Maple Leaf Stories: Election Fraud (3)

"A man walked into a bank to hold it up and gave the teller a note that read, 'This is a stickup. Give me all your money.'

She passed a note back to him that said, 'Pardon me sir, please fix your tie. We’re taking your picture.'"

"Why do in Democracy, we often talk about Equality?" Maple went on.

"Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity have been the motto of more than one Republic. It is indeed something more than a motto: the three doctrines of the Democratic creed. Civil or social liberty, says James Fitzpmes Stephen, is distinguished from ‘the so-called liberty of the will'. The expression originally meant protection against the tyranny of political rulers. Their power was recognized as a necessary evil, and its limitation either by privilege or by constitutional checks was what was meant by liberty. People came in time to regard their rulers rather as their agents and the depositaries of their power than as antagonistic powers to be kept in check, and it did not occur to them that their power exercised through their agents might be just as oppressive as the power of their rulers confined within closer or wider limits.

Fraternity implies love for someone—a desire to promote someone’s happiness. Everyone is interested in promoting this feeling in others even if he has it, not himself. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to like any of the physical conditions of our existence.

Equality is at once the most emphatic and the least distinct of the doctrines of which that creed is composed. It may mean that all men should be equally subject to the laws which relate to all. It may mean that law should be impartially administered. It may mean that all the advantages of society, all that men have conquered from nature, should be thrown into one common stock, and equally divided amongst them. It may be, it is in a vast number of cases, nothing more than a vague expression of envy on the part of those who have not against those who have, and a vague aspiration towards a state of society in which there should be fewer contrasts than there are at present between one man’s lot and another’s. All this is so vague and unsatisfactory that it is difficult to reduce it to a form definite enough for discussion. It is impossible to argue against a sentiment other­ wise than by repeating commonplaces which are not likely to con­ vince those to whom they are addressed if they require convincing, and which are not needed by those who are convinced already.

There has been a long-term movement over the course of history toward more social, economic, and political equality. Nonetheless, at least since the end of the eighteenth century there has been a historical movement toward equality. The world of the early 2020s, no matter how unjust it may seem, is more egalitarian than that of 1950 or that of 1900, which were themselves in many respects more egalitarian than those of 1850 or 1780. The precise developments vary depending on the period. Over the long term, no matter which criterion we employ, we arrive at the same con- clusion. Between 1780 and 2020, we see developments tending toward greater equality of status, property, income, genders, and races within most regions and societies on the planet, and to a certain extent when we compare these societies on the global scale. If we adopt a global, multidimensional perspective on inequalities, we can see that, in sev- eral respects, this advance toward equality has also continued during the period from 1980 to 2020, which is more complex and mixed than is often thought.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, there has been a real, long-term tendency toward equality, but it is nonetheless limited in scope. Different inequalities have persisted at considerable and unjustified levels on all these dimensions—status, property, power, income, gender, origin, and so on—and, moreover, that individuals often face inequalities in combination.

Thomas Piketti suggests that human progress exists: the movement toward equality is a battle that can be won, but it is a battle whose outcome is uncertain, a fragile social and political process that is always ongoing and in question. At present, humanity is in better health than it has ever been; it also has more access to education and culture than ever before. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, hardly 10 percent of the world population over the age of fifteen could read and write, whereas today more than 85 percent is literate. In 1820, less than 10 percent of the world population, attended primary school; in 2020, more than half of the young generation in wealthy countries, attended a university.

On average, life expectancy at birth has risen worldwide, from about twenty-six years in 1820 to seventy-two years in 2020. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, about 20 percent of newborns on the planet died in the course of their first year, as com- pared with less than 1 percent today. If we concentrate on people who reached age one, life expectancy at birth has risen from about thirty-two years in 1820 to seventy-three years in 2020. Two centuries ago, only a small minority of the population could hope to live to be fifty or sixty years old; today, that privilege has become the norm. To be sure, this great leap forward merely shifted inequalities to another level.

As access to certain fundamental rights and goods (such as literacy or elementary health care) is gradually extended to the whole population, new inequalities appear at higher levels and require new responses. Like the quest for ideal democracy, which is nothing other than the march toward political equality, the march toward equality in all its forms (social, economic, educational, cultural, political) is an ongoing process that will never be completed.

