Article originally published through Doorway Publishing

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” 

— Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

I wanted to strangle him!

It was my Senior year in college and I was one presentation away from graduating with my long-awaited, and hard-earned Bachelor of Science degree. Four long years of study and thousands of dollars spent all hinged on my final class project — an hour-long business presentation before the Dean of the marketing department and three business professors at my school. I was part of a group of six students who had to spend the whole semester of the year working on a massive marketing campaign for a local business and how well we did on the final presentation determined our final grade. 

The teacher of the class told us that we all would either receive a pass or fail grade, and they were going to be strict in their evaluation because this was the culmination of all our years of study. Needless to say, our group put our nose to the grindstone spending a boatload of hours meeting in an old dingy library conference room, drinking stale black coffee, comparing notes, and putting together the final touches on how we were going to present our plan.

On the whole, our group worked together brilliantly. But there was one student, I’ll call him Stan, that was a constant thorn in our side. He hardly ever showed up for scheduled meetings, and when he did come he offered no help at all. I would rather have The Dude from The Big Lebowski on our team than have Stan helping.

He joined our group at the beginning of the semester because Stan knew two things about the other five of us: (1) We were all hardworking students who actually cared about getting good grades; we all took enormous pride in what we did. (2) We all were nice. Kindness was our biggest weakness, and Stan knew how to play us.

On days when we were scheduled to meet, my team would look to me and ask, “Where is that lousy pot-licker? He plays on the rugby team with you, doesn’t he? Didn’t you tell him we had a meeting tonight?” I shrugged my shoulders, held out my hands, and sighed, “Who knows? Since it is past dinner time, Stan is probably already on his third round of drinks at the bar.”

The next day at practice I asked him where he was, and he was more than happy to confirm my suspicions with a sideways smile, “Yep! It was dollar beer night at Tim’s. You can’t expect me to miss out on that?” And then he patted me on the back, “Don’t worry man when it gets closer to the end of the term, I will be there to carry my load. So relax man.” After practice, he smiled again and said, “Five dollar pitcher night at the bar across town, so I won’t be there tonight. You want to join me?”

“No thanks,” I growled.

The presentation was only a week away and the team was really getting nervous that Stan would not be able to hold up his part of the project. We all agreed to give him a short five-minute segment with a detailed PowerPoint outline that only required him to read it out loud word-for-word. A Junior High kid who could read at a fifth-grade level would have no problem with this assignment. When he came for our final meeting to prepare, we showed him what his responsibility was and he grunted back, “Wow, that is a lot to read, but I guess I can do that.” 

The day of our final presentation arrived. Everyone on our team was dressed in their best business attire. I had on a black suit with a red power tie and I shined my new pair of penny loafer shoes so brightly you could see your face in them. We all met in the hallway twenty minutes before the presentation and went over our plan one last time. Ten minutes to go and still no Stan. 

All of a sudden we saw the strangest sight walking down the hall — Stan was wearing a red dress with low cleavage V-neck, you could see small curls of chest hair peeking out, he also had on high heeled red shoes, and he was visibly drunk as he staggered down the hallway like a dry reed blowing in the wind. We all could smell the pungent alcohol on his breath, especially when he laughed out loud and said, “I made it right on time. How do you like my dress? I borrowed it from my roommate’s sister.” He thought this was some grand comedy hour, and he wanted to be the featured act. 

No one was laughing.

As we stepped into the room before the Dean and professors, he said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Let’s get this over with because I still have a lot more drinking to do. It’s been a long four years and I deserve a bit of celebrating because I am finally graduating!”

I began the presentation, and one by one the rest of the team followed. When it was Stan’s turn, he almost tripped going up the stairs, and as he read his lines his thick drunk tongue slurred out fat syllables that were barely recognizable. Five minutes later, he saluted the crowd and staggered back down the stairs. Our last presenter had to swallow his obvious anger directed at Stan, composed himself, and gave a very clear closing to the presentation. 

We all walked out and the fury of the team no longer could be contained. The team member that just did the closing stormed at him, “Stan, you freakin’ idiot, you ruined it for us.” “Yeah,” said a red-faced girl, “this could mean that I may not be graduating!” Stan sat down, chuckled a little bit, and then gave a devious wink, “Don’t worry honey, you will be fine.” 

