Gun pride

Something else I heard on the news in the last couple of days stuck with me. The Connecticut school shooter’s first victim was his own mother, who was found dead at her home. It was (at least partly) her guns that Adam Lanza used to take another couple of dozen lives, and she was quoted as being “proud” of her gun collection.

I don’t want to make this particular comment about gun safety, as such. I have no idea how responsible this lady may have been with her collection. I have zero information on how securely the guns in her house were kept, and no reason to start criticising the way she went about trying to keep herself and her family safe.

What I do want to comment on is the use of the word “proud” when people describe their gun collections.

I think it’s a bad idea for that to be something to take pride in.

Well, maybe not in everyone’s case. There are no doubt enthusiasts of history out there, and people with an interest in their technological development, and so forth, whose interest in guns is sincere, learned, and intellectual, who find an appeal and satisfaction to studying their function, recognising and categorising them, understanding the details of their safe and proper use. That can be all well and good. It doesn’t do anything for me, but I know people who go birdwatching to a degree that bewilders me. There’s no accounting for taste, and that’s fine.

But there’s a different flavour of pride some people take in their guns, where it becomes a macho, posturing thing. In many cases, it’s a distinctly masculine way of bragging about how powerful you are, how dominant, how much harm you could do to others if you chose.

That’s an attitude that worries me.

I’m not saying you should be ashamed, or feel like a bad person, if you own any guns, or even if you enjoy owning them. And I’ll even stipulate, for now, that you’re perfectly entitled to own whatever weaponry you’ve got your hands on so far. You want to protect your family from potential threats, intruders, attackers. Sure. There’s a noble sentiment motivating what you do, I’ll give you. This isn’t about shaming anyone.

But the fact that you need, not just guns, but a gun collection to protect your family? That shouldn’t be a point of pride. If such things really are necessary for you and your loved ones to be adequately defended against the world, that’s deeply regrettable. It should be an unfortunate truth, against which you grit your teeth and grimly accept the tragic nature of reality.

At best, a gun collection should be seen as a necessary evil. I can’t see a good reason for it to inspire pride.

Would you feel as proud of your guns as you do now, if you had to use them? If a twenty-year-old tweaker broke into your home in a desperate frenzy one day, wanting to grab something he could sell to get a fix that afternoon, and you shot him dead because you legitimately feared for your family’s safety – would you be proud of what you’d done?

Or would you feel sad and shaken by something like that? Even if you were sure you’d done the right thing, the only thing you could have done in the situation, would you regret the necessity of it? Would you agree that the outcome was a terrible one, even if there was nothing else you could do to prevent it in the moment?

If it’s the latter case, I think that’s understandable. And I think you would do well to extend that attitude toward the ownership of deadly weapons in the first place.

If not… well, if killing someone who broke into your home and attacked you is something you reckon you’d feel positive about, you’re probably such a different person from me that you don’t read this blog a whole lot. If you are, I’d strongly urge you to reconsider your feelings on the value of human life.

There are also those with concerns, not about personal defense against individuals who wish us harm, but about the increased power of centralised authority, if we vote to let them take everyone else’s guns away (which, let’s remember, is not the only thing that “gun control” means, by any stretch). The gist of the argument seems to be that living in a country where the only firearms are in the hands of the government-run military and police forces is a scary notion.

And there’s a lot of truth there, but I’m also deeply unnerved by the blithe acceptance of a police force who need to be stood up to with armed violence. I mean, if the police and the army are such a threat to citizens of their own country, that those citizens need to defend themselves against them with guns… then why the hell do you have such a scary, power-mad police and military?

It’s not that I don’t think abuses of police authority are a serious worry, but surely there are other methods of recourse to deal with the problem. I’m not sure I want a police force or a military around at all if I’m going to have to carry a gun to make sure their behaviour doesn’t get out of hand.

I guess that’d be the right-libertarian ideal, where everyone is no more than a quick-draw away from ending the life of anyone who might pose a threat, so that we can all live in perfect peace under a comforting omni-present blanket of mutually assured destruction. But I’m willing to bet that, if I bothered to do the research, I’d find that the safest places in the world aren’t the places where the most people are armed and ready to shoot each other if anyone else tries starting any shit. I suspect the safest places are those where people don’t tend to own guns, and don’t think about guns all that much.

Things need to change massively before they’re going to stop being awful. I’m rarely crazy about government intervention, but I’m having a hard time seeing the idea of state imposition of gun control laws as a more sinister prospect than the condition of the US as it currently is.

