My Wife and I Got Rousted by the Cops
'It's the Law'—the mating call of authoritarians, psychopaths, Karens, and losers everywhere. (DN 4.YX)
People who want power are attracted to positions of power.
Could any statement be more obviously true? It’s like saying People who like to eat fish tend to go to seafood restaurants. Of course they do. If you create positions that allow a person to boss around other people, people who like to boss around other people are going to be drawn to those positions. Duh.
As usual, I must preface this discussion with the perennial caveat: Yes, I know that some government officials and enforcers genuinely have good intentions, truly want to protect and serve, etc. I even know some of them personally. But it doesn’t matter, because power attracts a large-enough portion of power-hungry people to be a serious problem.
We know from scientific data, for example, that psychopaths are overrepresented in positions of authority and power. That in and of itself ought to give us pause. The existence of involuntary government creates positions that give psychopaths inescapable authority over the rest of us—do we not see a problem with this? Hello? McFly?
Power attracts bullies. This is especially so among the police and politicians.
Power attracts low-status individuals and perennial Karens. This is especially so in bureaucratic agencies, where real performance is not required. A bureaucracy gives a person who can’t make it in productive enterprises the power to boss around their fellow man with petty edicts. It should not be a surprise, then, that bureaucracies attract exactly those sorts of people.
Power, in short, attracts losers, psychos, and authoritarian control freaks. Not everyone, but enough to be a significant problem. Enough to make the very existence of these positions a threat to everyone else.
Here are three quick accounts of recent encounters with these sorts of people and the ‘laws’ they attempt to enforce. (And yes, I put ‘laws’ in scare-quotes intentionally, as I will explain.)
#1 Whose lake is it anyway?
Throughout our entire marriage, my wife has been talking about how she wants to see the northern lights—the Aurora Borealis. I saw some little snips of color on a couple of weird nights in Massachusetts, but until last year, I had never really seen them properly, and she hadn’t at all. However, we do live far enough north in Western New York that we have a chance when conditions are right, and the nearest best place to try is a state park on the south shore of Lake Ontario.
Last year, after more than a decade of attempts, we got not one but two shows—one in May and the other in October—not just with the camera on long exposure, but the real deal with the naked eye. Amazing!
At both of those wondrous light shows, we were not the only ones up at the lake. Hundreds of people gathered, walking around, sitting on blankets, and taking photos. As far as anyone could tell, the park was open.
The same applies to the many attempts we had made over the previous decade. My wife has an app that tells her when conditions make a viewing of the northern lights a possibility, and when they do, we grab blankets and chairs, head up to the lake, and sit and wait. Usually, we are alone, or almost alone, but there is never any indication that the park is closed. The gate is up at night, allowing cars to cross into the park unimpeded.
On one occasion, maybe seven years ago, a cop walked all the way from the parking lot, across the long swath of grass to the edge of the water, to see who we were and what we were doing. Once he determined that we weren’t burying a body or snorting cocaine from the belly of a Guatemalan sex slave, he just bade us goodnight.
That was the reaction that makes the most natural sense. A polite, middle-aged, middle-class couple sitting under a big blanket, waiting for the Northern Lights, is not harming anyone else. And whether someone is harming someone else is the only criterion that should matter.
Try telling that to the Karen-cop driving around the park rousting people earlier this week.
Once again, conditions were promising, so we went and set up camp lakeside, as we always do. We weren’t getting much luck seeing the northern lights, but no matter—it was calm and peaceful. My wife experimented with her new tripod while I monitored the Yankees game on Gameday and looked out over the water. (As always, I am just happy to be alive and do whatever.)
Then we saw cop lights flashing in the parking lot. We assumed that there was something afoot up there that had nothing to do with us, so we just stayed put and did our thing. Then, about ten minutes later, we saw the lights again. The cop wasn’t dealing with some specific instance of criminality. The cop was patrolling. For what?
We soon found out, when we heard a woman’s voice, attempting to sound authoritative, call out from 100 yards away: “The park is closed.”
I let my wife answer. “Oh, it is?” she said. She was being honest—in our years of doing this, there was never any indication that we weren’t supposed to be there after dark. It was wise of me to let my wife answer, because the string of answers that ran through my anarchist head would have gotten us in more trouble than we wanted.
“The park is closed.”
Like f___ it is.
Not wanting to go through any legal hassles, we packed up and left. We never interacted with the cop, so I never got to confirm my suspicion that she is fat and ugly and has a chip on her shoulder, but I guarantee that she derives pleasure from driving around, with her cop lights on, rousting people who are causing zero problems.
