The right to be stupid

When you look at leaders like Donald Trump and Narendra Modi , you might feel that the morons have taken control of the world. When you look at their supporters, you feel a strong sense of stupidity, hatred, orthodox ideology, discrimination, entitlement and patriarchy. All the evils of the world that we have been fighting for the last era, suddenly taking over the world.

I felt the same way, a strong feeling of dread for them and whatever made their existence possible against everything we did to eradicate all these evils. But then yesterday I watched a TV series ‘Mrs. America” which was about a woman opposing Equal Rights Amendments in the 70s. How that particular set of women thought about feminism and libertarian values forced me to think from their perspective. They weren’t really opposing the amendment as much as the women who represented the opposing view. They weren’t fighting the act or what it could do but the fact that the entire feminism movement represented housewives as dumb useless people who didn’t have anything worthwhile to do with their life.

How closely it relates to the current narrative and how the right wing today labels the libertarians and secular people made me think that this reaction, this sudden outburst of anger and hatred is actually a survival instinct of these people. Now that we have established the context let’s deep dive into it.

Democracy is supposed to be inclusive, it is supposed to represent each and every constituent irrespective of whatever social criteria that may exist. More or less so as democracies have been messy and poorly defined. This is the general ideal goal of democracy that we are supposed to chase. So we made anti-discriminatory laws, we made laws that provided protection to every faction of society who was being ill-treated by those who were left in power by the traditional systems. Men, white people, upper caste Hindus, the rich and so on. We were trying to build a world free of their control.

We went ahead and we learnt more of science, we left religion behind, we left tradition behind. We found that people who are still stuck in that old thought process and are stupid and can’t think for themselves. So we did the thinking on their behalf and we did everything in our power to put science and logic first. We tried to remove the dogma from our social context.

We did everything to make the world, a better and a safer place for our kids. We did it to eradicate all that we found evil.

But this “We” didn’t include all of us. Some of us still believed in religion and god, some of us still believed in tradition and culture. Some of us still believed that they had a right to discriminate. With every law that we passed, we disfranchised them, outcast them. They were the ones who were committing the acts that were now a crime. And not one or two but the entire lot of them. Millions in India still practice dowry. They may not be harassing the bride’s family for it but it is still an inherent assumption of a marriage. “Kitna lagane wale hai ye pehle khol liya jata hai.” Before anything else, how much the bride’s family is planning to spend in the marriage is discussed.

While our constitution became more secular and liberal, our people didn’t. The constitution didn’t represent them anymore. They were told that this new law exists and deep inside they knew that they were now a criminal. Their safety lied in the fact that there were enough of them. But we did this to them nevertheless. We took away their representation in the democracy. We gave everyone else a right but every such right, at least to them, took away a right (privilege) of theirs.

What they believe in, what they demand is immoral. No doubt. But that’s not what the promise of democracy was. It wasn’t the most moral society but a society where every voice is heard. We ignored some voices, we structurally made them irrelevant.

Now they revolt. Some of them realised that this was the perfect time to raise their voices and they did. And as more and more people realised that there are enough of them, they felt comfortable. They waited till they had enough power that the laws we made could be rendered useless, the constitution meaningless. And then they all came out, in a unison to demand their right to be stupid. Their right to be discriminatory. Their right to oppress.

We failed to include them in the change we brought. We made them criminals instead of convincing them to change their ideology. We didn’t bring about the change to their moral fabric, we shoved our morality down their throats. When they refused, we called them stupid, we called them morons. We believed that they were a thing of the past and we moved on but they couldn’t. They are here now and they have declared their right to be stupid and you are rendered helpless on sidelines.

We fucked up the democracy by excluding them and now they exclude us. Democracy is dead but we killed it.