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chris_gerribThe proprietor over at Gin and Tacos notes that Americans say they have political principles but really they don't. For example, we should have free speech, but you shouldn't criticize the government during wartime. Or, everybody deserves a fair trial except that guy everybody knows planted a bomb in a crowd.
It's not really principle that Americans (and people generally) don't like, it's process. Trials are slow and messy affairs, and mostly boring. Allowing free speech means you have to put up with people saying things you don't want to hear. Limits on search and seizure inevitably means some guilty people walk, and are inherently inefficient. After all, the cop's got to stop and get a warrant, and that takes time.
We humans, or at least a majority of us, don't like process. The minority of people that do like it we call "born bureaucrats" and dismiss with a sniff of an uplifted nose. Process just gets in the way.
Now, I came to this thought because I read an article (lost in my filing system) about how superhero movies teach us to wait for a white knight to save us. Well, if you watch those movies, a white knight is needed because the hapless bureaucrats can't handle the situation.
Similarly in fiction. Heroes (even my own in Pirates of Mars) frequently go outside the system to solve the problem. We humans like that because we don't like the system! Humans actually like a strong leader to come forth and say "this is what we're going to do," not "let's form a committee and hash this out." Thus, royalty in fantasy novels. Again, from my own experience, for a while Mars was going to be the Kingdom of Mars - I just couldn't figure out how to plausibly make that happen.
But the sad truth is that humans need process. People are in fact wrongly charged with crimes. A political decision that's good for me isn't good for somebody else, and so we do need to form a committee and hash it out. It's like eating your vegetables - we don't like it but we all have to.
It's not really principle that Americans (and people generally) don't like, it's process. Trials are slow and messy affairs, and mostly boring. Allowing free speech means you have to put up with people saying things you don't want to hear. Limits on search and seizure inevitably means some guilty people walk, and are inherently inefficient. After all, the cop's got to stop and get a warrant, and that takes time.
We humans, or at least a majority of us, don't like process. The minority of people that do like it we call "born bureaucrats" and dismiss with a sniff of an uplifted nose. Process just gets in the way.
Now, I came to this thought because I read an article (lost in my filing system) about how superhero movies teach us to wait for a white knight to save us. Well, if you watch those movies, a white knight is needed because the hapless bureaucrats can't handle the situation.
Similarly in fiction. Heroes (even my own in Pirates of Mars) frequently go outside the system to solve the problem. We humans like that because we don't like the system! Humans actually like a strong leader to come forth and say "this is what we're going to do," not "let's form a committee and hash this out." Thus, royalty in fantasy novels. Again, from my own experience, for a while Mars was going to be the Kingdom of Mars - I just couldn't figure out how to plausibly make that happen.
But the sad truth is that humans need process. People are in fact wrongly charged with crimes. A political decision that's good for me isn't good for somebody else, and so we do need to form a committee and hash it out. It's like eating your vegetables - we don't like it but we all have to.
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Date: 2013-07-19 02:55 pm (UTC)That reminds me of the old saying, “A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged,” with the obverse, “a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.” In truth, a number of straight-edge hard-core John Birch types found themselves rethinking the issue when it was their own sons who came out as gay or got arrested for possession of seeds. “There oughtta be a law!” isn't always true.