This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The social contract is self-terminating.
If Penny and Neely had gotten into it in Mogadishu, he never would have been arrested. Because the social contract doesn't exist there. There's a DR line that goes "the police aren't there to protect you from criminals, they're there to protect criminals from you"- and that is in fact part of their job. In a state of nature when I discover someone trying to pick my pocket I maul him badly and part of the social contract is that I accept, in exchange for the police arresting him, that I don't get to put him in the hospital. And everyone knows it on some subconscious level. In a society where the police will not arrest criminals, citizens cut the hands off of thieves their damn selves and lynch mobs form at a moment's notice.
"Muh anarcho-tyranny" anarcho-tyranny is not a stable equilibrium. Lack of prosecutions result in police being less willing to do their jobs until whoops, Mr. Patel can break ribs on suspected shoplifters at his liquor store to his heart's content and the cops ain't doing shit. Eventually it doesn't get that far, of course; the bandidos show up and make Mr. Patel a deal; they take care of the ne'er do wells in very pinko-unapproved ways, and he pays them, with some forwarded to the police to file a report saying there's nothing to see there. Lack of enforcement of laws results in eroding state capacity until the state can't enforce the laws on normal people either.
That's the Leviathan shaped hole; someone is going to keep order even if it's not the government(at this point it's a failed state and usually taxes stop being paid). Establishing the Leviathan is a society-wide hock because threading the needle between pointlessly oppressive and so dysfunctional it loops back around into pointless oppression is a hard task with serious risk of grievous bodily harm.
Under what theory? Certainly not Hobbes.
And if YOU breach that contract, the police arrest you and maybe put you in the hospital. But suppose the breach is on the part of the state... they don't arrest the miscreants. What's your remedy, as an individual, supposedly a party to this contract? None at all. Social contract theory is merely an elaborate moral justification for a demand to obedience to government; what differentiates Hobbes's version is it's less sugar-coated.
It doesn't need to be a stable equilibrium: with enough force it can be maintained. As state capacity has risen, so has the capacity for anarcho-tyranny. When Bernie Goetz shot four men in the subway and buried the weapon upstate, he might actually have gotten away with it (he later turned himself in); there were no clear pictures of him. Had Daniel Penny tried to run, ubiquitous surveillance would have had him caught in no time.
The social contract exists because of the legitimacy of the king’s justice, and the king’s justice is legitimate because people- cops, sailors, shopkeepers, housewives, farmers, truckers, factory workers, street sweepers, you know, the mass of the commons- believe that it is just. The underclass has no meaningful social contract because they believe the kings justice is illegitimate; so they break the law at the drop of a hat and expect no protection from it either.
If Mr. Patel believes that there is no justice from the king, he will simply beat suspected shoplifters himself, and suspected shoplifters will probably not be filing police reports(they also don’t expect justice), so he can probably get away with it for awhile. But in practice, I suspect that a local 1%er MC will happily take a retainer fee to do far worse things than he would to ne’er do wells and miscreants that chose his liquor store as the location for their delinquency, and they don’t care if a member gets arrested from time to time- he’ll be out in far less time than the judge sentenced him to, and the cops aren’t willing to come down on the hell’s angels like a ton of bricks because why risk their lives like that for the king’s justice that is not just? Better to take a modest bribe and file a report saying no sir, that motorcycle clubhouse is a perfectly ordinary members-only bar, there’s nothing fishy or illegal going on.
The outlaw is outside the law, and being outside the law goes both ways. I know you’re eeyore, but surely even you can see that- ground level decisions in the real, material world matter, and cops have no sympathy for outlaws and outlaws don’t go whining to the cops even if they don’t expect to be themselves caput lupus; they have inaccurate ideas of how police encounters go and a sense of machismo forbidding it(what, you gonna squeal to the pigs like a battered woman?). It’s not just that maintaining a functioning society involves someone beating up lumpenproles, it’s that people trying to make a nice place for themselves in an otherwise dysfunctional craphole need the lumpenproles beaten up, and if they can’t free ride off the police they’ll have to do it themselves or outsource it to other rough men.
