From my old blog, in 2019:
We went out to dinner with my parents and my sister and her family, and when I was in the restroom, I saw this sign. It’s a variation of the same sign you see in all restrooms in all restaurants in this country. It said “state law requires you to wash your hands before leaving the restroom.” It didn’t say so explicitly, but I knew that it was meant for restaurant employees, not me (although for reasons that are incomprehensible to anyone but myself, I did wash my hands anyway). There wasn’t an exclamation mark, but an exclamation mark was implied.
And tonight, there was something jarring to me about that sign. It just brought home to me just how much our society is based on commands and laws - on force. And it’s not only the laws themselves, but in the way people interact with each other, the way many people parent their children. It’s as if, collectively, as a society, we don’t believe anything will ever happen if it is not forced to happen. By law. By threats of violence.
Meanwhile, in Japan, everyone knows that you need to bathe yourself BEFORE you get in the lovely steaming hot public bath. Everyone goes and showers themselves, for a LONG time, getting every last spot, and then finally, when there’s no skin left to scrub, you go and get in the tub. Everyone KNOWS that. And as far as I know, there is no law requiring it. Why would you need one? It would be like having a law telling people they had to wash their hands after using the restroom.
And that’s just a glimpse of what is missing here. A cultural intelligence, a reliance on each other as individuals, rather than a reliance on the force of law. I feel that America really is spiralling into a kind of insanity, where the only solution that can ever be implemented is one that brings more laws, more force, more state power over people’s lives, and that alongside that is an increasing fear people have of each other, and a need to control each other, based on this fear. It is a cultural disconnection that is palpable to me, there is something that is badly missing here, and I fear very few of us have ever experienced it personally. So very few of us even recognize that it isn’t here.
Yes. America has sunk into a kind of authoritarian nightmare, even as most of the populace happily sets off fireworks on the 4th of July as if we still bore any substantial resemblance to the nation founded in 1776. One revealing example: the drug war. The founders would have laughed at the notion that government should "protect" people from consuming whatever they pleased (always, of course, understanding that bad choices can lead to bad results). Today, it takes serious effort to find either a commentator or a regular person who would entertain the possibility that the drug war is impossible to win and causes terrible problems, not to mention being a sink-hole for tax dollars expropriated from a citizenry bled dry by taxes way higher than the colonists fought a war to be free of.
Thank you for sharing this, it really resonated with me...thought I'd add my 2¢:
In Oct 2014, Glenn Greenwald gave a TED talk entitled "Why Privacy Matters", and, though it was generally focused on the Edward Snowden files and the govt mass surveillance of private citizens, at the end when he was asked about the many suspicions of Snowden concerning his actual motivation for acquiring and releasing the secret files, Greenwald said:
"I think a lot of times when people make accusations like that about other people—'oh, he can't really be doing this for principled reasons, he must have some corrupt, nefarious reason'—they're saying a lot more about themselves than they are about the target of their accusations, because those people—the ones who make that accusation—they themselves never act for any reason other than corrupt reasons, so they assume that everybody else is plagued by the same disease of soullessness as they are."—to which he got cheers and applause from the audience.
I had long wondered the same thing about people in general, why so many believe that there have to be laws and/or signs to force people to "do the right thing" (at least according to their own belief systems and value hierarchies), and I suspected it's because they themselves can't image doing something entailing self-sacrifice of any kind without being forced to—and it was a little reaffirming to hear that same sentiment expressed by someone else, to a round of applause.
And of course, with the worst type of egocentric people being drawn into government (will to power), then multiply that tendency manyfold, and of course laws will be spewed unceasingly under the perception that just like them, other people also won't, or even can't, conduct themselves properly or appropriately or considerately without laws—i.e., forced to do so under the threat of violence.
Additionally, we're now several generations in to state-run schools, wherein it is taught that obedience to "authority" is what makes us a good person, and rewarded for it, too—so perhaps now, as adults, people now need—even want—authority and directives, in order to know what they're supposed to be doing?
I would imagine we're seeing the final stages of the historical cycle of the state growing until it collapses culture, economy, society; but until that inevitable end transpires in whatever form it takes, I suppose our best recourse is to ignore it as much as possible and continue to live our lives properly—not out of some sense of obedience, but simply because we strive to be ethical human beings and stewards.