Bill, David, KDC, your comments about this Dallas case brought to mind a passage from a piece upon which I’m working.
When an agent of the State believes that his orders justify the most basic mistreatment of his fellow man, it’s only a hop, skip, and jump to enemy combatants on home soil —and I’m not talking about only people who look like Muslims—being treated the same way. [That is, very poorly!] If the Milgram Experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiments taught us anything, it’s that people will follow orders—naked authority—to almost any end, despite data and indications (and even signals from conscience) to the contrary. It is this seminal truth that guarantees that the State, any state, no matter how constructed, no matter who is “elected” to run it, no matter what documents supposedly justify its creation and protect those under its control, will, in time, become a bubbling cesspool of rights infringement and totalitarian conduct.
When people are taught that they must “control” others and they are given a monopoly of force, they eventually act like this cop, every time. (One might argue that people susceptible to this type of misconduct are drawn to these jobs. Tomato. Tomahto.) It is not about age, in my view. It’s human nature. That the larger public doesn’t rise up to meet this lunacy head-on is a result, I believe, of the systematic sheepification of the citizenry, which as we know now, is accomplished and maintained via public schooling. This sheepification was, in fact, one of the foundational tenets of that institution, the public school, at its inception and remains a large focus of its job.
5:18 pm on March 27, 2009
