Tyranny of the Majority
Tyranny of the minority is worse
Thousands of years ago, Plato noted a big problem with democracy. If a democracy acts on the will of the majority, what happens when the majority is bad? In that case the majority might use their power to oppress a minority. What was to stop them? What is to stop a majority group saying that a minority group has to ride in the back of the bus or worse? Well - we saw how to stop them. They lost their majority in Canada and the USA 50 years ago and society has changed a lot. Now the members of that former majority feel oppressed because it's no longer appropriate to have nativity scenes in city halls and transgender people can use whatever toilet they want and gay people can get married (among many other changes).
But what changed their power? They sure didn't give it up willingly and even now claim to have been unjustly usurped. But from my view the injustices of the old oppression just became unsustainable because most people adopted a pretty liberal view of things like civil rights.
I watched it happen.
For years the newspapers and magazines were filled with horror stories about what it was like to experience the oppression.
It changed people's minds.
When I was a kid, my grandmother told me not to play with the 'coon' kids up the street. By the time she died she knew she couldn't say that any more but I'm pretty sure she still thought it.
And that was a tyranny of the majority that fell.
It fell because people in the erstwhile majority came to see that tyranny as bad and repudiated it.
But it fell long before there were legislative majorities against the oppression.
Those majorities grew out of the underlying social forces and that were reacting to the evil of the oppression.
For example, a grandchild might like playing with the kids up the street and disobey a grandmother.
But this change was spreading through society for a long time before it emerged as a majority in elections.
What happened was the oppressive behavior of the majority started getting hemmed in by the courts and human decency to the point that it changed the way people voted. It happened pretty fast. In the 1940s what I'd now say was extreme racism was the norm. (Not to mention that everyone smoked:-) By the 1970s extreme racism would get you in trouble. (It took longer to deal with smoking.) Hmmm - smoking. For years I have watched the places that people can smoke being restricted. My smoking friends felt oppressed. First they couldn't smoke in the coffee shop. Then they couldn't even smoke on the patio. I was not impressed. For a long time I was made uncomfortable by people smoking around me. I hated the smell and it made my chest hurt.
Western democracies are not pure democracies.
Changing laws takes huge effort. It's not just a matter of winning a quick election.
It is hard for any group to take over the legislature and dictate their will. Normally there is a lot of negotiation among competing interests.
We see that now in the American Congress as an example.
Brexit provides another example relevant to tyranny of the majority - a referendum - an end run around the normal checks and balances of legislatures. The Brexit side won a very slim victory there . They are the majority and are going to march on no matter what the damage. The problem is when people take winning by a slim margin in an election as a mandate to dictate your program. Here's the problem - if you try to dictate then the people who resist and mess you up if the election is close.
I'm Canadian. I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s and had a pretty idyllic life then with my parents and grandparents and the summer cottage and all that. I only learned way later that at that same time First Nations children were being ripped from their families and sent to residential schools where many were abused and many died and all were living away from family. Tyranny of the Majority
If you think that a majority decision by society is tyranny you must have a reason for thinking the decision is wrong and bad.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.