When policies mandates become a choice between democracy or totalitarianism

People wait in vehicles to receive covid19 vaccines at Hasley Crawford Stadium, Port of Spain on Tuesday. Government plans to furlough unvaccinated public sector employees from mid-January. - PHOTO BY AYANNA KINSALE
People wait in vehicles to receive covid19 vaccines at Hasley Crawford Stadium, Port of Spain on Tuesday. Government plans to furlough unvaccinated public sector employees from mid-January. - PHOTO BY AYANNA KINSALE

One of the first lessons we are supposed to have learned in life is that every action has consequences.

In primary school science, they said: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It doesn’t take a master’s degree in physics to understand that.

But science evolved and a Harvard professor called Edward Lorenz developed the Butterfly Theory, which says even a minuscule occurrence, such as a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, could set in motion a chain of events that could cause tornadoes in Europe a few days later, or, as actually happened recently, in Kentucky, Illinois, and Kansas.

Consequences follow action, so even Lorenz’s publication of the Butterfly Theory, for which he got the Nobel Prize, led to current theories of quantum mechanics and deterministic chaos. Any mother who has brought up a household of children instinctively understands chaos theory without having to go to Harvard, especially around Christmas.

What it proved was how one simple action or failure to act has consequences in relation to how governments act. That is known as political science.

A system is made up of many interrelated factors, each one affects all the others. A body is a system. If your liver is affected by too much rum and ponche de creme over Christmas, the rest of the body’s system is inevitably going to be affected.

When morale in a business organisation breaks down, production and profit plunge.

As Eric Williams famously taught us, that is what made slavery ultimately unprofitable.

When an essential part of any system, and believe me, industrial relations in TT, which is an essential aspect of the overall sociopolitical system, is devalued, the rest of the system quickly deteriorates as well.

We experienced that in the 1960s and in the 1990s. Dangerously.

How does this relate to quantum physics, deterministic chaos and all that? Well, Prof Lorenz’s work, according to those organisations that give out prizes for that kind of thing, has affected virtually every branch of political science, including industrial relations.

Over the past months, certain executive leaders of the trade union movement have warned of a slide into what they see as totalitarianism, which is total control by one political party, not just one single individual.

Initially, this started with a suspicion that a decision to adopt the Australian diktat of “no jab, no job” in the public sector was imminent. They claimed that they were not consulted on a decision that would affect the lives of their members.

These are men who have wielded considerable power in Trinidad and Tobago over the years. People who wield that kind of power do not relinquish it easily.

If the 88,000 members of what the PM and the President have both seen as the vastly overstaffed and underperforming public service begin to recognise that their leaders are unable to protect their jobs, since, by definition, furloughs never go on indefinitely, that power fades.

It is being speculated that it could end in the shrinkage of an overstaffed workforce.

The argument is not about the effectiveness or non-effectiveness of the various vaccinations against covid variants. The argument is about the destruction of a democratic right that people think they have to make their own decisions about things such as bodily integrity: the right of a person to decide without coercion by force, fear, fraud or the arbitrary exercise of authority to give a blood transfusion to you or your child; a “jab”, or a lobotomy to “cure” anxiety; or of a trade union to influence (although not yet determine) regulations that affect their members.

Medical advice cannot supersede a human right guaranteed by the Constitution. And medical history has admitted that it has never been an exact science, but it does the best it knows how.

A butterfly decision by those with power to force it through without consultation with the people it will affect, whether family, workplace or government, will have consequences.

Consultation does not mean agreement. But it does mean respecting the rights and opinions of those who will be affected, to speak, and be listened to, and to seek some measure of compromise, not just listening to those in government alone, which may start off the chain reaction into totalitarianism.

The formula generally starts with social resentment against police action, for example, arousing social unrest, which segues into public unrest, into chaos, then revolt, military suppression, which either ends in defeat or military takeover, and either way, into totalitarianism. This is not a secret formula. Ask any political scientist.

It is usually done gradually, over months or for the really total effect, in the name of protection against crime, violence or plague, over years. We are seeing it on the news almost daily with what happened first with the Arab Spring, then military takeover in Myanmar, and repression in Australia.

Most terrifying is the social hypnosis which ends in self-regulation and unquestioning acceptance of governmental total monitoring of movement and actions. Forbidding dissidents, or those different by race or refugee status or affiliation to party or belief, any access to justice systems, social services, use of government medical facilities, school places for children, etc apparently appears early in the process.

The division into the vaccinated and unvaccinated, for example, done by benevolent governments “to protect society,” is a good example.

Communist China now does it through electronic mapping and through neighbourhood “marshals” who are paid to report on those who do not conform.

Decades ago it was done in Germany via symbols such as giving badges which Jews were forced to wear. Actual statistics show Nazi policies to “protect ethnic purity” led to perhaps 20 million state-ordered deaths, six million of them because of their Jewish ethnicity, but it escalated to other “different” people, as these things do.

Party membership or the lack thereof, which led to forcible incarceration of citizens in Russia into concentration and labour camps was another example after the war.

The question now arising is whether the legal division of people into separate groups that is happening throughout Europe over mandatory vaccination is another example of dictatorial or totalitarian action, as some trade unionists fear.

Can it happen here? Can Trinis be pushed into agreeing into letting it happen?

The trade union movement includes many people of strong and passionate convictions. Their leaders may be a small fraction of the 1.4 million population. Even the 88,000 public servants on compulsory vacation this week to give them time to “decide” to submit or go unpaid into “furlough” are a small fraction and possibly only ten per cent of them dare to disagree.

But, according to the Butterfly Theory, that is all it needs.

In TT, deterministic chaos, an almost cultural norm here, by its very title suggests that with determination, chaos can be directed toward totalitarianism or redirected back to democracy.

As a society we have to choose.

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