Guillotines Don't Guillotine People
(musings on: "liberty," freedom of choice, and the Encroachment of the Dreaded Nanny State)
We’d been talking, last time, about the encroachment on our god-given freedoms, a.k.a.: The Slippery Slope we’re on towards full-blown Communism. This discussion was prompted by a curious incident I witnessed in which a perfectly healthy cyclist appeared to cut off his own perfectly healthy head for no discernible reason.
Here’s the link to that post, in case you missed it:
Anyway, having grown up in the US, my first thought (after sending my thoughts and prayers to the now-seemingly-headless man’s loved ones, obviously) was of Litigation: We’ve gotta figure out who’s at fault here (and if I should prepare to be called as a witness in a grueling, protracted trial).
This is where things got sticky. Was there even fault to allocate? Nobody had thrown a banana skin or oil slick onto the road to sabotage the cyclist; nobody had even been around/operating the truck (so this wasn’t an Alec Baldwin thing where there’d been some sort of ill-fated breakdown in communication between any of the staff/crew/grips).
But could we really blame the makeshift guillotine itself? Was it not just minding its own business? I guess so. But do any guillotines kill people ever, then? With that logic, the most you could get them (i.e. guillotines) on was “involuntary manslaughter;” they’re just puppets at our mercy, after all.
What about the even worse stuff, then, like napalm, or smallpox blankets? Are they protected under this principle, too? If you ask a lot of “Guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people™” people, they’d have to say yes, right? Everything that happens, ever, is solely the responsibility of the Individual Actor. We must let the “Free Market” [of information/choice] decide. Things will - and therefore must - be left to sort themselves out, however long that process takes.
I can see the appeal of all this, but I’d have an easier time getting on board if it weren’t also the case that these same advocates also seem to have no problem with criminalizing marijuana and crack cocaine, nor with keeping prisons privatized/filled with all sorts of non-violent offenders. (…It’s almost as if… no… surely not…)
On top of that, it’s become manifestly clear over the past few decades that this Trickle-Down™-adjacent line of thinking was flat-out untrue, which also didn’t help their case (as far as trusting things to even out). Turns out, a system centered on the accumulation of wealth can - and will - only lead to greater inequality. Who could’ve seen it coming!?
So, yeah, we were talking about how this ostensibly virtuous, hard-line approach to Liberty™ is actually applied pretty inconsistently - incoherently, even - in the real world, and also how it turns out that we actually don’t mind making some concessions here and there [as far as our god-given rights go], although we’ll certainly put up a stink first (as evidenced by our pro-DUI drivers in last post’s video: “You’re telling me a hardworkin’ guy like me can’t kill a 12-pack of Bud Light and go for a Friday night joyride anymore!? I didn’t know we were living in fucking NORTH KOREA!!)
The banning of smoking indoors/on planes was another example of such a shift, 99.99 (repeating, of course) percent of which have already happened and are therefore taken for granted, or altogether forgotten about. Like how it’s inconceivable to us today that children used to just wake up and walk over to work in the coal mine or factory.
At the time, though, I’d bet you had folks arguing that implementing any sort of childrens’/workers’ rights laws was against the spirit of the free market/bad for business (and therefore unethical/unpatriotic/sacrilegious). The government shouldn’t ever get involved in private business, nor insert itself between capital and labor (and speak for either party) - that would be tyranny. Only the individual knows what’s right for the individual.
Kind of the same argument as the anti-seatbelt crowd: If I want to do something that puts my life in danger, whatever that thing is, I should be allowed. Thus, if the humble laborer “agrees” to sell their waking hours to me [for pennies on the dollar], we must let him. (Never mind the implications of this, for example that I’m then incentivized to create the social conditions whereby laborers have little choice but to take such a raw deal.)
At any rate, I imagine that the proponents of now-outdated and obviously inhumane norms probably got much less vocal about their beliefs once they sensed public opinion changing.
But that raises an interesting point, as far as our DUI-videos go. Back then - for almost all of human history, in fact - people could be as reactionary/bone-headed as they wanted, and change their tune later on down the line as/when necessary. We had no choice but to take someone’s word for it when/if they professed to have always been on the right side of history, or when they claimed that things were better in Their Day, or how they “would have gone pro [if they hadn’t messed up their knee]”.
That’s what we were working with: hearsay, trial and error, Chinese whispers, etc.; communicating with each other - but also down through the generations - with little more than cave paintings and smoke signals at our disposal. Thousands and thousands of years of pretty much having to start from scratch every generation, re: figuring out stuff like “how the world works,” and how most people (even our leaders/the ones we look up to) are filled up to their eyebrows with bullshit. No wonder history has tended to repeat itself: unless you were a trained historian (pretty tough, if you weren’t a royal or in some other esteemed position) you were pretty much flying blind, at the whims of basic human nature; learning every single lesson the hard way (like every other species).
