Christopher Walker is the executive director of the
International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for
Democracy. To read his article on the struggles of the so-called democratic world
is like listening to a witch doctor give a lecture on heart surgery. You are
amazed that someone can be so self-deceiving as to believe in the validity of
what they say even when it is worthless rubbish.
Published in the Wall Street Journal on August 4, 2015, Walker 's piece came under
the title: “The West's Failure of Imagination” and the subtitle: “The
democratic world won the Cold War but has underestimated the tenacity of the
new threats to freedom.” What is wrong with this piece is that the author does
not seem to know what human beings have yearned for since the beginning of
time, and what they have been getting under different regimes.
Perhaps the best illustration we can have as to how we
prioritize our needs is to look into the compilation of the Jewish folklore
they call Old Testament. True or false, the story of the Exodus tells of a
Jewish clan that worked to earn a living in Egypt . A leader named Moses rose
among them and persuaded them that to work for a living was to be a slave.
He promised that if they will follow him, he'll take them to
a land where milk and honey run like rivers. Once there, they will live the
good life as do the princes and princesses of Egypt without having to lift a
finger. This freedom from work will happen to them, he said, because all the
quails they can eat will fall from the sky, the milk they drink will be
produced by sheep, and the honey they spread on the manna that falls from the
sky, will be produced by bees. Divine providence will serve them, he promised,
the same way that they now serve the Egyptian royals in their palaces.
Conned by that leader, the Jewish clan followed him into the
desert where they lived for a while on what they had looted in Egypt . When
they ran out of provisions, they looked for sheep or bees or quails but found
none. And so, they confronted Moses and told him in effect: freedom my ass;
take us back to Egypt where we drew the milk we drank from the sheep we raised,
where we collected the honey from the beehives we tended to, where we raised
the ducks we ate, and where we baked the bread in the ovens we constructed with
the tools we fashioned with our hands. Let us return to Egypt , and work
again so that we may go through the day on a full stomach.
The moral of this story is that the first priority of human
beings is to ascertain the security which comes from having access to the
primordial necessities of life. Take this away from someone, and they reckon
that no freedom is worth having if the price to pay is to go through life
without shelter or go hungry or go naked. However, a different program is
played out during the period of time that children go through the most
intensive learning phase of their lives. Because learning comes about with
adventure and discovery, the children associate the urge to explore with the
freedom that allows them to do so. If protective parents deny them that
freedom, they protest. If the governing authority denies it to them, they
dissent.
When they grow up and get saddled with the responsibility to
raise a family, they seek security first and foremost while their own children
advocate a more adventurous style of life. The young do so not realizing that
the price to pay could be the security they take for granted. This happens
because the children have not as yet lived long enough, or have not lived on
their own to know what the feeling of insecurity can do to them.
This is the sort of thoughts that come into play when people
appraise the kind of government that's ruling over them. In America , you
have a public that insists on having the freedom to bear arms despite the tens
of thousands who get murdered every year; a public that also tolerates the
massive intrusion into their privacy because they fear that someone inspired by
alien ideas may kill a handful. Oddly enough, the Americans sit at the two
extremes of the spectrum that extends from security on one side to freedom on
the other.
This says that the Americans have maximum tolerance for what
they do to themselves, and zero tolerance for what others may do to them. The
problem is that they believe they are so exceptional, no one else thinks or
feels like them. Thus, they try to intrude into the lives of others where they
seek to inflict an ideology they do not themselves understand.