We were called back in and the Dean read our final grades. He said slowly, “Great material, slides were very well constructed, but your demeanor was both unprofessional and quite frankly, very embarrassing. But we all agree, you had enough in your presentation to receive a passing grade.” The whole team breathed a heavy sigh of relief, while Stan stood up and said, “Finally! It’s time to party, I am out of here!” He then burst out the door of the room, while the rest of the team sat in simmering silence. Even though we passed, the group wanted to kill him. “Can you believe it?” muttered an irritated female team member, “He actually wore a red dress to our final presentation! He made our whole project a joke. What a jerk!”

One selfish man almost ruined four years of study for a whole group.

He did his own thing, at our expense. What started as a strong democratic endeavor, working side by side with people who all wanted to achieve something great, was trashed by the one person who didn’t care about anyone but himself. How easily the majority is destroyed by the selfish whims of the minority. Democracy stands on a tottering foundation. One small push by a narcissist is all it takes to topple it.

Democracy as a general idea is defined as “government by all of the people where majority rules through elected representatives.” Another idea when it is related to any given group or community is that democracy is “the control of a group is by a majority of its members” as defined by the Oxford dictionary. And for over two hundred years that has been the agreed-upon system that Americans have used to “make our nation great.” But in the last couple of years, the definition of democracy has changed. And it is because of people’s natural kindness that the majority has let it morph. Democratic ideals now can mean, “the practices or principles of social equality” Instead of control decided by the majority, it has become a mandated value that insists that everyone now in the group has an equal say which must result in an equal outcome. This new definition of democracy sounds good in concept, but it is not the principles democracy was founded upon.

The selfish minority now views themselves as the ruling majority. You could have the vast majority in agreement on what is right and good for the group, but if the 5% feel like they are not heard or catered to they will raise hell and demand that the majority bend to their will. Their hurt must be recognized and bowed down to, even at the expense of the 95%.

Should they refuse, how dare the majority be so callous! And this is the reason the vocal minority has now been given control because the majority has become too accommodating in the name of kindness. While the majority still cares about achieving greatness, the problem is that for the most part, they don’t want the minority to feel bad. But this so-called kindness toward the minority (which we now call tolerance) is actually destroying us.

Take Stan, for example, he didn’t want to conform. He liked to go to the bar instead of meetings, and he decided to show up drunk on the most important day, ignoring the hardworking of the others. Tolerating his selfishness almost led to the group’s total downfall. 

This is where we are as a nation. The majority are nice and they feel bad for people who like to complain about feeling left out. So, we stop making laws that make our society great because we don’t want to hurt the few who are in the minority and create a whole new class of victims. When the minority controls the majority, sloth, sexualization, perversion, and addiction becomes the new norm, even though it was once rejected by the majority for sound reason.

If one person wants a Drag Queen at their second grader’s story hour, they must be allowed even though every other parent is outraged. Minority rules. If a few fans want to change the genders and races of our most beloved stories because they wish to see themselves in the characters, it must be allowed even though most true fans like the stories the way they are. Again, minority rules at the expense of the whole.

I was reading a recent article entitled, The Pathological Nature of Wokeness, and the writer had great insight into the massive change wokeness (the rule of the minority) has wrought in culture:

“It should be obvious at this point why this philosophy is actually deeply regressive, seeing as it privileges the famous (and therefore, those with the resources to take the risks required to become famous) over others. But there is another reason for its regressive character, and it is this: the people most sensitive to pain are often the people who have the least experience of it. And who has the least experience of pain in modern American society? Those who are born rich and cosseted in helicopter-parented households.

In short, we are talking about the very people who most often end up learning to sublimate their ambition into shows of faux altruism through the college admissions process, and end up with degrees from tony private schools and elite universities as a reward for their diligence—universities whose student bodies, these days, are trending closer to being exclusively female, just like the user base of Tumblr. Indeed, we are at the point now where one can almost tell a person’s class origins the same way people once did: by looking at whether a person has soft or callused hands. Only today, the question is whether they have soft or callused minds.”

Stan is not only tolerated by the rest of the group, but his opinion, his wants, and his desires matter most. In other words, those who are of the minority have won the culture war. Even though their ideas are destructive, selfish, and childish, they take precedence. As a result, Democracy is dead. It no longer operates as intended because it no longer means what we think it means.