On Violence and Freedom
There are two things that I read the other day that I wanted to post about. Individually, they probably wouldn’t have motivated me enough to bring up the old Editing screen, but having read them a few hours a part — they really caught my eye.
The first comes from a monologue in John Brunner’s The Jagged Orbit. Written in 1969, I can best describe it as a distopian prediction of race relations and racial equality on par with Orwell’s prophecies on privacy…
How could you expect a man to be a good neighbor when he’s spent years shooting at shadows, moving tree-branches, silhouettes on window-shades? Hos could you expect him to be a good citizen when he’s seen his government authorize the killing of thousands, millions of other human beings? How could you expect him to be a good father when he’s spent his early twenties torturing children to get information about enemy troop positions?
The second quote comes from Hunter S. Thompson in the May 2005 issue of Playboy Magazine. The article is a loose collection of thoughts on a variety of subjects. This coming from “On Free Will” …
In Orwell’s 1984, rigidity is imposed by the will of the state. Whereas with soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s the will of the people. I’ve always operated on that second theory. Nobody is stealing our freedoms. We’re dealing them off. That’s the dark side of the American dream.
I don’t really have anything to add to them, I just thought they were interesting. Seperately, and together.
July 7th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
I think the former observation has more resonance in theory than in practice. That is, it is easy to be astonished that somebody could participate in such training or commit acts that seem utterly barbaric, then go back to a “normal life”. Yet that does seem to be what most people do. I know a number of Vietnam War veterans, for example, who are still deeply troubled by their experience, but who were nonetheless wonderful parents. And isn’t the classic counter-example the death camp guard who goes home to his wife and kids at the end of his shift?
To some extent, this can be explained by the fact that humans have an ability to compartmentalize their lives. Another part of the answer, at least with the worst acts of barbarity, is that humans also seem to have a remarkable ability to regard the subjects of organized oppression or brutality as somehow less than human, thereby excusing themselves from culpability for mistreating the “garbage / dogs / cockroaches / pigs / cancer / vermin / swine / monkeys” or whatever other euphemism they apply to the subjects of their actions.
As for the second observation, I think the real problem is that people tend not to recognize that they are giving away their own rights – they believe that they are merely giving away the rights of other people.