I agree, I'm really upset at the huge amounts of power that we're unquestioningly giving to authority figures right now. This is not totally related, but I've been thinking about it lately...in New York these days, pretty much every store you go into has a guy at the door who checks your receipt on the way out. And it always makes me feel shitty and taken advantage of, and I always let them see my receipt, because they've told me to.
We don't know how to say no to something that doesn't feel right any more, when the person doing the thing has some nominal authority. Maybe we never knew how (see Stanley Milgram), but it's even more frightening when our government and private security forces are taking such liberties with civil rights. There were police officers doing random bag checks at the subway station today, and I was wondering if they asked me to, if I would let them check my bag, and if not, if I would be willing to go to jail for it, and I'd like to think I would, but I doubt it.
There's such a learned powerlessness in play in our society right now, and it's frightening and nearly impossible to unlearn, and there are a lot of people who have a stake in making sure we don't unlearn it. And not to be over-dramatic, but this is how citizens in Nazi Germany weren't able to look around them and see what was happening was wrong...because evil takes power in incremental ways and we don't know how to stop it until it's too late.
We don't know how to say no to something that doesn't feel right any more, when the person doing the thing has some nominal authority. Maybe we never knew how (see Stanley Milgram), but it's even more frightening when our government and private security forces are taking such liberties with civil rights. There were police officers doing random bag checks at the subway station today, and I was wondering if they asked me to, if I would let them check my bag, and if not, if I would be willing to go to jail for it, and I'd like to think I would, but I doubt it.
There's such a learned powerlessness in play in our society right now, and it's frightening and nearly impossible to unlearn, and there are a lot of people who have a stake in making sure we don't unlearn it. And not to be over-dramatic, but this is how citizens in Nazi Germany weren't able to look around them and see what was happening was wrong...because evil takes power in incremental ways and we don't know how to stop it until it's too late.
Whew, OK. Maybe it's time for me to go to bed.
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