And You Thought You Were Free?


If you had asked me six years ago, 'What is the difference between the West and the world of Islam?' I would probably have replied : 'Well, in the West people are more free. Firstly, democracy has established its roots more firmly in the West so that citizens are equal to one another, and secondly, women enjoy a greater degree of freedom here.' Today, however, I am somewhat unsure about both these issues.

(A) Firstly, the question of Equality. There is a certain sense in which all citizens of a (West European) democratic country are (formally) equal in that each person has one vote, irrespective of who he or she is. All of them can come together to form political parties, contest elections to set up governments, and these governments will decide on the future course that the nation will take in the international arena. However, is it really true that all citizens of a nation-state are equally capable of doing the above? Consider these facts : Michael Bloomberg, New York's 108th Mayor spent $ 68, 968, 185 on the election, while the unsuccesful candidate Mark Green spent $ 16, 500, 000. Here are some more : the 10% most well-off people in the UK have 27.3% of the total income and the 10% least well-off have only 2.6 % of the total income.

What do these facts reveal? That pace Abraham Lincoln it is only in a vague 'romantic' sense of 'universal brotherhood' that democracy is government by The People, and that it is in fact government by powerful interest-groups, corporate bodies, transnational institutions, and property-owners. In both the UK and the US (not to mention the democracies of the so-called Third World) the gap between the 10% best-off and the 10% worst-off is increasing at an alarming rate, so that to talk of equality in such contexts is to indulge in dangerous sophistry. In other words, financial, economic and political power, far from being equally distributed in our much-acclaimed West European democracies, is actually organised in a hierarchical and inverted-pyramidical manner. People are equal only in the abstract sense of being free from gender and racial discriminations in a legal court while they have to live with huge inequalities at the socio-economic level.

(B) Individuals in 'western' democracies, it turns out, are not really that free after all. What about the womenfolk, are they free in the West? Here are some words from a woman who died anorexic : 'I slept most of the time. But I didn't feel sick. I felt at peace, finally emptied of all the mind and body filth. No more disgust with my body . . . with me. I wasn't even hungry. And I didn't have to worry about how guilty I feel when I eat and throw up, and even worse, how anguished I feel when I eat and don't throw up.' Many teenage (and post-teenage) American and European women may think that they are free to do whatever they wish to; in truth, however, they are compelled, perhaps even unknown to themselves, to reduce their weight to become socially acceptable through drug abuse, smoking, and incessant dieting. (90% of anorexics are women.) Anorexia is prevalent largely in the West where some women aspire to attain idealised standards of beauty put forward by beauty magazines and TV commercials. (For example, the height of a Barbie doll is 6' and its (marked) weight is 100 lbs.)