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Horrible

So, a horrible thing has happened.

That’s nothing new. Horrible things of one sort or another are always happening. Often, the most horrible things happen on such a scale you can’t even really understand them, or react appropriately.

This particular horrible thing isn’t on that scale. This horrible thing was something we can all understand and react to. And perhaps we should be more outraged about the horrible things in Rwanda and Syria and Darfur and Pakistan and Somalia than we generally are. But this horrible thing isn’t made any less horrible by its not being the worst thing in the world.

I don’t have too much to say about this, and if I don’t cover the obvious bases in much detail – that this is unspeakably tragic, that everyone involved deserves as much compassion and help and respect and privacy as we can give them – please understand that my own words are intended to be supplemental to these facts, not to supplant them.

With the proviso, then, that these are far less important than many other things to be said, I have some scattered thoughts related to the recent school shooting in Connecticut.

– Gun control. Some people want it, some people don’t. Some people on both sides of the argument in the States are talking about it more loudly now than they had been before. I’ve talked about it in the past, without coming to any particular conclusions.

But there’s one thing in particular that I wish people who are deeply pro-gun, and have been vocally so in the time since the shooting, would understand:

You know that other lot who you don’t like, who are calling for more gun control laws right now? They’re not doing it because they’re liberal fucking assholes. They’re doing it because eighteen children just got shot dead by a gun.

Trying to get someone to truly and sincerely understand where another person’s coming from, when they’re politically at odds, is always a challenge. But this really should be an easy one for you guys. Someone broke into a school and just kept murdering people with the guns he owned, and many liberals responded by proposing legal measures to curb gun ownership. It should not be that difficult to take a charitable view of these liberals’ motivations, and to understand why they might be suggesting such a thing.

You don’t have to agree with them, but they’re not fucking assholes for thinking that way. A bunch of kids are dead. It doesn’t make someone a moron or an authoritarian ideologue if they come up with “not letting people have all the guns they want all the time” as an idea which might conceivably stop so many kids from dying in the future.

And yes, yes, the government imposing limits on the rights of citizens is a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope, blah blah blah. Sure. But eighteen children just got shot and killed. And what that means for you right now is that you need to work pretty goddamn hard not to seem unforgivably petty, if you’re going to spend more time talking about protecting your right to own guns than about protecting children’s right not to get shot dead by those guns.

The other guys are sincerely trying to act in the interests of innocent people. You’re spending most of your own effort defending your right to own the weapons that just massacred them. I’m not saying you’re entirely without a point, but have some perspective on the argument and be aware of how you sound.

– Would it even work? The point of gun control is to reduce gun crime and save lives; the only point in supporting it is to achieve that end. But the correlation between lax laws and more deaths isn’t necessarily as straight-forward as all that.

Someone observed on Twitter earlier (I’ve got to stop half-remembering people’s tweets and failing to credit them) that many conservatives, who oppose gun control laws on the grounds that they wouldn’t even be effective in reducing gun ownership and crime, nevertheless support such demonstrably counterproductive endeavours as the war on drugs. A draconian set of laws is clearly doing nothing to seriously reduce the drug problem over there, and the frequent right-wing hypocrisy is clear.

But the argument goes the other way, too, and I’ve not seen any liberals giving the corresponding syllogism its due. If, like many on the left, you recognise what a dismally failed effort the drug war is, and the extent to which it exacerbates many of the problems of drug use and creates scores of new ones of its own… then why assume that restricting gun ownership will be drastically different?

– Whatever the answer, it’s not too soon to have the conversation, about gun control or anything else which could help. If eighteen dead children doesn’t make it a good time to start seriously examining our options, I don’t know what will.

– Final point. Fuck the Constitution.

Seriously, you colonials over there. Get over the fetish for this ancient piece of paper.

Okay, maybe that’s harsh. I guess I don’t have a massive problem with much of the document. It’s got some good ideas and some stuff which was reasonable at the time. And I’m not saying I think it’s terrible because any particular part of it does something I don’t like, or there’s any specific legal principle within that I find disagreeable.

But it was one bunch of people’s ideas of how to run a country, which they came up with in the 1780’s. Smart people with a positive vision for a glorious and thriving egalitarian democracy, they may very well have been. Their ideas should be given due consideration. But you’re allowed to move on.

If you’re trying to decide what laws you should have in your country, have laws that are good laws. Don’t have laws solely because they seem to line up well with what some guys two centuries dead thought would be good laws.

