The indiscriminate slaughter in Tiananmen Square is immensely satisfying in several regards. For Cold War hardliners, it is the vindication of the central tenet of their faith, the impossibility of peaceful reform under communism, which recent events had done much to undermine.

Apologists for the totalitarians can find equal comfort. It is possible now to measure communist dictatorships against a new standard of butchery, implicitly to praise by comparison. Indeed, the Chinese regime itself is legitimated by the very statement that it has ''lost its legitimacy,'' or as one CBC reporter put it, that the leaders the Chinese people thought were communists have turned out to be fascists.

It is a marvellous time for recrimination and accusations of hypocrisy. Richard Gwyn, fresh from proclaiming the ''moral equivalence'' of West and East, was the first to blame the massacre on the West, for not having taken a stricter line with China before - a theme echoed by conservative commentators to impeach the sorrow of liberals.

On the other hand, for the NDP's Gerry Caplan it is occasion to remind us of the thousands of deaths the U.S. has ''directly or indirectly'' been responsible for in Latin America, although, of course, this business in Beijing is shocking and deplorable and nothing to do with socialism. Parliamentarians of all parties said many fine things in an emergency debate. And the rest of us have all just had a good cry for humanity. As I say, it's been terribly satisfying.

IGNORE RULERS

It may well be that out of this revived debate we will decide that democracy is not inevitable after all, that the totalitarian state will not relinquish power and cannot be overthrown. It may also be that this does not matter. There are more important things than democracy, one of which is freedom. If the Chinese cannot dismiss their rulers, it may be they can succeed in ignoring them.

Wherever possible, one would wish to make the people more part of the life of the state, but more vital is to make the state less part of the life of the people. Until now this has been achieved, granted, by democratic means, setting constitutional limits on government by collective agreement. Technology will carry this process further. The story of our age is of the increasing impossibility of coercion as an organizing principle of human activity, whether coercion of the nice democratic or the nasty totalitarian variety.

This is embodied in the worldwide rise of markets. The market is more or less explicitly antidemocratic. Production is not subject to majority rule as it is when resources are allocated by political processes. The minority in a market system has a right not merely to object, but to opt out of the majority verdict altogether. In an era of satellite dishes and desktop publishing, of fax machines and cellular phones and computers that fit in your briefcase, when services are exchanged and capital moves at the press of a button, it is increasingly easy for individuals likewise to ''opt out'' from the political authority's reach.

In liberal democracies, this is as yet mostly a matter of economics. The emerging speculation, for example, over whether Canada will undergo a tax revolt in the face of rising rates misses the point: there's already been a tax revolt. By one informed calculation, Canada's underground economy equals as much as a third of measured gross domestic product, and it is growing twice as fast as the formal economy. Similar figures are reported in countries as diverse as Britain, Peru, and India. The state is simply becoming less and less relevant to economic activity.

But the contagion spreads to other acts between consenting adults. We persist in pretending we can control immigration, but still they come, and still they will come. We pass laws to put prostitutes out of business, and as a Justice Department study noted, ''there was no evidence anyone quit working.'' Gambling is illegal in Canada, but still an estimated $1 billion a year is wagered.

Drugs are everywhere outlawed, yet the global drug trade is worth at least US$500 billion. And for all the protectionist noise in Washington, the increasing information content of goods and consequent shrinking of physical volumes ''! make[ it far less easy to suppress worldwide trade,'' says Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, ''in the same sense that repressive governments have trouble blocking the satellite-transmitted flow of information to their people.''

Once, Richard Nixon claimed, we were all Keynesians. But we are all anarchists now.