Class war in full swing

Now that equality before God has been ditched as a social dynamic, equality before the law was supposed to fill the gap.

That second type of equality lacks a noble metaphysical dimension, but at least it’s not completely devoid of some link to real justice. Yet few things are allowed to remain real nowadays. Virtual reality has to step in and claim its slice of the pie.

Most people fail to realise that it’s no longer just a slice. Virtual reality scoffs the whole pie and regurgitates it into tyranny – which we have to believe is freedom at its most crystallised. Mr Orwell, ring your office.

Witness the £104,000 speeding fine handed to Anders Wiklof for doing 51mph in a 30mph zone. The incident happened in Finland, a new Nato member and hence presumably a Western country out to promulgate and defend liberal values.

This champion of liberalism, which is after all a cognate of liberty, has a system of means-tested fines. The richer you are, the more you’ll pay for exactly the same transgression.

The rule of thumb there is that a speeding fine should be the size of the transgressor’s 14-day income. Since Mr Wiklof is one of the country’s richest men, justice was served. He has the temerity of earning £104,000 in a fortnight, which evidently goes against the grain of Finland’s take on liberal values.

Mr Wiklof should count his blessings. Back in 2010, another wealthy Scandinavian driver was fined 1.08 million Swiss francs (£957,000) in Switzerland. Since he was doing 125mph in a 20mph zone, even the staunchest libertarian would agree that some sort of punishment was in order.

Yet that same principled individual should bemoan the blow delivered to liberty by any means-tested fine for anything. For liberty means nothing unless it’s anchored by just laws equal for all. Without that anchor, liberty is cast adrift and begins to sail towards what may appear to be anarchy but is in fact tyranny.

The law should rely on actuarial tables to mete out punishment no more than it relies on them to establish guilt. True, if a rich man is fined, say, £500, a sum he normally spends in daily tips, he won’t feel the pinch as much as a similarly punished poor man.

But then the poor man unaccustomed to luxury may suffer from imprisonment much less than the plutocrat. Does this mean that if the latter accidentally ploughs through a crowd of children he should receive a lesser sentence than a poor man guilty of the same crime?

If justice isn’t equal for all, it’s not justice any longer. It becomes something else. But what?

Here we stumble on a constantly widening area where communism or socialism converges with liberal democracy. The area has many sections, and their number is increasing.

But since we are talking about justice specifically, the overarching principle was formulated by Martin Latsis, one of the founders of the CheKa, history’s most sinister organisation.

In 1918 Latsis explained the rationale behind the Red Terror: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.”

It also seems to be the essence of liberal democracy. Granted, it hasn’t yet got around to “exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class”. But it too practises a class approach to justice, if for the time being without imposing sanguinary punishments. The same principle, although not yet pushed to the same extreme.

Both the Bolsheviks and the democratic liberals pursue a millenarian ideal of universal bliss on earth, where everyone is equal in every respect. Both groups have to admit, to themselves if no one else, that this ideal has so far not been achieved. Moreover, it shows few signs of coming soon.

That’s why both the communists and democratic liberals have built in their make-up what biologists call regression to the mean. Both attempt to push the lower reaches of society up to the middle, while dragging the upper reaches down into the same area. The latter task is easier.

The communists will happily shoot a man who makes several million a year, while the democratic liberals will profess commitment to his economic freedom. But they will be lying. Any outstanding quality of mind, creativity or enterprise challenges at least implicitly the core assumptions of modernity in general and liberal democracy in particular.

If a man displays his talent in a commercial arena, he is still just about tolerated even though he is deeply suspect. He can’t yet be given the Latsis treatment at the nearest wall, but every effort must be made to keep his economic rapacity in check.

Justice, that cornerstone and hallmark of decent society, falls by the wayside. It’s replaced by out and out tyranny, but one that’s different from the communist kind.

There tyranny is coercively imposed by the state, which most thinking people perceive as an enemy. They may go along for fear of persecution, but inwardly they will never acquiesce.

Liberal democratic tyranny relies more on seduction than on coercion. It drip-feeds its ideals into people’s minds, gradually turning each person into its informer and enforcer. If a decent man living in a communist country refrained from criticising the regime for fear of punishment, a liberal democrat has been paper-trained to close his eyes on any fundamental problems with his regime out of conviction.

Tocqueville diagnosed that condition with nothing short of prescience. He was writing about America circa 1831, but his diagnosis applies equally to today’s liberal democracy wherever it’s found: “I know no country in which there is less independence of mind and less genuine freedom of thought than in America.”

Mr Wiklof validates that diagnosis. Instead of raging and raving about the gross injustice he suffered, he said: “I really regret the matter and hope that the money is in any case used for healthcare through the treasury.”

It won’t be, Mr Wiklof. And even if it is, that’s not the point. His fine is another bullet fired in class war, where communism and liberal democracy are allied. Even if the latter may be coy about it.