Democracy and Dictatorship

Military dictatorship is a phrase we hear, an image we conjure, and a government we fear and would like to prevent. Its distinction, however, from regular dictatorship is merely a contingent one: it is administered by members of the military. All dictatorships involve the use of force (whether it is by police or military units) to enforce rules set by one person or a small group of people. Then again, all governments involve the use of force to enforce rules no matter who sets them, a point important to mention because it is a point we tend to forget. In any case, the deciding factor that sets governments apart is who (or what) determines the rules.

In the case of Turkey in 1981, military leaders dictated the law. As one review of the film Yol expresses, the characters appear to be as much captives in their homes and towns as they are prisoners of the penitentiary. What it likely refers to are the strict laws that the characters in the movie have to follow, whether they are set by the military or by religious standards. They must deal with travel-restricting curfews, ancient honor codes, and a multitude of other confinements on every-day life. Naturally, we look at a society like that in Yol and say, with certainty, that it is a bad place in which to live. In our society, we have the freedom to travel within our country, answering to no one, while we do mostly what we please. Such is the beauty of democracy, we would say, yet would we ever conceive that it could produce the conditions of dictatorship as seen in the film? Dictatorship is the rule of one; democracy is the rule of all. Intuition tells us that a group's members each having a say in its course of action is better than having one person determine it for the entire group, but is the result necessarily "better"?

Assume that 20 individuals get together and form a government, and any rules it creates are to be completely enforced. One person is randomly selected to be the dictator of this group, and everything that the dictator decrees becomes law. For example, he may tax, give orders, and even decree that other members of the group be killed; his power is limitless. Now imagine if group members foresaw that their lives would be in danger, and instead randomly selected a dictator with the condition that he may not decree that anyone be killed. This is the incorporation of a right, essentially a limitation on the government's power.

Assume now that 20 individuals get together and form another government, but instead they agree that all decisions shall be made by a majority vote. Eleven of the members have a vendetta against one and vote that he is killed. As in the dictatorial government, this is enforceable law and must be done if it is voted upon successfully. Without a pre-established set of rights, the government may do anything so long as the majority vote condition is met.

The conclusion to draw from this simple example is that the results of democratic processes are not necessarily superior to those of dictatorship. Though they tend (from our limited experience) to create a more favorable outcome for a greater amount because they distribute power as opposed to centralizing it in one, they are still capable of equivalent evil. The key lies in the establishment of rights-the limitations on government power-that permit societal justice. If the breadth of a democratic government's power encompasses one's life, there is no reason why one can not be executed like jesters are executed by kings. If its breadth encompasses one's liberty, there is no reason why one can not be voted into slavery. Without incorporating and enforcing these rights, any form of group-decision-making can (and eventually will) lead to injustice.

Both in the U.S. and elsewhere, this has been the standard fare: in most of the industrialized world, thousands of issues are pluralistically determined. We accept it as a cultural axiom that a person owns himself, yet we democratically outlaw prostitution and selectively permit and ban drug use. Either the right to self-ownership does not exist in the Constitution, then, or we are simply ignoring it. With the forfeiture of one right for the sake of an arbitrary law, there is probably a lessened significance of the next one lost. Could we, one day, ever pass a law that looks like something in Yol? Granted, something like a curfew or regular passenger searches aboard buses would be an outrage and no one in America would stand for it, but the status quo, of course, is no argument for any system. Things which happen to be in our personal threshold of acceptability will not necessarily stay that way. New justifications and circumstances can convince people to change, and without a serious commitment to an objective justice, it may gradually happen. Democracy is a system of people, and people can be persuaded, bought, cajoled, and deceived, but rights are persistent, unchanging, and here to stay-whether anyone likes it or not.