“Democracy does not create strong ties between people.
But it does make living together easier.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
I am more and more convinced, and the more I think about it and the more I realize that is true, that many people don't want liberty and they don't know what to do with their freedom (1)
Many people don't know what liberty means and what liberty can be figured out. Why? Very simple, they are born slaves. Or at least they were maybe born free but they hastily have learned to become slaves. They have been framed inside a culture of enslavement (i.e. democracy, in western countries) from the very beginning of their existence. And what is terrible, they love it and accept it without questioning it.
In Democracy, there is a tendency to oppress people in their spirit, and if your spirit is not well developed, has strongly developed the components of listening to the Spirit (for this concept, read HERE), you end up accepting this oppression.
Democracy enhances the idea of body and pleasure (in a democracy what counts more than beauty, fitness, image and health?). and of numbing the spirit. Democracy is conducive to the establishment of quietism, which is the death of any spirituality. Democracy is the infinite research for well-being in a society of equals, where equality becomes a synonym for "flock". If you live in the flock you are equal, if you are equal you are democratic. This is the dark side of Democracy and if you accept it you live in the low horizon of this dark side [i.e. in a state of oppression (1)] Spirituality is what makes your search for what is beyond that horizon, what lifts up your "I", which is not anymore a quietistic body, but an embodiment of Something that pushes you to throw your look elsewhere. And the very moment you do this you are not democratic, you are not equal but you are a rebel, you are out of the flock, you are out of the thinking-all-the-same. But you start becoming free, because free-dom is above all an act of will, in the Schopenhauerian sense of the term, you have it by nature, you can recognize it or suppress it. It's up to your will/structure/nature/state of awareness.
(1) In English there are two words to indicate the state of being free. Freedom, which comes from Old English freodom and means"power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance" that is something that pertains to the subject and it comes from the inner of the subject.
Liberty, which, instead, comes from Latin libertatem (nominative libertas) "civil or political freedom, condition of a free man; absence of restraint; permission". Therefore Liberty is a condition that is administrated from a power on behalf of people living together in a certain society. Liberty is an external social condition, which is given from//by. Freedom is the inner state of will and/or awareness that you have or reach independently from any external power.
It is interesting because in Italian there is only one word libertà, which comes from Latin libertatem, and Italians who are paradoxically considered free are in reality a very domesticated folk.
It should be noted that libertà has the same root lib- which we find in other words such as liberalità, libidine, libare, all words that refer to the idea of pleasure, of liking. There is no doubt that the Italian people love pleasure above all: the pleasure of good food, good life, beauty, idleness ...
(2) "Oppression" is a noun of action from past-participle stem of Latin opprimere "press against, press together, press down;" figuratively "crush, put down, subdue, prosecute relentlessly"
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