Civil Disobedience is the Opposite of Democracy.

I live in an era of history when were
burdened with the common misconception that civil disobedience is the emblem of democracy people commonly say civil disobedience is the essence of democracy and this is an error the thesis of this video to watching right now is that instead civil disobedience is the opposite of democracy don't believe me what do you think was the single most successful single most influential example of civil disobedience during your lifetime it's a lot easier to sympathize with civil disobedience in the context above modern Western democratic country it's not easy to sympathize when it ends in failure when the leaders of the movement or a tragic heroic snuffed out but is it really a positive thing to live in a society where 65% of people can vote for a law and then a small minority maybe 5% opposing that law through civil disobedience can completely subvert the course of democracy would it be a good thing if just 5% of the population in your country were fundamentalist religious Catholics who opposed birth control just 5% of people believe in that really passionate and let's say 65 percent of people voted in a referendum to say you know what birth control should be legal it should be widely available let's even say it should be freely available let's say it's available for free and that's in this country you're living it okay so there was a vote on this there was a referendum to make birth control free and available to everyone but just 5% of your population engaging in civil disobedience brought that down you would be but you know within your rights a wait wait wait wait wait a minute all of us participated in this democratic process and we didn't just vote you know there's some kind of procedure leading up to the vote people made speeches people wrote articles you know we engaged in this process maybe not as equals maybe it's not perfectly transparent maybe it's not perfectly fair but nevertheless with all its imperfection we participate in this process and sixty-five percent of us decided that this was in our interest to make birth control available to everyone and the 65% we didn't just decide that it was in our best interest we decided that this was in the best interest of a hundred percent we made this decision for all of us we made this to benefit you also because even though you disagree with us we decided that we're right and you're wrong so we're doing this for you too and now here you are you have just 5% of the population but you're well organized you're religious fanatics let's say you've got a little bit of money you know these this 5% of the population they've got donations coming in and through civil disobedience you're shutting down the airport you make it impossible for airplanes to take off and now this minority of the population is holding the whole society hostage through civil disobedience it's demanding that the majority concede to the minority that they don't rule in their own self-interest or the interest of 1% but that in effect this 5% of the population whatever maybe um I don't think you would sympathize if we were talking about anti-abortion pro-life protesters you know again maybe 5% of the population overturning the decision of the majority about abortion I don't think you would sympathize if we were talking about anti-vaxxers may or may not be 5 percent of the population people who are morally opposed to the use of vaccine quite possibly because they're religious fanatics what are the reasons if they hold all Society what we're actually interested in here are two things one is the difference between right and wrong okay it's possible 51 percent of the population will be it's entirely possible okay and that's why point two is we're interested in who who gets to be right who gets known who gets to make that who gets to make that mistake who gets to learn from those mistakes in a dictatorship it may be just one person it's the first it gets to be right and wrong but no I'm actually very fundamentally opposed to the model of a society being ruled and being led through civil disobedience of tiny minorities acting in their own self-interest or in their perceived self-interest what I'm interested in is the whole of society or the majority of society being engaged in discussions and debates and then coming to a conclusion and voting and then all of us having to deal with the consequences of that vote of that law being passed of that policy being oppressed let's come back to my question I asked you earlier I'm gonna tell you the single most decisive and important example of civil disobedience during my lifetime it was in the disputed election of the year 2000 the election of George W Bush against Al Gore some of you might be old enough to remember this there was a formal recounting process ordered if that recounting process had gone ahead as a matter of fact Al Gore would have become the next president of the United States of America the recount was legally ordered and it began to be carried out they had offices that a small office building and then a few security guards but they didn't have the army there didn't have a whole police force or anything hmm and an act of civil disobedience halted interrupted and prevented from continuing this recount of the ballots now this act of civil disobedience it looked like there were only 30 people involved maybe there were 200 people maybe there were 200 British I remember the the actual videotape that appeared on the news it looked like only a few dozen people were there participating in this in this protest in this act of civil disobedience I remember a political scientist who went through the picture of the protesters and identified a whole bunch of who they were what their connections were to the Republican Party and this this kind of thing um so it was not a huge mob of people now even if it was even if 5% of the population which would be a huge huge number people converge on this spot and physically prevented the counting of the ballots that would be the wrong thing to do because it's not about 5% of the population and it's not about 50 people or 200 people it's about everyone it's about all of us it's about democracy being as inclusive as possible or at least including everyone who wants to participate okay so through this act of civil disobedience a very small number of people in peculiar circumstances completely transformed the course of world history that's not an exaggeration the whole world would be different today if during that period of eight years even just that period of four years Al Gore had been impressed in the United States instead of george w bush that period of time didn't just have dramatic impacts the united states america had unbelievable impacts on the history of the whole world and yes the the civil disobedience of these few people the consequences were magnified by unique historical circumstances the consequences were very much magnified by a ridiculous decision made by the US Supreme Court a decision I did actually read but you know what all of political history transpires in unique circumstances all right decisions and events their consequences are magnified by peculiar or historical circumstances beyond our control all the time that's that's not what I believe in I don't believe in a tiny minority of people a few hundred a few thousand or even five percent of the population perverting the course of democracy and I know the excuses people are gonna jump up to me oh well they claim you know democracy is already perverted yeah fix it you think Congress is broken fix it I mean don't make that an excuse in my