Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, Engaged Citizen of a Democratic Republic, also Unemployed
TorrentFreak today followed-up on the news that a French TV executive has been fired from his job for – get this – writing an email to his MP voicing his opposition to France’s new anti-piracy law. Apparently the MP forwarded the email to the guy’s boss, who then fired him, citing “strong differences with the strategy” of the network.
While I happen to agree with the position held by the executive, whose name is Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, that’s not what I want to talk about here. I could rant about the evils of draconic anti-piracy laws all day, but it seems to me that there’s more at stake here than that. Obviously there are a lot of things wrong with the way this played out: Mr. Bourreau-Guggenheim’s letter to his MP should have remained private, and his company should be judging him on his on-the-job performance rather than his political leanings.
But my main beef with this situation is that it seems to exemplify the fait-accompli attitude that a lot of countries seem to have with regards to their democracies. Democracy is a fantastic form of government, in that it “crowdsources” policy decisions to an extent, and as such tends to more often arrive at reasonable compromises than one-sided ideological positions. But in order for that to happen, citizens need to be talking about politics, and to be involved in politics. It’s bad enough that police routinely round up and arrest peaceful protesters, but firing people from their jobs for expressing their political views to the representatives they elected is taking this to a whole new level.
Let me step back for a second: democracy in Athens was made possible, in part, by the fact that Athenians owned slaves, and therefore didn’t need to work particularly hard and could spend good parts of their days discussing philosophy and politics with each other. Nowadays only a small percentage of the population has the time and energy to be involved in politics, and it’s because of this that the small number who do chose to be active politically are extremely valuable. Since we can’t all be paying attention to every law the government tries to pass, it’s a damn good thing there are people who are, and who care enough to take action when they see something being done by their representatives that they disagree with. There’s real value in being an active citizen. No matter what the issue, it’s a selfless act for the betterment of the community. Being engaged in politics is as ethical, to me, as being engaged in charity. Companies should be encouraging this kind of behaviour in their employees, not suppressing it.
By instead attempting to crush this political spirit out of those who exhibit it, we can’t help but wind up with weak, ineffectual democracies. You get what you pay for.