Thankfully, we now have better tools to record things, giving us more data about the way things were, and about the people that came before us - how they actually thought and lived. With our mythologies having lost their luster; we’re no longer obligated to give the past - or those who lived through it - undue reverence. So that’s the “fun” thing about all this tech, I guess: if you like “gotcha” moments, you can pretty much have your fill. The average person’s mistakes/misapprehensions are on display for the world to see, judge, and ridicule…and it turns out, the average person makes a ton of mistakes, and has a ton of misapprehensions - meaning there’s effectively infinite low-hanging fruit, since everything’s a matter of public record. In a climate where regular people (especially young ones) are made to feel pretty disenfranchised/bitter about the state of the world - and those who had a hand in shaping it - it’s no wonder we dine out on all this. We might not have much, but at least we have the moral high ground.
But I wonder if we’re leaving meat on the bone here (to switch food-centric metaphors); maybe there’s some practical use we can get from these, too, beyond simple amusement.
For example, maybe we should be grateful that we now have irrefutable evidence of just how simple-minded we are; how boneheaded; how myopic. Now, I’m not saying the subjects of those interviews are dullards because they have those specific opinions. (They could still very well could be dullards, of course, that’d just be a separate issue.) The point is, those folks are no different to any of us; just swap out their manifestly false/absurd/self-destructive opinions for any current one(s) you want.
Videos like these show us how silly and backwards all of us will inevitably be made to look; how willingly we’ll argue against our own best interests - things like our health, happiness, and security - in the name of essentially inconsequential (when it comes to our day-to-day existence, that is), abstract things, like “National Values™,” “the Free Market;” how we’ll get red in the face over things we don’t even understand, like the “national debt” or “GDP.” Look how confident they (the DUI-defenders) are; how self-assured. Not one of them thinks they’re going to be on the wrong side of history, or that they’ll be a laughing stock within just a couple of decades - or just within a generation.
So, we can beat them (our poor old, much-maligned boomers, that is) over the head all day long, but we’d be falling into the same trap they did.
Obviously, seeing it from this lens is slightly less cathartic - it’s way more fun to think that those videos are far more a window into the past than any sort of mirror. It also requires resisting our nature: in our estimation, we are stronger, faster, and smarter than anyone who came before (and we now have video proof!) Alas, 100 billion people have come and gone before us; all of whom were convinced they were special and unique, too. (If you’re interested, this bias, where we assume the way things are now is the best they’ve ever been, or ever will be, is called “presentism.”)
This sort of footage, then, gives us a hitherto impossible peek behind the curtain, showing us the self-delusion, unwarranted confidence, and admittedly impressive degree of boneheadedness that’s been required to make it as far as we’ve made it as a species, given our pretty bleak circumstances (i.e., having to navigate a brutal, unforgiving planet while being cursed with consciousness and the knowledge of our own mortality, etc.).
So, while it’s no wonder that this stuff has come to seem like a shameful affliction in the internet age, it’s good to keep in mind that it doesn’t come from nowhere: it’s been one of our most useful tools [species-wise], letting/forcing us to prioritize meeting our basic survival/reproductive needs above all else, while filtering out all other distractions and concerns. This ties in with our impressive resilience/adaptability, which explain how we can get desensitized to these ostensibly earth-shattering (or Liberty-impinging) changes and get on with our lives so quickly - for better or worse.
We touched on this in our Discontented Frogs/Rising Tide™ Life Vests post, by the way:
Throw in “love of comfort”/“general distrust of the unknown”, and it’s really no surprise that, as individuals, we’re not too great at imagining any world/civilization where things were (or could be) fundamentally different to our own - even if we’re talking about something as seemingly innocuous as being “forced” to drive sober against our will.
All this to say: our myopia/hard-headedness aren’t any sort of character flaws, or down (strictly) to low IQ. They’re baked in, and we aren’t going to be able to get rid of them - but being aware of this stuff is a good start; it should - in theory - help us to get out in front of the issue as we try to move forward, reminding us to be a little less close-minded/stubborn/dogmatic.
Of course, you’re always going to get your contrarians who will happily die on their respective hills; the “Don’t Tread on Me’s” who’d happily cut off their nose (or get sent through a windshield) to spite their face. I’m thinking of the people who buy these sorts of things:
Ohhhh…..hang on a second… maybe that’s what our biker’s motive was! Some sort of eccentric form of protest/social commentary, like those avant-garde “artistes” who put their lives on the line for their extreme performance art. I’m thinking of that woman who stood naked next to a bunch of random items on a table and let the crowd do whatever they wanted to her. (It was some sort of commentary on group psychology, apparently.)
In this case, our biker’s beef was against the Nanny State (the one hell-bent on taking away our cherished weapons and medieval instruments of torture). He knew that: If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
How inspiring: a sort of real-life Walter White, refusing to be beaten down by a ball-busting wife and the unforgiving world closing in around him, deciding to take his fate into his own hands. A sort of: “You can’t fire me if I quit!”
His self-decapitation was the ultimate celebration of Individual Agency; Freedom of Choice in its purest, most fundamental form. (A shout-out to the French Revolution, maybe, what with its anti-big-government message, and all.)
A good a theory as any for his inexplicable crash, I guess.