Shay Khatiri has a reasonably bold piece positing the case for fewer laws, bold in that such a thing could never come to pass short of a civil war leaving the greater majority of Americans dead in their high heels, and reasonable in that it’s about as close to a truth as paid media might approach while still falling shamefully shy.
I’ve two issues with his article. The first is how he completely overlooks the minor detail that the excess of laws nationwide exist to manipulate competing revenue streams into particular directions, such as antitrust laws which empower the very monopolies they are setup to confront, crippling perceived threats to self-interest and private gains. But the greater issue concerns his call for a virtuous citizenry self-policing themselves. I’ve never in all my travels through all my years online and off known anyone who was not so blasted concerned with bettering their comforts at the expenses to all those around them whether financial or psychological or worse. Should virtues be restored? I am obviously a fan, being such a non-grifter that I sell nothing, promote nothing, worship nothing. But what he is alluding to would only further enable the bullies all the more, because even with the existing system of checks and balances which more people buy into than not, the forces tasked with policing have their omissions and the voices in favor of self-policing have their exceptions. The true extent of current self-policing, not just in the USA but across all first world nations of today’s civilization, is concisely limited to the pre-selected fantasies of social networking, competing trends vying for equality by canceling dissenters and purveyors of differing opinions as one man’s freedom fighter is always another man’s terrorist. Khatiri writes,
“There is a greater cost for a society overly regulated by the government than one which is regulated by virtue, shame, and communities.”
which is a half-truth, as no element of the USA is capable of self-governing, and in fact every aspect has been developed over generations for the explicit purpose that all be encouraged to find scapegoats for all matters in all situations personal and social. Virtues are long dead, but so too are the concepts of shame and community alike, because they ultimately intrude upon whichever favored bites of self-interest and private gains personally, and socially under the repugnantly threadbare guise of whichever unification presenting the most convincing damnation of scapegoats for the troubles of resisting or neglecting virtues and the vital needs of community. A nation of citizens bred to believe that giving more to their own entertainment than to the vital needs of anybody else is somehow alright is screaming silently to be put out of its miseries individually and collectively. When more of the citizenry are obese than not, self-policing is the one thing not on the microwavable plate whilst all else is up for consumption. People simply cannot think for themselves, so a third alternative to either self-determination or no laws period should be the final meal of the day were food for thought something that anyone could honestly stomach. Domestic socialists for example can explain away being adults who own comic books and/or gaming platforms and/or toys, but they cannot explain that as the culmination of an ethical series of choices made. Any and every paid subscription to whatever can be food for somebody with lesser or no means to obtain it. And I don’t mean upgrading from fast food to a steakhouse, I mean that one dollar box of saltines to magically provide a full week’s worth of three squares per day.
This ignoble reality is where each and everyone is the center of their respective universe, where they are an icon or icon in the making, the most special, the one who suffered the most, the one who deserves the most. And as each and every case is clearly just not true, as nobody is the center of all time and space, then in each and every case does the individual fundamentally lack the requirements of self-critique necessary for self-policing, self-governing or self-determination. The exaggerated inflation of self-importance runs counter to that and more, to virtue and to reason itself. Frustrated by reality not obliging their self-perceptions, then someone or something must always be held to blame for the grievous error, rather than a sobering moment of self-reflection to take note of what actually gives birth to the conflict, to all conflicts. The self which refuses to be policed, even by the self when the self can do no wrong. Everybody believes they’ve their own truth, rationalizing their own faults and wrongs as well as the faults and wrongs of whomever they’d wish to be, to befriend or to fuck, when truth is by no means a personalized or customizable phenomenon. It doesn’t exist to flatter or to justify, it just is. All assertions to the contrary are exertions of ego, superficiality in open contrast with nature. If ever were I to fail to address you as The Queen or The King, I am not being a bad person. You are owed that by nobody, and certainly not from me. If you yourself have a king or a queen, I do not recognize their authority either. This as well does not quantify me as immoral or unethical, as personally I resist all opportunities to take more than I give. There are always to be matters more important than whatever I may want, or whatever might make me feel good about myself or the world.
Nobody has to love each other. If you are a Nazi, nobody must love you and if you identify as trans nobody must love you, as none of it is any relative to a free and open society where the most fundamental element for a democratic peoples is the ability to protest. There must however be rules against lying, cheating and stealing from one another regardless of who you think they are or who they themselves think they are. There must be rules against endangering the livelihoods of others no matter the circumstance. But a mindful society can no more mandate an acceptance be given than it can mandate an offense be taken, which is what we have in this horrid place where commercials and advertising and the peer pressure manufactured by the most gullible set all standards and perform all cognitive functions on behalf of Joe Q Citizen. Who forged your path? All are welcome to their own thoughts, and all are welcome to their own feelings, just as all must be made welcome to the consequences of their actions. That is liberty. To give what you take and to take what you give. When everybody is at least capable of their own thoughts and feelings, the reality is that there are no centerpieces, no stars. Love is valueless without a price, the same as any salvation.
Elsewhere as well, the world is frozen in shock by the one and only real diversity in the USA, of examples in stupidity openly and repeatedly denying common sense by any definition of the government and the population it monetizes and all the while the world with no irony continues to fetish all attempts at replicating the madness for their own, the corporatocracy, the artificial cultures, the unharnessed ego. Every official and pundit and icon believing with every fibre of their being that reality might somehow magically meet with differing results for themselves and their very own, because they are the most special, who suffered the most and who deserves the most. All the independence of a prostitute when the only happy ending is the ending itself.
State and national leaders insist upon the masses endangering themselves amidst the pandemic, throwing precautions to the winds themselves while urging the public to be the ones to harbor personal responsibility, the same personal responsibility shunned by said state and national leaders for ascribing to any potential for financial gains more importance than reason or virtue or common sense. And the same personal responsibility which the public themselves have long proven entirely incapable of, by allowing themselves as subsets of the whole and as individuals to be backed into the corner like so between rocks and hard places, the irresistible force of ego perpetually and universally grinding its soft wood against the immovable object that is all time and space and common sense. Allowing themselves one and all to get robbed in broad daylight by their own culture because marketing suggested it’s the right thing, or because the basic idea of personal responsibility, much less any form of responsibility, is perpetually and universally a thing that is simply not for them, the masses; its demands of reason and virtue and common sense too demanding when reason and virtue and common sense refuse to wax the favored egos of the always momentary but never momentous life.
I’ll have none of it. Merits and truth affect more than the cleverest packaging or labels, not with appealing promises, vows, declarations or self-assertions but by execution. Platitudes carry all the consequence of phone sex, being a measure closer to LARPing than a recognizable form of salvation.