Isn’t free speech great?
You can say pretty much what you like, about pretty much who you like, pretty much whenever you like.
Assuming you’re one of those who lives in a democratic country.
Have you ever stopped to wonder just how many people on this planet live in a democracy?
Thought not.
Try it now.
For every 100 people in the world, how many do you think enjoy the benefits of living in a democratic country?
And how many live under the cloud of personal repression that affects those who live in an autocratic country?
That image has 100 stick figures in it.
I want you to represent the number of people that don’t live in a democratic country.
If you’ve a paper copy of this book, draw a cross over the figures to represent those that don’t live in a democracy.
So if you think that out of every 100 people on the planet, 60 of them live in a democracy, cross out the other 40 of the figures to leave the 60% that live in democracies.
Reading an ebook or online?
You’ll have to use your imagination to picture what that the image would look like once you’d crossed out the figures.
Now, keep the number in your mind as we’ll come back to it shortly.
I want you to do one more thing now though.
I want you to start thinking of 99 other people that you know.
It could be family, friends, people you play sports with or people you work or study with.
But I want you to have a specific group of 100 people, including you, so you can think through them and see each and everyone’s face in your mind.
Shortly we’ll use this group of you and 99 others for a mental exercise.
For now though, I have a question.
How Much Do You Value Democracy?
I’m writing this in English, so if that’s your first language, I can probably assume you live in a democracy.
Have you ever thought about the value that democracy has to you?
Obviously, it’s not an easy question. How do we place a value on something so abstract?
We could at least consider some of the advantages that living in a democracy offers. That might help you to get a better idea of just how lucky or otherwise you feel.
Let’s consider a few bios of various people from around the world. Maybe people not so very different to you.
People like…
Neth Nahara
On TikTok, Ana da Silva Miguel, who uses the name Neth Nahara, posted a live video criticising the president. If she lived in the USA and had criticized Joe Biden, who’d care? Even his supporters criticise him. If it hadn’t been the president, but the Prime Minister and she lived in the UK, again, it’s hard to believe many would have noticed. Someone praising the PM would stand out much more.
Unfortunately for Neth Nahara, she lives in Angola. On 13 August 2023 she was arrested and the following day convicted of the crime of ‘outrage against the state, its symbols and bodies’. Initially, she was sentenced to six months in prison, though just over a month later, an appeal saw that increased to two years.1
Just for posting a video criticizing President Lourenço.
What a precious little snowflake he must be.
Imagine you lived somewhere where you could be imprisoned simply because you criticized a public official.
Agil Humbatov
During the often chaotic response to the Covid 19 pandemic, did you ever post on Facebook or elsewhere on line criticizing the actions of the government.
Understandable, I’m sure.
Just imagine if the reaction to your complaining post about Boris or Donald was for the police to come to your door and drag you off to a psychiatric hospital for a three-month stay, where you were forcibly medicated against your will.
It would feel like a bit of a harsh reaction from the government, wouldn’t it. Unless you perhaps lived in Azerbaijan. That’s what happened to Agil Humbatov.2
Neda Agha-Soltan and Shirin Alizadeh
Ever taken part in a public protest, complaining about something you don’t like that the national or local government has done? Or maybe you’ve been present when a protest march of others passed by you.
Does either scenario feel odd to you? It shouldn’t, peaceful protest should be a basic right for everyone. And you certainly shouldn’t face problems just if you happen to be near to where a protest is happening.
Not the case for Neda Agha-Soltan though. In mid-2009, she was apparently travelling to join in with political protests in the Iranian capital, Tehran. It’s reported she was observing the protests from a distance when she was shot in the chest.3
It seems unimaginable that someone could be shot for just observing a protest against the government. But you don’t have to imagine it. Search for her name and you can look into her eyes as she dies, her blood, having filled her chest, flowing freely from her mouth.
Think carefully before searching, you can’t unsee someone’s death. It must be 13 or 14 years since I watched it and I’ve described it from memory.
Maybe the final video shot by Shirin Alizadeh would be an easier watch.4 Passing through the Iranian town of Salmanshahr with her husband and two friends, she simply used her phone camera to record attacks on protesters in the street. The video ends shortly after the phone falls from her hand as she is fatally shot. Stop the video a few seconds early and you don’t even have to see the red appear as her blood fell onto the lens.
Think of all the times you’ve seen video shared on social media of police officers carrying out various actions. Now imagine living in a country where you could be summarily executed just for pointing your phone camera in their direction.