opinion for something that is fundamentally on kradic and frankly anti-democratic as the cure for what's wrong with your particular form of democracy in your particular country why is it that the romanticization of civil disobedience enters into our political discourse so late in the history of Western civilization hmm why is it that I mean if you just think about the nouns and verbs we use in politics almost the entire lexicon can be found in Aristotle right democracy aristocracy oligarchy the whole vocabulary and you know really even the majority of what you find in Karl Marx the idea of class interest and self-interest how democracy works and doesn't work we kind of get all the machinery of political science handed to us by this one author Aristotle in ancient Greece and that's because he's gathering together the work of many different people from several generations who observed frankly the rise and fall of democracy they observed both the advantages and disadvantages of democracy in Athens throughout ancient ancient Greek world why is it that when we read Aristotle we don't find this concept of civil disobedience I'll tell you why it's because it's obviously dishonorable and evil in a society that truly has direct democracy for someone to try to subvert that democracy through civil disobedience let's take the example of Athens starting its war with Sparta so this is the war that's documented by Thucydides in his you know masterpiece of Greek political history this is a huge momentous decision and what all sources record is that they had this democratic process where people came together the direct democracy they made speeches they talked about it they thought about it everyone got to stand up and try to convince the crowd tried to convince the citizens of Athens whether it were good idea or a bad idea for Athens to start this war with with Sparta no they did start the war and the war was kind of a disaster long story short but imagine if you were one of the participants in that debate were you really lived in a direct democracy where you personally had the chance to stand up in Parliament in Greece it wasn't a parliament but it was a the Penix it was the place where these discussions took place that you yourself had the opportunity to stand up in Parliament and make your case make your speech for why everyone else assembled there should agree with you and vote the same way you did as soon as that process is over imagine how dishonorable and really evil it would be for you to say well I didn't win in this debate I didn't convince enough of you to vote the same way I wanted to vote so now I'm gonna engage in civil disobedience now I'm gonna be a sore loser I'm gonna subvert the whole process of democracy I'm gonna even bring this society to a standstill I'm gonna shut down the harbor shut down the airport I'm gonna sabotage the military sabotage time engaging these forms of civil disobedience that today are celebrated as if they're heroic within Western democracies because I didn't it self-evidently absurd and it's self-evidently evil in the context of the discussions we have preserved from ancient Athens for someone to even propose this kind of civil disobedience so the genealogy of civil disobedience the emergence of this ideal as being something frankly better than democracy in many people's minds it only becomes thinkable it only becomes possible to imagine this as a moral cause when direct democracy has degraded into a form of indirect democracy a form of democracy that is so indirect that your country is starting Wars and you feel hey I never had a chance to speak in I never had a chance to have my voice or I never got to vote on this there never was a referendum I was never consulted I never voted you're going to war with my money my tax dollars if possibly my son and my grandson these people are going after war you're gonna kill people with my flag and my name I and my descendants are gonna pay the consequence of the decision and I wasn't a part of this decision at all I didn't get to speak I wasn't heard there maybe there was no vote at all where the name of democracy still exists but to some extent in reality you live in an oligarchy you live in an aristocracy you live in some kind of mixed form of dictatorship and then you are reduced to opposing that dictatorship through civil disobedience so in this way starting with Henry David Thoreau then with Mohandas Gandhi in India also there was a Russian school of civil disobedience prior to communism when the benifits our Tolstoy the theoretician of non-violence and civil disobedience okay now we have a Meisel Valor now we have a view of civil disobedience that lionize it that presents it as something heroic but even then it's only heroic when it fails it's only heroic when it ends in tragedy it's never heroic when it succeeds because when it succeeds you're still fundamentally talking about a situation in which five percent of the population quite likely to be religious fanatics force their opinion on the other 95% of the population if you want to see really influential examples of civil disobedience take a look at Israel do you think Israel should be ruled by the sober judgment of a hundred percent of the population participating in a democracy where they have to stand up and make rational arguments whether they believe in and consider the law on the Constitution and people get to vote and all this stuff do you think it should be a procedural rational democracy involving everyone or do you think that a small minority of religious fanatics should just be able to go and engage in civil disobedience if you've heard of the settlers in Israel that's one of the most successful examples of civil disobedience in the world let me tell you something settler is a very strange euphemism for what they've done in the last four years something like that yes a highly motivated especially religiously defined fanatical minority can push around the whole of society can lead that society into Wars and can prevent that society from fighting a war Israel must be one of the most disturbing examples in the world but people want to use this term selectively so that you're only talking about civil disobedience when you're talking about people in India resisting the British Empire and they don't want to talk about civil disputes don't want to use this term when you're talking about Zionist Jewish fundamentalists extremely religious people in Israel going out and basically stealing land in the West Bank it's illegal what they're doing even under the law of Israel let alone under the law of the West Bank Palestinian transitional authority and this kind of stuff that is civil disobedience civil disobedience is rule of your society by the most militant minority in Israel who do you think that is in Afghanistan who do you think that is I'm not going to claim to you that 55 percent of the population are always right and that the minority is always wrong I would I would never make that claim that's preposterous sometimes the majority in society is going to be wrong but the process of making that decision whereby the evidence is presented the it's our Wade speeches are made there were rational arguments and counter-arguments and then we vote okay so are we gonna have are we gonna have vaccines for everyone you know there's a scientific case there's a moral case there probably are economic considerations okay we've made this decision 65 percent of us have decided that a hundred percent of us should be vaccinated the moral opposition of just five percent can bring the whole of society to its knees if you believe in civil disobedience and I don't