Still a Thug after All These Years

by Myles Kantor

An indicator of civilization is the presence of consent over coercion. Civilized people persuade, savages punch.

Those who conflate force with reason are bipeds that happen to talk. Their language is a meaningless skill since they rely on physical supremacy to fulfill their desires.

Less than five minutes into the first episode of The Sopranos’ fourth season, director-writer David Chase shows its protagonist to be a talking biped.

During breakfast, Anthony Soprano asks his son, A.J., if he’s passing social studies. (A.J.’s at a new school after being expelled from his previous one.) A.J. responds, "You just reveal your own ignorance. It’s only been five days. We didn’t get grades yet."

Soprano reacts to this insolence by smacking the back of A.J.’s head, portrayed less maliciously than casually.

Later Soprano sees an underling being wasteful with ice. The underling earnestly but imprudently explains the ease with which ice melts. Soprano flings ice at him and adds a few hits with a bucket.

After three years of therapy, Soprano remains someone in whom aggression is central.

What kind of social bond is possible with someone who’s prone to violence at any moment? Consider the following exchange:

A: I think Woodrow Wilson’s invasion of Haiti in 1915 was wrong.

B: It was a holy undertaking!

A: I disagree.

B: (Hits A with a copy of Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul.) Fool!

Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes that "the norm implied in argumentation is that everybody has the right of exclusive control over his own body as his instrument of action and cognition. Only if there is at least an implicit recognition of each individual’s property right in his own body can argumentation take place."

B rejects this norm and recognizes no such property right in A. He cannot discuss, only dominate.

For all of his spiffy threads and other trappings of civilization, Anthony Soprano is just like B. When he hears something he doesn’t like, his impulse is to beat.

We can expect many more thuggish acts from Soprano. For good reason does a gun symbolize this series.

September 20, 2002

Myles Kantor [send him mail] is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for Free Emigration, which agrees with Frederick Douglass that "It is a fundamental truth that every man is the rightful owner of his own body."

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

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