills needed to solve disputes.  They will have no chance  to solve them so will in all likelihood turn to authorities to resolve disputes that in turn will cause them to suffer “from a coarsening of social interaction” that could “create a world of more conflict and violence.”

Haidt has paid particular attention to the role of social media and its effects on these hapless teens. Here is how Haidt summarized his own research:

“And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.’

Haidt’s research showed a remarkable timing of youth attaching themselves to new social media and the rise of youth anxiety and depression.

This incapacity has been revealed most strikingly in university classes, though it is felt everywhere. Here is how Haidt described life for this generation at North American colleges:

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010, arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

 That is one reason hat Haidt urges governments to reduce the damaging effects of social media on adolescents by reducing its availability to them. He urges that they not be allowed onto social media platforms until they have reached at least the age of 16. He also says businesses must be compelled to enforce such regulations.

He thinks the most important thing we can do for them is to let them out to play. We should stop starving children of the vital experiences they most need to become good citizens and that is “free play.”  Not organized play much preferred by helicopter parents. He likes the laws established in Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas where free-range parenting laws help to assure parents that they won’t get into trouble for “neglecting” their children by allowing them to play freely. Kids should also be allowed to walk to school and play in groups as they used to do.

This could go a long way towards detoxifying social media for teens and adolescents.

A lot of people point to social media as the culprit. Haidt backs it up with solid science.

 

Avoiding a Smothery Death

Authoritarianism, Classic Books, Freedom, Rebel

 

I know I have been going too long about the wonderful book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But it is a classic and classics are worth it. At least in my opinion they are worth the extra time. I promise to bring these posts to a close soon. But I think there is so much to learn from that novel.

It is obvious that totalitarian societies impose horrendous encroachments on freedom.  Democratic societies are more subtle.

Of course, in a democratic society the arts of the imagination don’t usually threaten the state, but they help seduce us into what Nafisi e called “a paralysis of consciousness” and what she also referred to as “an intellectual indolence.” Both of those were  recognized by Huck Finn, though he expressed it in other words such as “smothery.” Huck Finn demonstrated that in order to avoid the “smothery” embrace of a conformist society it was absolutely necessary to rebel and “light out for the territories.” Nothing else will suffice.

Nazar Nafisi put the issue this way:

“Every state, including a totalitarian one, has its lures and seductions. The price we pay for succumbing is conformity, a surrender of one’s self to the dictates of the group. Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice. Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to do and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart.”

 

No one better exemplifies this awful choice more than Huck Finn who is willing to go to hell for doing the “wrong thing” so that he can save his friend Jim. Who is a better emblem of freedom and dissent from conformity that that?

Huck knows that to give in to “sivilization” and the Sunday school marms like Miss Watson, is to accept a “smothery” death and he won’t accept that. Instead, he will “light out for the territory” because  “there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” Huck would not give up freedom for a comfortable home.

Huck was like the great artists mentioned by Nafisi when she said,

“What made Brodsky, Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz and Hannah Arendt—all of whom took refuge in America (Einstein too for that matter)—resist the totalitarian states of their home countries and reject the empty temptations of Western democracies was essentially one and the same thing: they knew that to negate and betray that inner self was not just a surrender to the tyrant’s will but a sort of self-inflicted death. You become a cog in a vast and invisible wheel over which you have no control—Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, only without the comedy.”

Not for them a “smothery” death. Not for me either.