Shamsuzzaman Shams
How often do you hear people complain about the cost of living? At the best of times, we all tend to moan about how expensive something or other has become. However, for the last few years, the price of everything just seems to have been on a constant upward trajectory. It seems to be that way pretty well everywhere, doesn’t it?
Certainly in Bangladesh, where the journalist Shamsuzzaman Shams wrote an article for the Prothom Alo newspaper, that focused on how rising prices were affecting ordinary people.
On 29 March, he was arrested for writing “false news”, spending several days in custody before being granted bail on 3 April.5
Shouldn’t we be allowed to talk freely about what’s going on around us?
Yo-han Doe 1 and Yo-han Doe 2
When you were younger, did you ever watch a film or TV show you’d been told not to? If you got caught, I’m guessing things may have been a little emotional for a while, but it’s not the biggest of crimes, is it?
Unless you’re a teenager living in North Korea. The ruling class are so paranoid about the people seeing the relative prosperity and freedom enjoyed in South Korea, it’s against the law to watch South Korean TV shows and movies.
The BBC obtained video of two 16-year-olds being sentenced to 12 years hard labour just for watching South Korean TV.6
What do you think are the chances that the leaders, who never go hungry, also get to watch whatever they want?
Netiporn Sanesangkhom and Mongkol Thirakhot
Apparently, there are 43 countries that have a monarch as the head of state. I was born in one of them and now live in another. As you’ll discover, I’m not what you’d call a royalist, but fortunately, I live where I’m free to say what I like about those two monarchies.
Thai citizens aren’t so lucky, with Thailand home to some absolutely crazy laws that outlaw any criticism of the king.
Netiporn Sanesangkhom, a Thai citizen, was facing up to 30 years in prison for calling for reform of the royal family in Thailand, but she died after several months on hunger strike protesting against her punishment.7 Meanwhile, the 30-year-old Mongkol Thirakhot experienced the full effect of that law when he was sentenced in 2024 to 50 years for insulting the monarch.8
How weak and pathetic does someone have to be to use draconian prison terms to try and prevent any personal criticism and to seemingly be happy for people to starve to death for such “crimes”? I’m not being too controversial if I question whether King Rama X might have a few issues he needs to work through, am I? Maybe “grow a pair” would be good advice for the little shrinking violet that he must be.
How many people live in democratic societies?
I asked you what percentage of people you think live in democracies.
I guess it’s a bit like the glass half-full/glass half-empty conundrum. It may suggest how optimistic or pessimistic you are.
So out of the 100 stick figures, how many did you see that weren’t crossed out?
Did your stick people look like that?
To save you counting, 28 stick people haven’t been crossed out.9
Did you nail it or are you surprised? And if surprised, which way? Is that a higher number than you thought or lower?
It surprised me. It seems shocking to me that more than 70% of the world’s population live in autocratic societies. Societies where they’re not 100% free to say or do what they want. Or choose who leads them.
Surely this must be changing though? Aren’t we developing as a species? As we develop, we must be expanding the number of people enjoying the benefits of living in a democracy, mustn’t we?
You’d hope so, but no, that’s not the case.
In fact, the exact opposite is happening.
For every single second of this century, two people have lost democratic freedoms. If you’re a Zoomer, a member of Generation Z, since the birth of your generation in 1997, some 1.6 billion people across the planet have lost their democratic rights.10
That’s very nearly 20% of all the people alive on the planet today.
It’s more than the population of the USA, the UK, Canada, the European Economic Area (the EU, plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein), Australia and New Zealand.
A lot more in fact. Those countries don’t even make up a billion people between them.
Let’s add the populations of Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
We’re still more than 160 million people short of that 1.6 billion people figure.
And that is the number of people robbed of true democracy in a silly short period of time. Barely a quarter of a century.
Doesn’t that make you angry?
The thought that more and more people are being treated as the property of a few powerful people.
That’s what happens when we lose our democratic rights. We become someone else’s possession. Something they have the power over. Something they choose whether it has the right to live or not. We become assets, not human beings.
And what worries me is knowing that people are people. I’m going to repeat this over and over. Wherever we are, we’re the same. Some of us may benefit from access to education, but beyond that, we’re no different.
If another society can lose its democratic rights, why can’t the society I live in lose its democratic rights?
Why can’t the society you live in lose its democratic rights?
Assuming you live in a democratic society, you probably already think that life is unfair.
How much more unfair do you think life could be if you no longer have your democratic rights?
Are you feeling mad as hell yet?
Where’s all the money gone?
Ever hear your grandparents or even great-grandparents tell you how lucky you are to be young today?
Maybe they remember growing up without central heating or recall just getting a satsuma and two walnuts for Christmas.
