Giving up power and anticipatory obedience

I recently read “Black Klansman” (Century [Penguin], London, 2018, first pub. Police and Fire Publishing, 2014, ISBN 9781780899299), Ron Stallman’s book on infiltrating that racist organisation which led to the powerful movie “Blakckklansman”, which is the reason I bought the book.

Now there are many things which struck me from the movie and the book. One was a racist fireman. He did his job, as far as he was concerned, by rescuing people of colour from fires and fighting fires affecting them, but he would have preferred people of colour “lived elsewhere” – which is very like work colleagues I’ve heard say “Muslims should stick to “their own nations”, as if nations don’t have a mix of all religious faiths and agnostics and atheists and as if people are not allowed to change their path. Apart from both being wrong, one of the many problems such attitudes lead to (and their beliefs do show – they “leak out”), is that it will lead to a reluctance to call on emergency services in the future.

This is probably one of the reasons there was such a quick reaction to the violent and wrong raid on Hares and Hyenas (currently being investigated by IBAC), although I consider it likely other reasons included a desire to assure members of the public that (the majority – a small number are currently subject to investigation) police do intend and try to “do the right thing”.

Going back to the racist fireman, he is probably is doing that job because he wants adulation. He possibly gets that from majorities (i.e., most white people), but he is probably also too stupid (an article I wrote on a similar error is here) to see that he is actively harming others by promoting discriminatory attitudes that do cause actual harm, and thus, no matter how many people of colour he rescues, he will be an abhorrent person.

(As a side note, I was also staggered to recently discover how racist US President Woodrow Wilson was – see here, here, here, and here, for instance. The CS Monitor article includes: “While he worked with diverse world leaders to spread American values, Cooper writes, ‘his reluctance to enter the war for fear of further depleting the white race disclosed what really moved him.’ ”. The Wikipedia article includes: “The Wilson administration escalated the discriminatory hiring policies and segregation of government offices that had begun under President Theodore Roosevelt, and had continued under President Taft.” What a hypocrite!).

There are many other powerful aspects to both film and book.

On that, one of the epigraphs to Ron Stallman’s book is:

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

Alice Walker

People giving up their power . . . 

Well, that’s what I want to write about next.

One of the most frustrating things for me is workers just giving up and meekly accepting claims by bosses – such as the claim that “normal practice” is to be available 24/7. That is the case now, but when it started it wasn’t – who was the first irresponsible coward who gave up workers power by agreeing to that claim without even questioning it, let alone discussing it?

I’d hazard a guess they were probably a male who either didn’t have, undervalued or ignored “family duties” – or they were someone who was cowed and intimidated by fear of losing their job.

And where were unions while this was happening? (Doing compliant things like telling women how to negotiate salaries better rather than questioning why the system was built on a fundamentally patriarchal view of competition rather than decency???)

Another frustrating area is security  theatre – especially what amounts to sexual assault in the USA (and too many other nations as a result of US bullying [aka "coercion"]).

There was objection – a lot of it – when these measures were introduced (and evidence of very considerable trauma – including to adolescents and victims of sexual assault), but the dissent appears to have been suppressed (a website is still blocked ;from China?!], but they appear to be have been able to set up on social media), but the main objection was people refusing to fly – which has led to higher road fatality rates as around 6% of people do exactly that (and there was also one plane crash that killed 150 people that could happen because of the reasonable measures that had been introduced).

Keeping in mind that most of what has been introduced is security theatre, nothing of great effect (the underwear and shoe bombers were unsuccessful, remember) and possibly actually harmful to safety, this is a perfect example of an out of touch, short sighted bureaucracy/politics causing more harm than it prevents. The 80% of people surveyed in the USA who agree with that are guilty of shallow, superficial and sloppy thinking (and the bloody USA didn’t even have baggage screening and basic procedures at the airports the 9/11 violent extremists used) – the sort of thinking that results in people giving up their power, and leads to less democratic, less free, and ultimately less safe societies (read Masha Gessen's magnificent "The Future is History" [pub. Riverhead Books, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-1-59463-3], for more on this).

To cap it off, some morons claim not continuing to fly despite the sexual assaults is “allowing the violent extremists to win”, when in actual fact they WON when the security theatre was introduced.

(Do the agents in the USA’s TSA think that being groped by someone in a uniform is acceptable because it is being done by someone in uniform? If so, they share that fallacy with others, and they’re wrong. From a recent email of mine: “The sort of attitudinal problem I am describing is something I first came across in the 80s in Queensland, where a police officer I knew was talking blithely of his preference to pointing a loaded gun at cars stopped during road blocks for his safety, and refused to acknowledge that such could cause any problems to the victims of that behaviour - he seemed to think that his wearing the uniform prevented damage, which is utter rubbish. [For what it is worth, if such situations involve danger, I am OK with officers having drawn weapons, but not pointing them at innocent people.]”)

Most recently, this sort of sloppy thinking and meek compliance has been demonstrated by accepting use of electronic copies of signatures without a quibble (again, where were unions on that one?), and with the casual ignoring of privacy risks on the internet and even, more recently, handing over biometrics without even asking what security precautions are being taken to employers (this led to a court case that was a win for sanity, but not for the right reason – see here) and technology companies.

All of this actively harms the sheeple going along with this, and creates a culture where others are compelled to be subjected to harm.

While that is bad enough, it also sets the scene for the problem of “anticipatory compliance”.

From Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” (Pub. The Bodley Head [Penguin, 2017, ISBN 9781473549296):

ANTICIPATORY OBEDIENCE IS a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

So . . .  from bigotry to sheeple compliance to anticipatory obedience . . . what is the solution?

It’s certainly not “shouting louder”, but what would help, in my opinion, is, firstly, better education – teach kids to think: if they can learn to see through advertising, they can learn to see through some of the rubbish claims being made in general. If they can learn to take a more philosophical, broad perspective view on life, they will questions the rubbish claims.

And secondly, better – more objective, nuanced, sceptical, and broader perspective – media reporting, and continued, more widespread education and advocacy.

A third dream is for public servants and politicians working together for the longer view, but I fear climate change has shown that, while some of each group will, it can be too difficult to get enough sheeple to elect the better MPs who will enable that to happen – which takes us back to better education of children so the next generation doesn’t repeat our errors.

But above all these is for people to recognise that they do, as Alice Walker inferred, have power.