You’ve had nearly a quarter of a millennium now, as a country, to consider and reflect on the original Constitution, and think about how its contents might best be updated in the face of an ever-changing set of societal requirements and conditions.

Particularly, say, in the case of the rather significant advances in handgun technology that have come along since the invention of the musket.

There was much to admire about Thomas Jefferson but we might, collectively, be able to make better decisions than him on the subject of waiting periods and background checks before people are allowed to purchase an M1941 Johnson Rifle and set of armor-piercing .30-06 Springfield cartridges. The founding fathers had some smart ideas, especially about the importance of freedom, and it’s true that many politicians are too keen to second-guess them and assume they know better… but I really think us 21st century folk are in a better position to make the call on this one.

It’s a really, really good time to have a conversation about guns, and about any possible ways we might be able to minimise horrible things that happen because of guns in the future. An honest conversation needs to consider all the options, including gun control, no gun control, or just somehow persuading the entire USA to be a little less batshit insane about firearms.

And a worthwhile conversation about gun laws actually needs to be about gun laws, and not – please, for the love of bacon – about the placement of fucking commas in the Second Amendment. For fuck’s sake.

More not unrelevant things about this can be read here, and here, and it may also have come up in conversation elsewhere on the internet.

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Live to work and work to rule

The discussion about big corporations paying surprisingly little tax keeps coming back around, and rarely changes in its substance. Every time, a significant part of the discourse is devoted to reminding us that, so long as what they’re doing is legal, companies like Starbucks are simply engaging in good business practice by minimising their tax liabilities.

Regular Joes in the street like you and me, we don’t go paying more tax than we legally have to, after all, and if we had the chance to save a few quid we obviously would. Why would we expect companies earning billions, and with expert accountants on their payroll to find and make use of clever loopholes, to be any different?

In other news which might not seem to be connected at first glance, Education Secretary Michael Gove has called for the docking of teachers’ pay if they engage in industrial action by “working to rule”, and has called the unions organising such action “highly irresponsible”.

Working to rule, if you’re not familiar with the phrase, essentially means doing your job up to the limits of what’s legally required of you, and not going an inch further. If you’re contracted to work until 5pm, you go home at 5pm on the dot. If you’re entitled to an hour’s lunch-break, you drop everything and take not an instant less than three thousand six hundred seconds of leisure in the middle of the day.

The reason that “only doing the work you’re paid for” can, in some cases, constitute significant industrial action – let alone the fact that there’s even a term for it – speaks to how normalised it is for many workers to do more than their job description as part of a regular work-day. If everybody doing no more than the job they’re paid for would do as much damage as Gove would have you believe, you’d think someone might want to look into finding a way of remunerating public sector employees in a way that’s less calamitously broken. Possibly this should even be within the Education Secretary’s remit to look into.

The comparison and contrast, I hope, is clear. Doing the bare minimum legally required of you: When billionaires and global corporations do it to avoid contributing any more to the public purse, they’re savvy investors wisely managing their finances to maximise growth and increase shareholder return. When teachers, nurses, doctors, and other workers contributing their labour for the public good and regularly doing more than they’re paid for do it, they’re irresponsible and should be fined.

It’s a term you only seem to hear from serious politicians when the little guy is fighting back for a change, but “class warfare” doesn’t get much more naked and shameless than that.

It shouldn’t be surprising, of course, because government ministers and people distanced from the level of actual service provision have an innate upper hand. Someone from the National Association of Head Teachers is quoted in that BBC article:

We understand the position of our colleagues in the teaching unions, but our duty to pupils overrides all political or industrial considerations.

And he has a point – obviously the well-being and care of pupils (or those needing medical attention, etc.) should always be kept in mind. But the extent to which we consider these publicly funded jobs vital and necessary means the people doing those jobs can effectively be held to ransom.

If you’re in a union of, say, steelworkers (they still have those, right? We must still use steel, even though it’s the future now?), and you’re not happy with your pay or working conditions, you can go on strike. The company management might not be happy, but that’s kinda the point – and who else is going to care? The public at large isn’t going to give a crap if some steel doesn’t get worked by one particular company. Collective bargaining for the win.

But if you’re directly responsible for providing a public service, then any kind of industrial action risks disrupting that service. A service which could be much needed, even life-saving, and which could be made unavailable to some people in need of it.

