Consent: Democracy is Not Date Rape.

the concept of consent
has come to take on tremendous political significance in the 21st century political significance it didn't have in the 20th century i think the use of the concept of consent in the context of date rape has sort of transformed the way people think about the consent of the governed the role of consent in government itself without people really thinking clearly about why that is or how much of anything in government is supposed to work there was a housing development in a cheap suburb of toronto that ended up with one really run down shabby apartment building over here inhabited almost entirely by palestinian refugees and another apartment building just as shabby just as run down across the parking lot that was all israeli immigrants and they hated each other cordially and i remember reading a newspaper article about these two of our buildings this kind of contrast i would say is more common in london england but it was an extraordinary i mean in exactly the same circumstances that led palestinians to come and live in this particular neighborhood this particular apartment building led jewish settlers to settlers we can't use those settlers jewish immigrants to come and live in the same neighborhood and they would not consent to have their children go to the same school right they would not consent to have their children perhaps will differ from family and family that wouldn't want their children learning the theory of evolution neither one of those groups living in those two apartment buildings would consent to study the same curriculum about world war ii and the holocaust right and yet that's exactly what the government wants to do is to force those two groups of people to go to the same school for their children to see one another face to face to challenge the bigotry and ignorance of their own parents that the children will learn the government's version of biology including evolution that they're going to learn the government's version of what happened in world war ii and that may lead to squabbles around the family during the real conflicts with their parents where they say look dad this is what you told me happened in world war ii in the whole and this is what they say at school and that that could be just as much a source of tension within a jewish israeli family as it would be within a palestinian family but all of these issues probably much more extreme for muslim immigrants in canada struggling with those issues right so if you believe in this concept that government cannot do anything without the consent of the governed right there's a very real sense in which you don't believe in education period there are small towns in canada this is probably true everywhere in the world but let's just let's just talk about canada because i know it well there's small towns where every single individual in that town is a member of a crazy christian cult crazy is my own editorializing i'm sure they consider themselves a perfectly sane christian cult group okay there are all kinds of things they won't consent to they may not consent to have their children put into schools they also may not consent to the government coming in and forcing them to obey standard traffic regulations or sewage regulations or what have you is it up to the consent of the individual of the community even if it's 100 percent of people in the community to refuse sewage treatment program all right it's not the case the government is something that works primarily or only with the consent of the governed and then it's only some kind of remarkable exception to the rule or some kind of footnote to history the government does something contrary to the consent of the government all right that kind of coercion is government in principle government is precisely the force in our society the force in our lives that compels the children of palestinian people and israeli people to sit down at the same table in the same classroom and study the same curriculum with the same teacher and some of them are going to make friends some of them are going to come home and shock their parents you know probably probably there's some palestinians who end up getting an israeli girlfriend or israelis get a palestinian boyfriend probably there are unexpected friendships that come out of them probably unexpected conflicts and rivalry interpolating right the common table being created there through education right that is government and it comes about through coercion it comes about through directly and flagrantly violating the consent of the people being governed each and every day right water quality sewage treatment compelling apps taking away everyone's right everyone's freedom everyone's the privilege you probably eat three times a day you probably go to the bathroom a lot more often than that you may not think about you may not think about your freedom in this relation okay this is government it's not an exception to the rule it is the rule it is rule in principle what i've seen happen in the last 20 years is that more and more this notion of consent which has a kind of self-evident significance when you're talking about date rape we've talked about romance about personal regimen it's transformed the way people both on the left and on the right think about government and you know and it could be added they only think about this when it is convenient for them right uh you know on the right wing the most obvious theater the most obvious theater for these absurdities to uh be played out on to to demonstrate themselves be you know anarcho-capitalists uh libertarians uh their their notion of non-aggression and that you know the government should do absolutely nothing without people on the left-wing fringe i mean i've heard lately from um vegan anti-natalists who do not believe you have the right to reproduce to conceive and give birth to a child because you don't have the consent of that child to exist before it comes into existence i kid you not those people take their political movement uh very seriously and you know in the middle or you should say across the whole spectrum left to right you have movements towards uh minarchism minimalism even if it's only aesthetic forms of ecology that have to do with minimizing waste right even just calls for low taxes civil liberties and freedoms that are based on minimizing government right less less less subtract subtract subtract and there's not a lot of thought given to what it is they're subtracting from and i would i would note it really just comes up as a late motif people ask how dare the government invade iraq without my permission and they ask how dare the government invade iraq without the iraqis permission to they do they do right so i think this is a very strange moment for sort of coming of age in western democracies of gaining the maturity to really step back with detachment and recognize the coercive and indeed oppressive nature of government you've got options you you don't have to embrace this i really do understand that some people will make the well-informed decision to go and live in a cave that some people will live in a small wooden hut in the remote wilderness and they will get to experience what life is like with a minimum of access to government a minimum of access to government provided services like hospitals and education and electricity and water and sewage treatment plants when you put yourself out in that remote wilderness you'll get to see what life is like um under those conditions an incredibly small number of people will reject the social contract that's offered by government but the rest of us i think have to challenge this consent centered narrative all right um people including people in positions of political