05/04/09 - I want to make a proposition. There are two kinds of people in the world. Now, as you can tell, this is going to be a gross overstatement. And there is no way this is the only way to divide the worlds people up. We, as a species, are finding new, incredible, and profound ways to do that every day. Point is, this is something that occurred to me. Obviously.
You have seen, I am sure, a police officer (from here on, I'll say cop. It's gender neutral and shorter to spell) stop a person, not because they're doing anything horribly illegal, just lets say, kind of illegal, or technically illegal. Say, something like a skateboarder on a side walk, or walking on the grass somewhere. What thought came into your mind when you witnessed this? Did you think, "Good! Fuck that guy! How dare he skate here! Doesn't he know good, law-abiding citizens like me are in danger of being run into and injured every time he skates around here on this sidewalk?" and it's a legitimate concern, and skateboarders shouldn't be on the sidewalk, and neither should bicyclists. That's not the point. The point is whether you think like that, or instead you think along the lines of, "Man, fuck that cop man! Where does he/she get off tellin' people what they can and can't do! It's a free sidewalk, and that dude has as much a right to skate on it as I do to walk on it! It's a free country, man!" Which is true, we live in a pretty liberated society. We could always be free-er, but we're still pretty well off.
Again the point behind this is not whether in this intensely hypothetical situation you would think precisely in the manner I described, it's just if you thought along the lines of one of those thoughts. Like me, my exact response would be something like, "Ah, man. Poor guy has probably skated down this side walk all year and not bothered anybody, but I mean it's the law, so I guess he's got what's coming to him." See, I empathized with the skateboarder, but not to the extent that I stereotyped the pro-skateboarding thought. Hopefully you get the idea.
Anyway, as I thought about it, my emotional response is pretty much the same to every instance of "the man" exercising its responsibility to uphold justice. Which could be because I grew up in a liberal household with a judge and defense attorney as parents. Or maybe I'm just an empathetic person by nature, or untrusting of law enforcement by nature. Although that last one's probably not it, I get along with cops pretty well. Unless they're arresting some one.
What puzzles me is not so much what different people think after seeing the same situation, or even why they think it. It's the idea that people do think in these basically two different ways. Why don't all people empathize with the authority, after all, it's us that put them in power, asked them to do these things. On the other hand, why don't we all empathize with the person being subjected to that authority. After all, It could easily be us next time. The reason that I see behind it--if there is one--is that, as a society we need balance. Think about what would happen is we all, collectively, hated anyone who broke any law. No MLK day, that's for sure. Gandhi would have been the Muthafucka instead of the Mahatma. And we would just throw people in jail, with no regard for the depth of their transgressions or even if said transgression even occurred. Just sounds bad, man. But on the other hand, what if we all had a deep-seeded disrespect, mistrust, and even hatred for law enforcement? Peace would be very difficult to keep. Society would be in chaos.
There are people, I'm sure, that would enjoy either of those two extremes, fascists on the one hand, anarchists on the other. But they're the two extremes. Hell, most of us would say they're unrealistic, if not bat-shit insane. If you generalize, you can really group the two different views of power and authority into two different branches of political thought--left and right, liberal and conservative. Most of us can agree, I think, that society would have a very hard time maintaining itself if we didn't have people on both sides of that political aisle. We would migrate towards the extremes until we collapsed either from too much government or not enough. When looked at like this, I can almost describe it as a sort of sociological evolution which serves a protective and self-maintaining function for society.
However, recognizing this trait of society leads to a paradoxical question in the means of the functionality of political debate. On the one hand, it seems like we have to debate our viewpoints, otherwise having them would be pointless. If we don't let the other side know what we think, we simply won't be represented, and then we will drift to the extremes of political thought. On the other hand, debate seems useless if society as a whole wants to maintain an equilibrium in political thought. Why argue about things when our own society wants the two approximate halves to believe two different things?
Maybe I should take a sociology course. It seems interesting to me. But, if my line of thought is right, even discussing this topic is slightly useless. That's a big assumption, I suppose. But you know what they say about assumption... it makes an ass out of u and mption.
That made me laugh, rereading it.
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