Obviously, life is so much better for young people today.
If you have an irrational love of satsumas and walnuts that is.
Less so if you have a rational love of owning your own home.
By the late 1950s, the average price of a house in the UK was four times the average annual wage.
By 2020, the average house price was about nine times the average annual wage.11
No wonder it feels so difficult to buy your own home nowadays. And this hasn’t been helped by a huge collapse in house building by local authorities. In the 1980s, the Conservative government established the right to buy for council tenants allowing them to buy their rented home at a significant discount.
That was great for council tenants in the 80s, but not for you. It effectively made it hugely unattractive for councils to build more social housing to replace the houses being sold off cheaply.12
So you either have to buy a home, which has become more expensive because higher demand has pushed up house prices, or you have to rent, which has become more expensive because higher demand has pushed up rental prices.
It’s no wonder that the British government’s own Office for National Statistics found that by 2020, Britons in their early 60s had personal wealth almost nine times as high as Britons in their early 30s.13
This inequality in wealth between generations isn’t a UK-only thing either.
In the USA, in late 2023 the Baby Boomers generation, those born between the end of World War 2 and 1963, held 51.3% of all the wealth, while Millennials had just 9.3%.14
Oh, and the Silent Generation, basically everyone still alive who was born before the end of the war, own 13.7% of all the wealth.
How many of them are still alive? I can’t tell you the number, but just 5.49% of Americans in 2022 were from the Silent Generation, compared to 21.67% of Americans being Millennials.15 Yet those quiet oldies have a load more money between them
And you noticed that Generation Z doesn’t even feature in the stats at all? That’s how poor the Zoomers are.
Feeling a bit madder about things now, perhaps?
But You Still Have to Pay For Our Pensions
So, the older generations have most of the money, yet the younger generations are still giving them even more.
In the UK, citizens enjoy a government-run pension scheme. A scheme that pays a weekly amount to all over a certain age.
Look at a payslip in the UK and you’ll see those contributions under the National Insurance heading.
It would be nice to think that the money you were paying in was being put somewhere safe for you to tap into when you retire.
That’s not how it works though. Those contributions are used to pay the pensions of those alive and retired today.
The mechanism is very much like a Ponzi scheme. Money paid into the system today is used to pay those who contributed yesterday.
If everything remained the same, I’m sure a skilled mathematician could work out a formula that ensured this worked forever with no problems.
Just about nothing stays the same though.
For a start, the population is getting older. That means more people need to be paid pensions and for longer.
The UK’s national pension scheme was introduced in 1948. At that time, the average life expectancy was about 67.66 years16 and the retirement age for men was 65 and 60 for women.
In 2020 the average life expectancy in the UK was 81.15 years and the retirement age is now 66 years for both men and women.
See the potential for a problem?
People are living much longer, but the retirement age has barely changed.
If there are more old people, living for longer and being paid pensions for longer, we need more young people to work and pay into the National Insurance system and/or we need them to pay for longer.
However, the birth rate in 1948 was 905,182, but by 2021 it was just 694,685. So at the same time that we have a lot more old people who need their pensions paying, we have a lot less young people to pay those pensions.
There are similar concerns in the USA, with a population that is growing older, while the birth rate is falling.
Surely the fair thing would be for the retirement age to increase in line with average life expectancy. If everyone is living longer, then surely everyone should work longer to pay for these pensions. Not just the young people.
So why hasn’t the pension age increased to keep up with people living so much longer?
Because politicians know that older people vote more than young people. If they suggested making what are realistic and reasonable increases to the pension age, everyone looking forward to their retirement would go ballistic.
They’d lose all these votes of older voters and because there are more older voters, they prioritise them at the expense of the younger generations.
Without meaningful change, one day, this system is going to stop working as planned.
The US government have already admitted that by 2041, citizens may only receive 78% of what people receive today.17 And you should be pleased about that because at least the system won’t have collapsed completely, so it’s better than nothing.
Hallelujah! Praise be to the Social Security Administration of the United States of America!
Now, tell me, on a scale of one angry red face to five angry red faces, would you say you were tip-toeing along to the higher end of the mad scale yet?
Did I Mention We Ducked Up Your Planet Too?
Scientists were getting worried about upcoming climate change as long ago as the 1950s and yet some 70 years on we’re still trying to agree on how we’re going to prevent the global temperature from increasing by 1.5ºC when it’s already as good as happened.
Don’t believe in man-made climate change?
It’s possible you’ve been swayed by propaganda from the fossil fuel industry.