The people who go and physically do things matter and when the social contract loses legitimacy they stop doing the things pieces of paper from mandarins tell them to do and start doing the things that benefit them, personally. Corrupt cops are not great for the citizens, but they don’t do anything to protect the outlaws either, no matter what the mandarins say(why should they, they’ve got a union to cover them for not doing their jobs).
The king's justice's "legitimacy" rests on the cops and the soldiers; the others don't matter unless the king wants them to matter (as Justin Trudeau made clear during the trucker protests)
If Mr. Patel believes there is no justice from the king, he may beat the shoplifters himself. But the shoplifters may well go whining to the police. Or it might get out of hand and result in something the police won't ignore. And unlike the local 1%er MC clubs, the cops WILL come down like a ton of bricks on Mr. Patel. They'll send him to Rikers Island, a very rough jail where, unless there's an ethnic-Indian protection gang (which there may or may not be), he's going to be hurt. When he gets out he'll have many restrictions on him and likely lose the licenses necessary to operate his store. Which doesn't matter all that much because the fees he pays to his lawyers mean he'll lose the store anyway. He'll likely be advised by his lawyers that his best bet is to plead to a lesser felony, which not only puts him back in prison but means for the rest of his life he will be unable to obtain licenses and such, so at best he'll end up working the night shift for his cousin in the cousin's store. And according to social contract theory THIS IS JUSTICE. The king said don't hurt the shoplifters, leave that to me. Then the king didn't do anything. The king played dog-in-the-manger with the monopoly on violence... but according to Hobbes and all the rest, this was absolutely something within the king's discretion to do.
The truckers won. They took a few licks, but as Kulak convincingly argues, they won.
And it’s worth asking ourselves who the cops and soldiers are. And in every society within modernity, they’re from the mass of the common people. Sometimes they’re from the upper end(second sons of kulaks or whatever) and sometimes they’re a cross section and sometimes they’re from the bottom. But the difference between ‘the opinions of cops and soldiers’ and ‘the opinions of housewives, janitors, shopkeepers, truckers, factory workers, bus drivers and all the rest’ is very small; the king’s power comes because masses of common ordinary people follow orders and don’t just say the follow orders and pocket the money like a bunch of education bureaucrats. The clerks and bartenders and truckers who have to deal with the consequences of anarcho-tyranny are the friends, neighbors, brothers, parents, romantic partners of the cops and army sergeants that the king depends on; the anarcho-tyranny phase sucks for them, but for that reason it is just a phase.
The truckers were utterly defeated and their leaders are still being prosecuted.
They're those selected for both a penchant for violence and willingness to obey the regime.
No, they aren't. Cops are different; you've perhaps of the "us vs. them" dynamic among police officers? To police, police are "us". Sometimes a few other groups of public service workers such as EMTs are at least us-adjacent. Those other people, the janitors and truckers and factory workers and such? Those are the people the cops consider it their job to keep in line, they're "them". Soldiers are a different "us"; the military makes them into a breed apart, and so they remain.
ETA: You said
Yes, someone is keeping order. The Leviathan is the cops and the soldiers who are keeping the people in line. But it is also the schizos and petty criminals who have free reign. The prison gangs who impart harsh injustice to those who fall afoul the state's rules. The bevy of lesser officers who harass shopowners and other basically-decent citizens for violations real and imagined. Your "Mr. Patel" and the truckers and the Daniel Penny's of this world are kept in line by all those powers. The sort of order where a man may run a store and not fear to be robbed is one sort, and Hobbes would approve. But the order of Gotham City, where the criminals are given wide reign and the ordinary people are kept in line through fear of them on the one hand and the state on the other, is just as valid by Hobbes's philosophy. Who said the sovereign must rule on behalf of the decent man to suppress the scum? No, if the sovereign prefers the scum... well, he's still the sovereign.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's not a DR line that's a Robert Peel line though his framing was more along the lines of; It as much the police man's job to protect an accused criminal from a vengeful public as it is to protect the public from criminals. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.
Edit: Agreed on the rest though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link