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Dissent is the First Step to Freedom
I awoke from a dream this morning with the title quote in my head. I’ve no idea why; the content of my dreams is almost always gone by the time my transition to wakefulness is complete. But there it stuck. “Dissent is the first step to freedom.”
Clearly this was on my mind.
So I decided to write a piece about what the thought could mean, in spite of the fact that I have no idea why it visited me.
I believe dissent is on many people’s minds these days, as dissatisfaction with all of the entrenched sociological systems is reaching a fever pitch. It has accelerated, no doubt, due to our collective cabin fever, as we enter our fourth month of social disruption, without access to our usual palliative outlets — the adult equivalent of an infant’s plush toy.
Sports, shopping and film — from the meme to the full-length feature — are the modern-day equivalent of Ancient Rome’s panem et circenses — the ‘bread and circuses’ that they created to distract the “idle masses” — because they knew that a large group of idle poor people was a threat to their empire. This is the primary reason that The Games — called ludi — were free.
Clever Romans.
So here we are, with a swelling class of jobless poor — a larger contingent of ‘idle masses’ than we’ve had in the United States since the Great Depression, nearly 100 years ago — without access to the things that would typically keep the lid on the pressure cooker of their discontent. It is as much due to this development as anything that 400 years of systemic racism, levied most acutely against African-Americans, has transformed into a sea of protests and marches that in June earned the honorific of “largest civil rights movement in history”, according to Wikipedia. It even has a name: The Second Civil Rights Movement.
Good for them. Good for us.
Civil unrest is the wellspring of change. When resentment, boredom and distress co-mingle, the combination seeds urgency. When urgency is met with courage — the courage to stand out, consequences and power be damned — dissent is given a voice. Dissent can go by many words: “no,” “enough,” “change”, and the most powerful of all, “revolt”.