The simplest, most headline- and soundbite-friendly way (which, let’s face it, is the way a lot of media outlets are most likely to bother with) to frame any industrial action by public sector workers boils down to: “They’re letting people suffer because they want more money”. Children are going untaught, wounds are going untreated, vital operations are (it’s presumed by extrapolation) going unperformed, because teachers and nurses and doctors are refusing to do the work we pay for with our taxes.

It’s the easiest perspective to take, because the workers are the ones immediately responsible for providing the service – but an instinct to see things this way renders every public sector utterly powerless to preserve their own financial security and their rights as employees, in ways that aren’t similarly threatened for private employees.

If the government made the money-saving decision to abruptly cut the salary of every firefighter in the country by half, those firefighters might not feel inclined to put out many fires until that bullshit was sorted out. The implications could be horrifying – fire is very unhealthy if you eat too much of it, I’ve read – but you’d have to be insane not to support their call for the government to reverse their policy decision, and absolve the firefighters themselves of the bulk of the responsibility for any consequences. What’s the alternative? How far below a living wage would you have to give them, before firefighters stop just being selfish for not doing their job simply because they’re the ones sitting in the truck with the massive hose?

Whether or not public sector workers are driven more by a sense of duty and desire to do good than others, they’re also trying to earn a living, and deserve a chance to do so. If their attempts to fight for that chance are having a negative impact, look a little further up the chain of command before deciding where to place the blame. Look at the cuts to education spending, and the way the NHS is being squeezed and privatised, and think about how much of the blame for disrupted services really lies with individuals trying to support their families and pay their mortgages under increasingly tight and antagonistic conditions.

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But to Obama’s credit…

…at least he’s waging the war on Christmas as much as you’d expect from any good fundamentalist communist secularist Muslim.

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The enemy of your enemy

I often remind myself, these days, of how recently it was that I generally bought into the Democrat/Republican good-guy/bad-guy narrative. Remembering that I meant well, and wasn’t simply being vindictive or a complete dumb-ass, is what stops me getting as cross as perhaps I should at a lot of people in my Facebook and Twitter feeds, and others with whom I’m of a like mind on many things.

But look, people, progressives, sensible liberal types who want to help everyone and think that government is an important tool for doing that: you really need to look at the tribalism on your side of the aisle, as well as just denouncing it when you correctly spot it on the other.

Sometime in November, I tweeted something to the effect of:

“The wrong person won the election and now THE WORLD IS DOOMED!!1!” – crazy Republicans. Also most of you if the numbers had been a little different.

It’s not that the people who saw Obama’s re-election as the moment their country was lost to an Islamic socialist conspiracy aren’t comical. But the number of people with whom I share almost all my values, and yet who cheered Obama on and would have declared the US a complete lost cause if Romney had won, gave me an irony headache.

The idea that, because of the obvious stupidity and meanness of the American right, supporting the left means joining forces with progressive freedom fighters of tolerance and equality, is entirely misguided. You really need to realise that Obama is not your friend.

Before the recent US election, there was a lot of speculation on the left that the President would really start getting things done in his second term. Things he wanted to do, but which wouldn’t have been politically viable for him while he was still trying to get re-elected. This is troublesome for a number of reasons.

It surely indicates a catastrophically broken system, if you’re saying we can’t trust anything a President says or does in his first four years in office. That’s a long time for them to hold the most powerful political position in the world’s primary superpower, while having to prioritise their own popularity above the things they were elected to do.

Lawrence O’Donnell, a man who had hundreds of reasons to vote for Obama in November, made it clear that the President had “absolutely no intention of having that discussion” (about the war on drugs he totally plans to end) until he was re-elected. So if Obama thinks it’ll hurt his political career to talk honestly about his feelings on the important political issues facing the country, he’s just going to keep quiet until he’s in the clear.

That’s coming from someone firmly on Obama’s side. In the face of his failure to do what they want him to do, and act according to his own alleged conscience, their defence is to say “It’s okay, he’s just lying so people will vote for him”.

When it comes to that, you really need to ask why he’s worth defending at all.

Especially when it becomes apparent that he has no goddamn intention whatever of suddenly becoming the liberal Messiah everyone seemed to think he was four years ago. He’s not leading the way in some gloriously progressive, tolerant, loosening of insane drug laws and ushering in a new world of relaxed attitudes to personal use of enjoyable substances. He’s entirely failing to keep up with the pace of public opinion, and in fact is actively struggling against it.

Colorado and Washington both recently voted in favour of legalising recreational marijuana use. In Colorado, legal pot got more votes than Obama did. But the only news about his administration’s changing attitudes to the drug war implies that he’s considering efforts to step it up, and will be going out of his way to enforce federal laws to overrule these few democratic victories.

