Freedom vs equality

Every time there is any discussion of the end of the Cold War, the fall of communism is talked about as a door opener for a free and democratic system in Russia. Yet, what almost always is carefully ignored, especially by the Western media, is that there was a ballot in the communist Soviet Union as well. And sadly, ballots are the gold standard for detecting democracy in a given country. While the jury is out on whether the ballot has utility or futility, the narrative mentioned above, however, wins the purpose: getting people to internalise that Soviet Russia with its evil communism was no democracy and that capitalism was that great system where democracy and individualism flourished.

Truth be told, democracy and capitalism are incompatible. Capitalism is all about corporate greed for more profit at the expense of people’s rights. It creates few winners and many losers, the superrich and the super poor. We are witnessing that in America today. Every time I drive in America, I see veterans begging for food and shelter at traffic lights. These men who risked their lives for the mightiest army mankind has ever seen and in return, the state cannot even provide them food and shelter. Capitalism created corporate human beings called US persons, who have more rights than regular human beings with flesh and blood.

ExxonMobil is a human being in the mind-boggling interpretation of the 14^th Amendment to the US Constitution. These human beings get bailed out for their bratty behaviour with the hard-earned money of the flesh-and-blood human beings. These are also causing a slow extinction of all life on Earth with their thirst for oil. Such is the fate of democracy living side-by-side with capitalism.

This leads me to the crown jewel of the American democracy: freedom and equality. Those two beautiful sounding ideas are nothing more than punch words because they are incompatible. You can either have freedom or you can have equality. Both are mutually exclusive.

In the United States, if Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are given freedom just like everybody else is, the result would be and actually is massive inequality. Taming these competition killing giants while emboldening new ambitious startups would give everyone a fair chance of succeeding. Restricting the freedom of the powerful and more resourceful while giving freedom to the weaker ones would ensure equality. Therefore, equality squares more with communism while freedom with capitalism. The only time a freedom is restricted is the freedom of the disadvantaged ones, creating further inequality.

In the Middle East, the US doesn’t stick to even one of these cherished ideals. While Israel’s freedom is respected to have nuclear weapons, creating an asymmetrical situation in the entire region, the same freedom is not afforded to Iran. Creating equality would mean allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons while restricting Israel’s work for furthering its nuclear ambitions.

Equality would literally be giving the black vote in America four or five times the weight compared to the whites because of the sheer number of the latter. Equal vote doesn’t mean equality. Freedom for all means inequality for the disadvantaged ones. No wonder why the US old-schoolers and traditional war criminals today advocate for keeping the soldiers deployed in Afghanistan to ensure that the Afghan soldiers have the strength to match the Taliban. The arc of an immoral world bends towards freedom and that is a scary reality.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2020.

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