power they don't do good and they don't do evil they do things and later on they find out if those things were right or wrong later on they find out if those things were successful or unsuccessful um it's very easy to forget now that in a city like toronto or in a city like new york there was a considerable population of italians who did not want to go to war with fascist germany or fascist italy they may not have been fascists themselves they may not have really believed in or supported mostly but you can imagine italian americans italian canadians there was actually a considerable public that was in this sense anti-war if not openly pro-fascist and that war went ahead you know without their consent now many people in a very shallow way invoke the memory of world war ii as if it were a tremendously positive and one-sided thing world war ii as fought by the united states and canada had unbelievable unforeseen consequences unbelievably negative unforeseen consequences such as the creation of communist china under the dictatorship of mao zedong now absolutely nobody who was sitting down to make that decision and it is very much a problem with our democracies that a small number of people in a small room make that decision if it's not the case it's not the case there was some broad public uh you know plebiscite to determine but the people who sat down to make that decision you can imagine the long list of priorities that they were thinking about and worrying about including including places like czechoslovakia and poland and of course england and france of all the places on the map that they were thinking about certainly the lowest priority possible would have been china certainly absolutely nobody was thinking about how an alliance against the nazis with joseph stalin was going to impact you know their long-term future of china and japan if anyone cared it would have been an unbelievably low priority even compared to disputing the future of poland right disputing the future of greece there were a lot of different theaters of of world war ii a lot of different parts of the map to be to be known well guess what you know creating the dictatorship of mao zedong in china murdered more people than the nazis as absolutely terrible as the nazis were as compelling as the case was to intervene and extinguish you know the dictatorship of adolf hitler unbelievably if you can sit back and look at it with detachment that ended up killing more innocent people in china than died in the gas chambers of europe right now i have jewish heritage my own relatives of course unknown to me and my generation were killed of course you know if one could go back and rewrite history there are many changes you want to make all right but i'm not a racist okay i can't sit here and tell you that a jewish life is worth more than a chinese life that'd be deeply hypocritical and deeply racist for me all right and this should be obvious ask yourself have you ever heard anyone reflect on this in any high school history classroom university history classroom any textbook you've ever seen any newspaper what what i've just said to you sadly strangely in the 21st century it remains unthinkable it remains unthinkable to question how these decisions are made what the constant governances were and this is a kind of index of just how little democracy we have you can read the heartbreaking story of what happened in the peloponnesian war in thucydides so this is talking about ancient athens and the way decisions were made about wars at that time um people seem to remember sparta as being the opposite of democracy whereas athens supposedly represents democracy let me tell you get a detailed description of how sparta voted on whether or not to go to war uh all the people so they had a room full of people and all the people who supported the war walked over to one wall and all the people who were against the war walked them they counted how many people were standing on each side of the room oh sparta was a lot more democratic than canada was um the united states was in the lead-up to world war ii right um there's there's a lot more uh to be said about that all right the notion of whether or not anyone consented to go to war in world war ii the notion of whether or not he wanted meaningful consent before canada decided to bankrupt itself building a railroad before the united states decided to bankrupt itself putting a man on the moon any of the things however grand in scale however really unimaginable in terms of the millions and billions of dollars in the budget or however tiny but really transforming your life like forcing you to go to that school or going into that christian religious community and saying no we're gonna drag you into the modern world along with the sewage treatment plants and traffic lights and forcing your kids to go to school with everyone like you know whatever the some of these things have budgets in the billions and are difficult to conceptualize like putting a man on the moon or building nuclear weapons or starting a war an enormous war entering into a war like world war ii um some of them are boggling in their scale and some of them are so tiny right but this is government all right government it's so radically incompatible so fundamentally profoundly incompatible with this concept of consent that as i say is this unexamined loanword that's come over from the world of romance and dating into you know party politics it's not the case the government is something that primarily and most of the time is flowing along with public incentive than just once in a while just once in a while as a footnote as an exception of the rule is contrary to the consent of the government no government is very much integrally and by definition something oppressive something coercive something that's happening contrary to your consent absolutely all of the time every time you turn on the tap every time you flush the toilet and it is that government that's burdened you with the whole vocabulary of politics that you've inherited examined or unexamined from your primary school high school textbooks so on and so forth what whatever it is you think you know about politics probably 80 of it growing up came from propaganda the questions you've been taught to ask the questions you were told never to ask you had the freedom to raise your hand in the classroom but do you know what happened if you dared to ask the wrong question right yeah you learned to ask questions in school you also learn to remain in silence you learn that you'll be scolded if you dare to ask anything unthinkable if you dare to ask but isn't it the case that mao zedong killed more people than idol filler isn't it the case that mao zedong and joseph stalin both were our allies we're on our side that we fought for them and they fought for us in this same war that you're presenting to me as this entirely heroic narrative if you dare to ask those questions i mean some of you may have as children some of you may have had the experience of asking your teachers some of you may have had the experience of asking your parents and you may know the outcomes and in all kinds of ways this coercion the so-called oppression it does shape who we are it does shape how we live it does shape how we think most of all in terms of the things that are unthinkable the questions that don't we don't even think to ask um and i say this to you not because i'm an anarchist quite the contrary because i think we now need to take this next step in the 21st century a step away from frankly the whole liberal utilitarian tradition that defined our way of thinking about government as less less less that defined progress as the creation of limited government a limit on the tyranny that supposedly existed before