For some time now, Obama’s been stepping up harassment of even medical marijuana dispensaries, let alone people who just want to get high and have some fun and do things with their own bodies which they should be entitled to.

People such as himself. Obama’s own history of drug use is well recorded. He’s never been cagey about the fact that he smoked marijuana in his younger days, and stronger substances too. But, of course, he stopped, because he wanted to make something of himself someday, and he was concerned about the negative effects. He’d seen what regular use can do to people, how it can damage the intellect and blunt the senses. Drugs are bad, mm’kay.

What we’re supposed to take from that story is that drugs are a scourge which destroy people’s lives, and it’s just as well Obama overcame that temptation, so that now he can fight to stop others indulging in something so potentially damaging. What I actually take from it is that Obama used drugs when he was young, never got thrown in jail for it, made his own grown-up fucking decision to stop, and now he’s the goddamn President.

And now he doesn’t want other people to have the chance to make the same decision and take the same life path that he did. If he’d been subjected to the law which he’s now forcibly and expansively trying to implement, he’d have been a black kid with a criminal record for drug offences and a history of jail-time. Legally interfering with his life would have ruined it. Leaving him the hell alone let him become the most powerful man in the country.

Obama is not your friend, progressive liberal sensible nice people. He’s not the good guy. He’s not on your side. I’m not saying you should forget that Mitt Romney is appalling or that Republicans seem to say something new and moronic about rape or abortion on any given day that ends in a ‘Y’. But that doesn’t mean the other guy is the one you want. Don’t let the inane, two-team, pick-a-side mentality of US politics blind you to the fact that, if you’re in favour of cannabis decriminalisation, this President might be the worst in history on that metric. Stop fixating on the inanity of the Republicans who oppose him; look at the shit he’s actually pulling.

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IP unfreely

The premise of this article is that intellectual property shouldn’t be considered a “right” in the way that it commonly is, and that the current legal arrangement of IP “rights” is not a good solution to the problems they purport to address.

I find myself drawn towards ambivalence on this. It seems both highly persuasive, and simultaneously strangely unsatisfying in a way that’s hard to pin down.

Once I dig a bit deeper, though, it seems like the part of me performing a rational assessment is the part which follows the logic of the article and agrees entirely. The part that’s reacting against it seems to be coming from a place of “this is new and unfamiliar and significantly different from the world I feel I understand, and is therefore unimaginable, impossible, and ridiculous”.

I haven’t excised the latter part from my day-to-day assessment of the world yet, not by a long shot. Which is fine. I’m aware it’s there and sometimes know to look out for it, which is a start.

It’s a difficult idea to take on, that intellectual property is simply not fit for purpose, and it’s very easy to come up with a number of instinctive, knee-jerk objections. Even while I see how much sense it makes, and how much it lines up with my ideas of what a more fair, egalitarian, just, productive, and universally beneficial society should look like, part of my mind just isn’t happy with it. And I think this has something to do with a tendency to consider things individually, rather than as part of a more general set of changes.

It might be our natural inclination, on reading about an idea like this, to imagine making just one stand-alone alteration, to the particular part of the world most familiar to us, and imagine that the result represents the full extent of any possible development in that direction. This means that numerous obvious problems spring up, and they seem all-encompassing.

“No intellectual property? How will writers and artists and musicians get paid for anything? What will motivate people to research new technologies, if everyone else will be able to profit from them? Why wouldn’t everyone just steal each other’s ideas and content and creative output willy-nilly, even more carelessly than they do now, in this modern age of torrents and pirate bays and get off my lawn you damn kids!”

But sometimes, even if making a single change in isolation wouldn’t have a great outcome, that change can be a part of something beneficial.

Kicking out the crutches from under someone with broken legs might in no way make things better – but working toward a situation where those crutches aren’t there can still be a good thing.

Or, if you tried eating flour straight out of the bag, you might conclude that you’d prefer to go hungry, but that’s not a good reason to decide that flour always makes things worse. (You clearly haven’t been eating all the breads and cakes and scones that Kirsty’s been constantly baking for me for weeks.)

So, sure. Throwing out IP but leaving the rest of our international infrastructure completely intact might not be an immediate recipe for a productivity revolution or an upsurge in everyone’s liberty and quality of life. But, just because the immediate consequences would be problematic if we did that, we shouldn’t ignore the problems that the current system creates, exacerbates, and allows to persist.

