Kindergarten. Sandbox. Children playing with toy cars. One child tries to take the toy car from another. That one won’t give it up. A fight breaks out. A teacher shows up, punishes both. The victim’s indignant cry: “He started it!” The teacher’s response: “I don’t care who started it. Fighting is not allowed.”
A familiar situation, right? I would say, a typical one. Each of us has been through it countless times in our lives — in kindergarten, at school, in the army. At university, at work. There were far too many of these situations, even if we discard those where “I don’t care anyway” was simply the teacher’s laziness in figuring out who was right and who was to blame. In most cases, however, the perfectly clear “he started it!” was carefully ignored and all participants in the conflict were punished.
I have always been curious about why this happens. Why do bosses who try so hard to position themselves as the only channel for conflict resolution and establishing justice, regularly punish both sides instead of punishing the aggressor? I understood this when, in various discussions, I began to notice how many people are simply unable to recognize aggression. A small child has no doubts that the aggressor (the one who “started it”) is in the wrong, that resistance to him is completely legitimate, and that he should be punished. But an “intellectual” has doubts galore. He will easily prove to you that Oksana Makar “was herself to blame,” and most importantly, having arrived at such a conclusion, will not feel any revulsion toward himself. And this is not just the fruit of abundant knowledge and excessive philosophizing. This is a direct result of upbringing and subsequent life practice.
Where does this come from? This is the result of society’s interaction with its parasite — the state. This is a pattern of behavior that arose as a reaction to legalized violence on the part of the state. An example is the well-known monkey experiment, which — if my memory serves me — involved shocking monkeys with electricity (though I came across a version where they were sprayed with water) whenever one tried to reach a banana. Eventually, the monkeys themselves would not let newly arrived individuals take bananas, even though the electricity was no longer on. In our case, of course, everything is much more complex, the experiment has been running for at least the last thousand years, and no one has turned off the electricity. Moreover, if in the case of the monkeys we have clearly visible sides — one of which is the experimenters — then in the case of the state and society, these sides are conditional. Social institutions, behavioral patterns — these are most often unintended consequences of our actions. A police officer “solves a problem,” a bureaucrat covers his own ass, a kindergarten teacher makes his life easier. Each pursues their own goals, not thinking for a second about “the state as a whole,” but together they act as if they are part of some creature with its own interests.
That is, the “side” in the monkey experiment is not a specific police officer or kindergarten teacher, but “the system as a whole.” And if we speak of this system, this creature (Hobbes’s artificial man), it is obvious that the state is interested, first and foremost, in making its charges as obedient as possible. Whether this is done “for their own good” or for the simple collection of tribute — has absolutely no significance. Obedience is achieved, among other things, by the state claiming the role of the sole authority in conflict situations. This is achieved through various means, but one of the main and simplest — is the prohibition of conflicts as such. That is, no one here should fight; only bosses are allowed to fight. And the institution of “I don’t care who started it, you will both be punished” — is perhaps the most important tool in achieving this goal.
It is no coincidence that the state regularly punishes people defending themselves from ordinary brutal physical aggression. And not only here or in Russia. Right now, Obama is bending over backward to restrict Americans’ right to bear arms, to make them defenseless against criminals and against the state.
But this is only part of the problem. The consequence is not simply the defenselessness of some people against others. The consequence is the destruction of society. I did not mention by chance that a small child perfectly distinguishes an aggressor, while a cunning intellectual does not. The child is at the beginning of socialization. He absorbs basic concepts, the most important of which is “me” and “not me.” “Me” and “not me,” and the “good” and “evil” that follow from them — are those concepts without which society, that is, cooperation between people and the institutions that arise from it, simply cannot exist.
However, when a small person encounters institutions infected by the state, they try to unlearn him to recognize aggression. This is done to him throughout his subsequent life. He is told that “it doesn’t matter who started it” and is punished when he tries to resist violence himself. As a result, many simply stop distinguishing good from evil and, in effect, lose the ability to be human — that is, social beings aware of the basic concepts of cooperation, of community. Society, as such, is destroyed.
The state seeks to reduce a person to an unconscious, sub-human state — in the social sense, of an infant who does not yet know “me and not me,” does not know “good” and “evil.” The state seeks to make us non-humans. And it is getting closer and closer to this result. Breivik killed more than 70 people. This situation would have been simply impossible a hundred years ago, because the victims, who had an undeniable numerical advantage, even if unarmed, would have immediately subdued the scoundrel. But Breivik’s victims did not do this. They waited for the authorities. Because only authorities are allowed to fight.