And it’s probably good that we didn’t, because it would have taken all my restraint to keep from saying,
Congratulations, you have kept democracy safe from a middle-class white married couple in their 50s sitting under a comforter, taking pictures of the sky.
The next night, conditions were promising again, so, being the rebellious types, we went back and did the same thing in the exact same spot. We figured maybe the patrolling was just a one-time thing.
It was so calm and peaceful until, sure enough, we saw the cop lights again, off in the distance. Knowing that she might have run our plates the night before and thus might not be inclined to just yell “The park is closed” a second time, we packed up and bailed.
In a park built with tax money they stole from us.
#2 It’s the law!
I am doing a bunch of landscaping right now, including some light digging. I know where the buried power, gas, and cable lines are, because I have done this several times before. However, just to be safe and responsible and all that jazz, I called 811 to have them mark the lines.
For purposes of brevity, I won’t go into details of the call. The pertinent point is that the guy injected, “It’s the law,” about eight times. I wasn’t arguing or saying anything crazy. I was just answering his questions.
Like a dog or a bee sensing fear, I knew instantly exactly why he was saying it so much:
Because he enjoyed it.
This is the low-status individual that Michael Malice has repeatedly described when talking about how eagerly average people comply with and join in on totalitarianism.
No, the 811 service is not totalitarianism. But the whiny little person who takes obvious pleasure out of saying “It’s the law” over and over is the first to sign up to be an informant when totalitarianism comes.
#3 Bureaucratic bullies
This last one will be even quicker. Someone I know—I won’t say who—is being targeted by the local machine—I won’t say why. Suffice it to say that he has done nothing to deserve the abuse he has received…and the abuse he has received is the kind of abuse that produced the Killdozer rampage out in Colorado.
It started with a judge who is a poster child for Marxist intersectionality ruling against him…because he isn’t. Then it devolved into her siccing the police on him for the same reason. And it has now developed into an obvious campaign of bureaucratic harassment for the sake of harassment.
Here’s a guy who has paid a quarter million in property taxes and has run an honest business for decades, being harassed by local bullies…because they can. Because they are in positions that give them special “rights” that the rest of us do not have, and they can use that power to abuse whoever they want, under color of authority.
I suppose I am making a lot of points here, including about the danger (and moral impermissibility) of creating involuntary, inescapable systems of authority that are ripe for control by the very people you would expect to want to control them. The very people to whom we should not want to give any power.
But let us focus instead on the concept of “the law.”
Many people assume that “the law” is a good thing—that it is the shield protecting us from barbarism. But if the law means statute law, created by legislators, then “the law” is an instrument of tyranny, not protection.
The reason is simple (this a formulation I first heard from Mark Passio, and have heard it in many places since):
If a law violates natural law, then it is morally impermissible.
If a law comports with natural law, then it is unnecessary.
Either way, the law should not exist.
Natural law proponents may quibble with the second of these assertions, since some sort of codification of natural law might be helpful. But the point is well-taken nonetheless. Legislators busy themselves all day, every day, inventing laws. But morally, the only acceptable laws are those that embody and ensconce natural law. And as we know, legislators go way beyond this with almost every “law” they pass.
In fact, genuine natural law is so simple that we can sum up the totality of crimes in just a few words. Something perhaps like this,
In the absence of voluntary, explicit, transparent, informed, and revocable consent, no one may damage, encroach, take, subjugate, or initiate coercive force upon the person, property, or liberty of another.
In an earlier exploration, I proposed seven crimes under natural law: violence, subjection, theft, fraud, trespass, breach of responsibility, and grievous coercion. (Breach of responsibility would cover things like failing to make restitution if you drive through your neighbor’s fence, and an example of grievous coercion would be a government agency brainwashing you to do something against your will.)
What other laws does a society actually need?
And what of these were we violating up at the lake? And don’t say “trespass,” since the government’s “ownership” of that park is maintained using money it steals from us at the point of a gun.
This has been an informal installment of The Distributed Nation.
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People who say "it's the law" are the same people who say "just doing my job" as they harm others willingly and turn a blind eye to their own behaviors out of fear of losing their "position" in the hive. The "uniforms" they wear is the mask they cling to as an excuse to relinquish personal responsibility.
Great post. Sorry you had to deal with that nonsense.
There are few "types" of people I loathe more than the Nurse Ratched/Headmaster Umbridge/Standford Prison Experiment types whose only sense of purpose, power, and perverse pleasure is derived from meancing other healthier, happier people with the fictitious authority "granted" them by the egregore of society's condensed fear and laziness masquerading as some benevolent Big Brother.