light darkmode

social control

I saw a rough sketch of this argument online recently:

You may witness a social state or behavior you don't like and you may think

There are several things about this that I think are important:

  1. It's about a social standard
  2. It requires some kind of sociatal action

Fundamentally, this is what we have a justice system for. There is no structural difference between "no smoking", "no littering", "no murder" and "no racism". There is a rule and there are people who take action when the rule is violated. And then the situation is fixed to the best of everyone's ability.

The difference is one of scale. How severe should the action/punishment be?

And with that question, you open up the gigantic can of worms that results in ideas such as:

isn't that overkill?

Maybe we're talking about a rude remark. Something that hardly deserves more of an eye roll? Can't we just... rely on common sense?

Basically, no. Or it depends.

It depends on your personal feeling, how much effort you want to exert to prevent the thing from happening?

what irks me

Of course, more "law and order" minded people have no issue turning enforcement and punishments to eleven and call it solved. That comes with it's set of problems that have been discussed ad nauseum, so I won't.

But what I see generally speaking on the... "not authoritarian" political spectrum are statements such as...

I think that's bias speaking, because they don't want to be like who they see as a political opponent, they try to avoid their opponents actions.

But that doesn't change that it's the same kind of problem, which mostly implies a similar solution.

People who voice this, think we as a society already have achieved approach 1) or 2) and the idea that it may need 3) is alien to them. It seems to me that they think they can avoid 3) if they just believe in the good in people hard enough.

conformity

Some may not like to hear this, but something that has to be absolutely clear, is that it's a problem of conformity. You want a certain standard of behavior and you want essentially everyone to comply with it.

approaches

fundamentally, resolving a social conflict or social conformity can be achieved in three ways:

  1. appeal to reason,
    resolve the conflict by talking about it and convincing the other side that you're correct and they should do or not do something. This also includes "education", since that provides the background necessary for discussion.
  2. tolerance and compromise,
    redefine the problem and agree on some set of rules both sides can agree to. The best example is probably europe's religious wars and conflicts. Catholics vs. protestants, pogroms against jews, crusades against non christians or slightly less christians.
    At the moment we have achieved peace, by the method of not insisting whose religion is "correct" in the details.
  3. enforcement through power,
    Someone with the power decides that convincing or compromise aren't possible and uses the power they have.
    This comes in many shapes and sizes:
    • regular justice system activity, fines, punishment, etc..
    • preventative means, such as police at political events
    • a wall, preventing going where the power doesn't want people to go
    • burning books the power doesn't want people to read
    • banning people on social media who talk in ways or on subjects the power doesn't want

position yourself

Depending on the problem you're facing, you are free to pick whichever approach or decide for or against whichever approach you want.

You can spontaneously think you want enforcement, but when you think about it, tolerance will be the better option, because you don't want to bother with enforcement.

You can idealistically think you want the freedom of tolerance but come to the conclusion that you can't tolerate something and can't negotiate with the person causing the problem.

the "eventual victory of the good"

You may be tempted to think that because your cause is good and just and actually really just the natural state of the world, it will win. surely. eventually. i have to admit i want to believe this with open source code but we have to be prepared for it to not work that way and the cause needing all the help, support, *work* we can put behind it.

examples

*racism "just be nice" well what are going to do if thr racists just say no? *veganism im on the other side of the argument here. i dont think will be convinced to quit dairy. or woolen clothing. but its not about me. its about you and which actions you will take to either force compliance or whether accept a world that doesnt conform to your ideas.

knowledge and education

Another aspect of this, that has become relevant is about knowledge. What's the "standard of knowledge" that you can expect or enforce?

do you enforce it? how much?

Excluding people from discussions because of their education or intelligence...

I think it should be agreeable, that it would be unfair to apply force and exclude someone, if the information is something exclusive thats out of reach. be it because its actually unavailable or just burried in obfuscation.