Can Freedom be Copied?

Monday, July 5, 2010

Put the document you wish to copy on the glass and out comes the copy on the selected tray. Whatever you specified before copying, the output will follow suit. You can make as many copies as you want provided you have enough ink to do so.

Zooming out of the scene, you see a lone photocopier and an operator. This photocopier wants to spread his ‘documents’ and makes as much copies as he can. The operator wishes to copy the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

The operator has a noble job, desire, duty! It is his right to give copies of his formulas for other students waiting in line. He wore a Red, White, and Blue shirt and the other students behind him is getting impatient and irate. His noble aim is not appreciated and he stayed even longer on the machine. He enlarged the paper, zoomed in on the key points, and highlighted his goals. This was not appreciated by his classmates and soon enough, he was pushed off the machine. He recovered quickly from the fall, but refused to budge from the machine.

Zooming out even further and going back in time, history has showed lessons that the operator should have taken note of. Yes, the wars fought back then showed that politics and religion can be spread and copied through conquest. Gone are those times. Centuries of growth and maturity has made people less accepting of change. Cultures have grown differently from each other and this cannot be changed by a simple copy and paste.

Video note: Democracy as an idea maybe old, but its best blueprint and conception is held by USA. Yet, the best 'model' cannot be imposed suddenly on other cultures. Culture finds alterations that may not be compatible to the American mould. The video was taken at the ceremonies at Kaskaskia Island. Clip shall be taken as a metaphor.

America’s desire to copy its winning formula is indeed a noble aim. However, deep-seated preferences on various cultures resist such a change. As lectures about American Democracy continues, there is a unifying thought. Americans prefer the status quo. The democracy is made to be slow so that there is not one power to overtake the entire United States. America is a culture that is resistant to change. Yet, this is my question, why must it impose its own brand of democracy to other peoples? America took more than 220 years to get its modern copy of the word, and yet it is still full of loopholes.

America is a bad student of democracy if it plans to copy its own notes on the topic and give it to other students so quickly. It cannot be impatient for other countries to change so quickly when he himself is resistant to it. More than 220 years of resistance does not fare well an image as a model student. Besides, the culture of its people is radically different compared to other peoples of the world. In my calculation, there must be a merging, at least, of the learning culture with that of America before it can start to spread its version of democracy. Going deeper in the analogy, it needs the student culture to actually go to class to learn about democracy before it can inherit it. Then everyone knows that there are students who simply refuse to go to class. This is the my point. There are cultures who grew up to avoid going to class altogether.

Assuming there are students that get the copy, study it, and go to class, they have varying learning curves. These require time and must it take two centuries for them to learn their lesson? If America’s noble aim stretches that long then export of democracy is possible, but improbable. It is doable but takes so much time and effort that the country might run out of this metaphorical ink. If a country does learn its lesson, the output will be radically different than that intended by the US. It will never be as perfectly as the first paragraph described.