Tyranny

In 2017, as America was beginning its obsession with a tyrant, a short book titled On Tyranny was published. Its author, Timothy Snyder, writes brilliantly about political tyranny, but I wish he had explored other forms of tyranny. As I studied it, my mind drifted to the Jefferson Memorial and the words inscribed there: I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Every form of tyranny. Was Jefferson’s conception of tyranny larger than Snyder’s? I’m inclined to think so. I understand tyranny as Jefferson did: a cruel, oppressive power that denies life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of human experience.

In its simplest manifestation, in the family and the neighborhood, tyranny is a leech, sucking the joy from our conscious hours and leaving despair behind. I think of child abuse, spousal abuse, elder abuse, and bullying on the play ground. I think of gangs on inner city streets using swagger, contempt, and intimidation to hold their egos together. In their ambit, there is suffocating unease.

Across communities, fear and ignorance propagate tyranny. “Well well,” thinks the patrol cop. “A lane change, no signal, and a spook behind the wheel! Let’s have a look.” “See that lady, looking all holy in her mask?” a bigot says to his girl friend. “Look at those sneaky Chink eyes. Someone should mess her up.” “Fuck that,” mutters a Proud Boy when he sees two gays walking arm in arm and laughing. “Laugh it up, faggots, while you can.” The black driver, the Asian woman, and the gay men can’t be unaware of the ambient hostility. Their unwelcome companion is tyranny, ready to do harm.

Tyranny metastasizes in the job market, where wage slaves exhaust the best part of their lives. Many of them don’t earn enough to avoid poverty. Many others do but with little hope of owning a home, paying for emergency needs, or sending children to college. They simply limp along from month to month. Both groups are dogged by debt or crushed by unemployment. Why is such misery allowed to exist? Isn’t there enough wealth in the economy to put a roof over everyone’s head, set a wage floor under everyone’s feet, teach new skills, and provide for essential needs? I think there is. Lack of means isn’t the problem; it’s lack of will. Where ownership by a few exists, whether privately or through stock shares, the idea of paying well, sharing profits, and subsidizing employee growth is exceedingly rare. There are better uses for profits, like manufacturing propaganda about the “American dream,” paying lobbyists to buy the votes of politicians, and contributing billions to political advertising. In this manner, an oligarchic tyranny fattens as it oppresses.

The workplace is notable for more than its economic tyranny. It’s an aggregation of power structures that range from the single-boss variety to labyrinthine monsters with a hierarchical chain of command. Every node of the latter variety amplifies and elaborates a top-down strategy for maximizing profits. Ultimately, concrete orders and expectations reach the workers, the people who create a product or render a service. Thus their motivation is external. It comes from the enterprise, not from themselves. Almost always, work is evaluated against standards, also provided by the enterprise. The evaluators are people with delegated authority, whose skill set often has little in common with that of the workers.

The result is an unnatural and disagreeable experience, tainted with tyranny. The closest analogy I can draw is that of the horse and farmer. The horse can carry the farmer down the road to the next farm in short order. That’s what the farmer wants, and he can make the horse do it on command. In today’s industrialized economies, those with delegated power similarly make us do their will on command. They usually do so in a cordial way. Their “requests” don’t have hard edges, but we still feel their force. There’s no avoiding the truth that our minds and bodies are rented.

At the worst of times, a superior’s request may strike us as absurd, misguided, or demeaning. It may even have nothing to do with our “rental agreement”; it may be personally invasive and repugnant. It’s not easy to push back, and even if we do so successfully, we know our self-respect is under siege. Tyranny will always challenge our self image.

In the classroom, tyranny makes its stealthiest inroads. Young minds must be molded and trained for the sake of perpetuating the culture. That is received truth. After all, what sense is there in procreation if we allow our progeny to revert to barbarism? The need to replicate what we know and believe is so insistent that we frequently lose sight of who children are. Some of us, in fact, never acquire that knowledge.

Children have innate behaviors that drive learning. Playing, investigating, and imagining are the most potent of these. Through these behaviors, children discover and adapt to the world. When teachers stimulate these behaviors, they grow learning organically. When teachers supplant them with memory drills, bare assertions of fact, and lessons without context, children experience schooling as tyranny. The result is ennui and rebellion, as Calvin shows us:

What if children thought of school as a place where they would be surprised, fascinated, or delighted? What if they came to school expecting a revelation because revelations happened so often? Childhood would be an altogether different experience. No more Calvins slumping over their desks or running for the exits. No more thinking of teachers as hired oppressors.

We’d do well to discard the image of an autocrat when we hear the word “tyrant.” Better to imagine a hydra, the many-headed water monster of mythology. Its scent is foul, its breath poisonous, its blood diseased. Cut off a head and it regenerates two. Hold on to that image in your roles as parent, concerned citizen, worker, and voter. It will guide you well.