The Frustration Of Trying to Discuss Anything Controversial On The Internet

I had an interesting exchange on a usually-non-political blog I frequent. Going to paste snippets, but not link to or identify the blog, because I really don't think they'd welcome a bunch of incoming political commentary (Hee, hee! I'm pretending people read and are influenced by my blog! I love playing make-believe!).

I was the initial offender, going on what I hoped was a pretty inoffensive political tangent, in response to another post:

I work for a large private company, but with government in some very sensitive capacities, and my experience has taught me to not be too trusting of government in any of its flavors.

At the risk of getting too political, private people who just want to go about their lives are responsible for only very tiny pieces of the world’s misery. To create truly horrific pain and suffering takes a government, and some people who want to “make things better” that are willing to use it.

In the immortal words of noted political philosopher Malcolm Reynolds:

“So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this — they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people … better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.”

And another philosopher from the same school, River Tam:

“People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”

Damn that was a great movie.

 It wasn't that long before someone made the following comment in reply.

Yeah, I was just thinking earlier today of the miseries inflicted by the big mean boogerheads of government with those clean water acts, and prohibitions on child labor, and limiting the number of rat droppings in my ice cream, and putting roads in the way of anywhere I am to anywhere I want to go, and keeping inspirational pioneers from creating stuff like useful airplanes or microchips or the Internet by going off and funding it themselves, and requiring cars that don’t roll over when you take a turn at more than 15 miles per hour, and making kids learn to read, and prosecuting fraudulent merchants. Not one single bit of this in any way makes the lives of one single person better and yet government goes after it day after day, year after year, as though it were at all possible for people to make society a little less savage.

I replied in turn:

Chill. I didn’t say there were no benefits to government, or that we were better in a state of anarchy. You’re reading a lot into what I said that’s simply not there. George Washington* Cloudbuster said, quoting vague sources, “Government, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” Also, like fire, that doesn’t mean government isn’t necessary and useful. I was simply pointing out that, like fire, government must be treated with extreme caution.

The world isn’t full of black and whites. It’s not “government is great” or “government is terrible.” Not all governments are equal. We are blessed with an exceptionally good one in the U.S., for all its faults. But governments are made up of people, with all their typical flaws. You have to be ever vigilant. No government is immune from abuse and degeneration.

I can’t speak in specifics about my job, but as I type this, I am aware of some very, very disturbing things being done by our own government, usually with the best of intentions (and this isn’t a liberal/conservative thing. This is just a “this is how governments do business” thing). That was what I meant about people wanting to “make things better.” In real life, almost nobody thinks they are the villain. But it’s really not too many steps from “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” to the horrors of the Stalinist purges or the Great Leap Forward. A lot of well-intentioned people did a lot of terrible things. It’s human nature. The only way to make sure “it can’t happen here” is to keep, every day, making sure it’s not happening here.

 I hope that's taken as a civil response, but, damn, comments like that person's reply really get to me. Not because he's wrong -- I agree with him that government is an invaluable institution that can be a powerful force for good. What really ticks me off is how he takes what I said and completely twists it around to make it seem as if I was saying all government is terrible and does nothing good for anyone.

I don't see how any honest reading of my words can be interpreted that way. It's almost a banality to say that governments are responsible for much of the world's misery. I don't even see how that's controversial. Most of the world does not currently enjoy our form of Constitutional representative republic. Most of the world, even today, suffers under tyranny, oppression and corruption. Caused by their governments.

He's creating an argument by imputing to me beliefs I don't even hold. How can you have a discussion when someone does that to you? It's communicating in bad faith.

It strikes me as supremely naive to respond to a statement that "governments are responsible for much of the world's misery" with a sarcastic "Oh, yeah, right, government never did anything good for anyone!" I imagine this kind of response can only come from someone who lives in a well-governed country.

To me, it smacks of hubris. When you look at the disparities between well-governed nations and poorly-governed nations, between free nations and tyrannies, you have to ask yourself why. Why do we in the U.S. (or Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland, pick your free western nation) have a generally orderly, prosperous society, while people in Somalia and Sudan are hacking their neighbors apart with machetes?

Anything less than a very complex answer risks doing an offense to people in either location. If you believe in the essential equality of man, if you believe that Somalians are not in some way essentially inferior to Swedes or Aussies, then the one conclusion you cannot draw is "It can't happen here." If you took a Swedish baby and raised him by Sudanese in the heart of contested territory, do you believe he would grow up fighting along side the people he grew up with? And if you raise a baby from the Sudan by Swiss in the heart of Zurich, do you believe he'd grow up as intelligent and civilized as any of his neighbors?

If you believe so, then whatever a man can be driven to in the Sudan, he can be driven to in Delaware, if things in Delaware were allowed to degenerate enough. What I am saying here is not that the U.S. is in incipient danger of collapse, but that the impulses that drive us all are the same. The corrupt, murderous warlords in the Sudan are not a different species of people than accountants in Baltimore.

The tendency toward greed, corruption, envy, tribal and familial allegience, they're all right here in the U.S. suburbs. We hold them at bay with our culture, our upbringing, the institutions of civil society. But civil society can be weakened. It can succumb to baser impulses if bad people get the reins of power.

But freedom can also be undone by higher aspirations, when an ideal is deemed so important that any means is acceptable to achieve it. That's the barbarism of the educated. The Marxists of the 20th century had the best of intentions -- the ideals of Marxism are admirable, if wrong-headed -- but time after time, in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, they committed horrors in the name of those ideals and created nightmare states, some of which persist to this day as blights on the face of the world. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guevera, Pol Pot, these were not stupid or uneducated men. They were brilliant, idealistic leaders who believed so fiercely in their collectivist ideology that they were willing to commit countless horrors against the individual.

We keep the same thing from happening in western nations only so long as we recognize that the state is the servant of the citizen, not his master, that the individual is supreme over the state, not vice versa, that the state exists to protect individuals, to allow them to pursue their own interests, and that individuals should not be squelched in the pursuit of the state's interests.

* An alert reader pointed out that this is one of the apocryphal quotations that apparently cannot be reliably traced back to George Washington.