Tyranny and oppression is a beast with five faces. You’ve seen them before…
- church
- oppression by organized religion: believe and worship the “right way” or face death and damnation
- state
- oppression by governments that do not consistently uphold individual rights and act as if the individual existed to serve the state and not vice versa
- capital
- workplaces as private dictatorships, the tendency of the richest to buy public officials
- society
- fear of what strangers might think of us, fear of being ostracized for the slightest mistake
- family
- the inherent power imbalance between parent and child lessens as the child becomes an adult, but never disappears, and many parents wield this as a weapon against their children
Beware the false libertarian who rails against the tyrannies of church and state but ignore those of capital and society.
They don’t care about liberty; they seek only the privatization of oppression and a regression toward feudalism.
Beware also the conservative who rails against the state and and society while remaining mute in the face of oppression by the church and the rich. They are no better than the false libertarians, and tend toward an obnoxiously evangelical Puritanism.
Socialists who decry the private tyrannies of church and capital are little better. They seek all too often to legislate their ideal society into existence when not wasting time arguing over theory and tactics that haven’t been relevant in a century.
Worse still are the leftists who ignore the oppression all workers face at the hands of church, state, and capital and focus only on social oppression. They do the right wing’s work for them, dividing the vast majority of have-nots by unchosen characteristics (race, biological sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity) and pitting each against the other.
Leftists in the US are particularly egregious in this regard; they have little to offer besides book clubs and struggle sessions, especially if they’re academics or members of the professional-managerial class.
All of these at most ignore the tyranny of family, but many (like conservatives) actively embrace it and use the hierarchies inherent in the family to justify hierarchy and inequality outside it.
Those who cherish liberty strike at tyranny in all its guises. We can’t afford to be blind people touching one part of an elephant and thinking that the part we can touch is the whole.