There are always two sides to every argument and it’s vital you always consider both sides. If you’re sceptical about the science, it shows you’re open-minded. That’s a good thing.
However, talking of two sides to every argument, the oil industry had evidence supporting the prospect of fossil fuels causing climate change as far back as the 1950s.18 In 1954, the American Petroleum Institute (API) believed their products were creating pollution problems, while Shell knew in 1959 that use of their fuels could lead to climatic change by the end of the century. Other files apparently show the API knew of the link between fossil fuels and global warming by 1968 at the very latest, perhaps earlier. And Exxon also established a firm link in the 1970s.19
Despite that, the oil industry kept quiet about their research and spent decades publicly promoting doubt about the science behind man made climate change.
Based on that, it appears to me that many in the oil industry lied to the public in order to protect their own profits, rather than protect the planet we all rely on.
A crime against humanity is defined as “a deliberate act, typically as part of a systematic campaign, that causes human suffering or death on a large scale.”
Do you think it would be fair to say that publicly denying science they privately believed was true, knowing that it would lead to future human suffering, just so they could continue making vast amounts of money, fits in with the definition of a crime against humanity?
I’ll be honest with you, I actually did think that, but what a silly and naive old man I am.
Obviously, it can’t have been a crime in this case, because no-one’s been punished. Except you and your future children and grandchildren, etc.
If the world had started seriously looking for alternatives to fossil fuels more than half a century ago, mankind might already have started to have success slowing down or even halting climate change.
The cost would have been great, but the future cost, with more than 50 years of delay, will be much greater.
And while we, the older generations that is, enjoyed many of the benefits of the delay, we’re not going to suffer too much from the downsides.
Those are for you I’m afraid. You’re also going to be picking up the bill too. That bill that’s going to be higher because of the delay and which we’ve all avoided paying.
How about now?
You feeling mad as hell now?
It’s Not All Our Fault
Honest gov’, it isn’t our fault. It’s yours too. If you’d been born when we were born, you’d have behaved the same. We’ve developed as people to behave in ways that make all of the above inevitable.
Evolution has been a bit of a bugger in all of this.
Come on, let’s head back 17 million years to meet Roger, Jeff and Gary in their east African home.
- https://www.verangola.net/va/en/102023/Defense/37391/Influencer-Neth-Nahara-sentenced-to-two-years-in-prison-for-insulting-PR-on-TikTok.htm ↩︎
- https://www.ipd-az.org/agil-gimbatov-2/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan ↩︎
- https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221103-shirin-alizadeh-iranian-woman-killed-filming-crackdown ↩︎
- https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/who-is-shamsuzzaman-shams-bangladesh-journalist-charged-over-food-cost-article-101680180529099.html ↩︎
- We don’t know the names of these two teenagers. Apparently Yo-han is the Korean equivalent of the name John. You can see the video at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68015652 ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0v005j1j91o ↩︎
- https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/19/asia/thailand-man-sentenced-50-years-lese-majeste-record-intl-hnk/index.html ↩︎
- https://v-dem.net/documents/29/V-dem_democracyreport2023_lowres.pdf – It’s important to note that there are different ways to assess relative levels of democracy and not every measurement system agrees about every country. However, as it’s much easier to lose democratic rights than it is to gain them, I personally believe it makes sense to highlight steps that may be leading to autocracies sooner, rather than later. ↩︎
- https://ourworldindata.org/less-democratic ↩︎
- https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-174-years-of-data-tell-us-about-house-price-affordability-in-the-uk/ ↩︎
- https://neweconomics.org/2022/05/the-damaging-legacy-of-right-to-buy ↩︎
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/distributionofindividualtotalwealthbycharacteristicingreatbritain/april2018tomarch2020#the-generation-gap ↩︎
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1376620/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/ ↩︎
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/ ↩︎
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040159/life-expectancy-united-kingdom-all-time/. That report is based on data from the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Gapminder Foundation, an independent Sweden based non-profit organisation. I want to note that a UK government report (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82dd6740f0b6230269d1c0/print-ready-state-pension-age-review-final-report.pdf) which seems to suggest that the average life expectancy in 1948 was 78.5 years. There must be a valid explanation for the discrepancy, though I don’t know what, but if I was a government minister, I’d much prefer the higher figure as it makes the potential problem look a lot less scary. ↩︎
- https://www.ssa.gov/newsletter/Statement%20Insert%2025+.pdf ↩︎
- https://commonhome.georgetown.edu/topics/climateenergy/defense-denial-and-disinformation-uncovering-the-oil-industrys-early-knowledge-of-climate-change/ ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-climate-change-global-warming-research ↩︎