Individualism

So I was reading this essay called MINORITIES VERSUS MAJORITIES by Emma Goldman in her collection of essays called Anarchism and Other Essays. And it got me thinking. She says:

Today, as then, public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant; today, as then, the majority represents a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirrors its own soul and mind poverty.

She sums up her argument against majorities by stating:

In other words, the living, vital truth of social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass.

But she also goes to state that she believes what Emerson once said:

"the masses are crude, lame, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. Masses! The calamity are the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only."

Draw individuals out of them. That one line. In every majority there are individuals.

But yet, as humans, we are drawn together, it feels good to be with pack. Maybe we do it out of some primal need for survival, for with the pack our chances are better for protection, food, etc. But it is the majority that rules, the majority elect the President and other elected officials. The majority vote into law (or not) our legislature. The majority. We are a nation which leads by majority rule. So the majority have it in their best interest to retain that power.

But who is this majority? Not the Democrats for they lost the Presidential election to the Republicans. But every couple years the cycle rolls on that one of the parties will win the Presidential election. So does the majority in charge change with every change of the President's political party?

I think not.

The majority isn't one political party or the other. The majority isn't one religious group or another. The majority isn't one gender over the other. The majority isn't one ethnic group over the other. Though politics, religion, gender and ethnicity have all been used by the majority to retain that power.

The majority isn't even a majority. The majority are those that control the masses. The majority use what they can to retain their power, and lead others to believe that they are part of this majority rule. Those with the money, with the resources, are ones who rule the masses, who lead the masses to believe they are part of the majority and therefore in the right. But even as the majority think they are leading, they are being herded around as a flock of sheep by the shepard. The shepard in this case the rich. The sheep are scared and need to be led.

But occassionally some individual in the minority, the ruled, wants a better life for her/him self and therefore struggles against the majority. And while it looks as if some progress is being made (the end of slavery, civil rights, giving women the right to vote and own property), the majority, the rulers, the rich, still are the ones in control. For they will give us, their sheep, some more meadows to play and eat in, but they will not give us the shepard's crook.