The problems with the present system should be more than enough to make us take seriously the question of whether doing things vastly differently from the status quo might not be a huge improvement. At best, the tangle of intellectual property laws we have at the moment can claim to weakly staunch some of the systemic problems arising from a monopolistic government providing constant and ubiquitous support to an equally monopolistic corpocracy.

The standard objections for why we need patents, intellectual property laws, and so forth, are always framed as if change could only ever be applied in one narrow, restricted way. They warn of legitimate problems, but act as if the best defence against them is already in place, and ignore the flaws in the system that already exists.

Oddly enough, I don’t want to see artists unable to achieve recognition for their work and starving in the streets either. I want everyone to have the time and opportunity to explore their creative interests and put their art out into the world, as much or as little as they want, in whatever medium most interests them, and gain recognition among consumers with similar interests by letting their work be experienced as widely as possible. And if that work is Harry Potter fanfic, or Star Trek slash, or a cruel parody of the novel I might eventually get around to finishing, the currently popular methods of cracking down serve to stifle far more art than they protect.

This all goes for patents on inventions, too. Patents are ostensibly offered to encourage companies to put time and resources into exploring new technologies and ideas, which wouldn’t be profitable if they couldn’t maintain some kind of proprietary rights over those ideas afterwards. But that very fact – that shared breakthroughs are considered less desirable than those which are legally prohibited to all but a single group – is already an artefact of the badly flawed way we fund research.

And perhaps if the one thing you were to change about the world was to scrap patent law, the doomsayers might have a reason to be worried. But this doesn’t mean we should be content with the present system and assume any change will be for the worse. It means that there’s much, much more that needs to change as well. Otherwise we’ll still be acting as if corporate profit margins were indicative of the benefits available to humanity.

I want to see everyone have the chance to do creative, inventive, imaginative, potentially ground-breaking work. The present system of IP law says that we’d have no motivation to do so, if we don’t drastically hobble everyone else’s ability to join in, compete, or enjoy the fruits of each other’s labour. I disagree.

Intellectual property supports a state of affairs largely antithetical to that vision. Moving past it won’t be a single sweeping change which will make everything better; it’s one of many necessary ingredients to building a world worthy of everybody in it.

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Libertary

There are people who want to control your lives.

This is no surprise. You interact with them to some degree every day, and they already do control your lives to a frightening degree. You’ve probably been warned many times about how dangerous it can be to let these people and organisations have any power over you.

You might wonder whether it’s really so bad. After all, the power these people possess wasn’t simply stolen. It’s not the result of some military coup. It’s been earned legally, and granted to them in effect by a sizeable chunk of the population. They wouldn’t be in the position of authority and national prominence they are if people hadn’t rationally elected to put them there – if society as a whole hadn’t chosen to allow them to control the things they do.

It’s a tempting argument. But I don’t think you should be convinced.

If everyone acted completely rationally and knew exactly what they were supporting, every time they took any action which affected the world, then maybe it’d be okay – but, speaking for myself, I’m not that smart and I’m not paying that much attention. And when power accumulates, then it becomes the main interest of the powerful to protect that power. If that means obstructing our already feeble ability to get an accurate understanding of how they operate, so that we’re less able to make rational decisions which might not favour them, then they’ll have a strong motivation to do that.

And they’re going to be motivated that way, even if they enter this arena with the best of intentions, and believe they can do much good for everyone once they have the authority and disproportionate influence. Even if they’re attempting to act unselfishly, they’ll end up protecting their privileged position and justifying it with claims that it’s best for everyone. That’s just how power works.

In theory, the general population should be able to keep this power in check. It’s our decisions to support these people which are the source of their power, and if we all withdrew that support because we disapproved of the power they wielded, they’d crumble. So, in principle, those who remain powerful do so because they’re earning it, because they’ve risen to the top of a meritocracy, because they’re the best people for the job and our continued actions prove that.

But if it’s easier to have laws changed in their favour… to divert people’s anger and hostility toward others… to exercise some of their considerable power spreading propaganda, persuading us that allowing them to continue exerting their power is a moral necessity, and that curtailing it in favour of a more egalitarian system would be an unacceptable breach of everyone’s freedoms…

If doing all that is easier than actually being the best people for the job, and if actually providing a truly optimal service which benefits us all is more trouble for them than simply convincing us that’s what they’re doing…

… then maybe that’s what they’ll do.

Okay, enough melodrama. Quick question: Am I talking about governments or corporations?

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