Human population and average income have both multiplied more than tenfold since the eighteenth century. The former has risen from about 600 million in 1700 to more than 7.5 billion in 2020 while the latter, on the basis of the imperfect historical data regarding salaries and wages, production, and prices, has risen from an average purchasing power of less that 100 euros per month per inhabitant of the planet in the eighteenth century to about 1,000 euros per month per inhabitant at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Can these tenfold increases be described as human progress? The interpretation of these transformations is in reality far more complex than it is for health care and education. The spectacular growth of the world population reflects, of course, real improvement in the condi- tions of individuals’ lives, particularly thanks to advances in agricul- ture and food supply that have made it possible to escape from cycles of overpopulation and shortages. It also derives from the fall in in- fant mortality and from the fact that an increasing number of par- ents have been able to grow old with living children, which is not insignificant.

The general increase in population, production, and incomes since the eighteenth century took place at the price of overexploiting the planet’s natural resources, and to examine the sustainability of such a process and the institutional mechanisms that would make its radical reorientation possible.

We must be wary: the solution cannot be found only among purely environmental indicators, to the exclusion of socioeconomic indica- tors, including incomes. The reason for this is simple: human beings need to live in harmony with nature, but they also need housing, food, clothing, and access to culture. Above all, they need justice. Unless we are capable of measuring incomes, the inequality of their distri- bution, and their development over time, it is hard to see how we could develop norms of justice that would allow us to concentrate our ef- forts on the wealthiest people and rethink the organization of the global economic system in a way acceptable to the humblest. Without resolute action seeking to drastically compress socioeconomic in- equalities, there is no solution to the environmental and climatic crisis. To make progress in this direction, we must combine different indicators—environmental and economic, for example—and independently set targets for carbon emissions or biodiversity while at the same time formulating objectives that include the reduction of in- equalities in income and the distribution of fiscal and social deductions and public expenditures. In this way we may compare different sets of public policies that make it possible to achieve our environmental objectives.

Property and its distribution play an important role in our topic. Unlike income, which represents what one earns over a given period, property refers to everything one owns at a certain point in time. Like income, property is a social relationship, in the sense that it acquires its full meaning only within a particular society that is characterized by a set of rules and specific power relations between social groups. Property is a historically situated notion: it depends on the way each society defines the legitimate forms of ownership (land, houses, factories, machines, seas, mountains, monuments, financial assets, knowledge, slaves, and so on), as well as the legal procedures and practices that structure and delimit property relations and power relations among the social groups concerned.

In the Western world’s acquisition of wealth, slavery and colonialism played a central role. Today, the distribution of wealth among countries, as well as within them, is still deeply marked by this heritage. The development of Western industrial capitalism is closely linked to the international division of labor, the unrestrained exploitation of natural resources, and the military and colonial domination that developed gradually between the European powers and the rest of the planet starting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and accelerating during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The exit from slavery and colonialism, a major step in the long march toward equality, involves conflicts and struggles, liberations and injustices. The slave revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1791 paved the way for the end of slavery and colonialism, but the battle for racial equality is still being fought. The same is true of inequalities in status in general: in 1789 the French Revolution took an essential step by abolishing the nobility’s privileges, but it did not do away with the multiple privi- leges of money—far from it.

The battle for equality is not over. It must be continued by pushing to its logical conclusion the movement toward the welfare state, progressive taxation, real equality, and the struggle against all kinds of discrimination. This battle also, and especially, involves a structural transformation of the global economic system. The end of colonialism has made it possible to begin a process of equalization, but the world- economy remains profoundly hierarchical and unequal in its workings.

The battle for equality will continue in the twenty-first century, basing itself chiefly on the memory of past struggles. If a historical move- ment toward more social, economic, and political equality has been possible over the last two centuries, that is above all thanks to a series of revolts, revolutions, and political movements of great scope. The same will be true in the future.

What then are the implications of this for alleged fraud in the 2024 election in Indonesia? Such fraud is contrary to Political Equality and Human Rights. A system as democratic to the extent that all members of society share equal fundamental political power. That democracy is good primarily because it works. Consider, by analogy, a hammer. We value hammers not as ends in themselves, but because they do a job. We would not insist on using an inferior hammer over a better hammer. We would not insist on using a hammer when we need a wrench.If the Indonesian people allow election fraud to continue to occur, then they will be left behind in the battle for social justice and equality, which the founding parents dreamed of for all Indonesian people.

We'll go again with in our discussion on next fragmen, bi 'idhnillah."

Then Maple was rhyming Linkin Park rapping,

All I know

Time is a valuable thing

Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings

Watch it count down to the end of the day

The clock ticks life away *)

Citations & References:

- James Fitzpmes Stephen, Liberty, equality, Fraternity, and Three Brief Essays, 1991, The University of Chicago

- Thomas Piketti, A Brief History of Equality, 2022, Harvard College

*) "In The End" written by Joseph Hahn, Brad Delson, Mike Shinoda, Robert G. Bourdon & Chester Charles Bennington

[Episode 4]

[Episode 2]

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