An Experiment in Scotch

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand por­trayed a soci­ety where the best and the bright­est peo­ple essen­tially picked up their prover­bial bas­ket­ball and went home, leav­ing the rest of us strug­gling, mediocre morons to fend for our­selves as said soci­ety broke down (she also seemed to favor sit­u­a­tions where women got raped, pos­si­bly a win­dow into her extrem­ism). It was an excep­tion­ally pop­u­lar book when it was writ­ten and to this day holds a cer­tain appeal among young ado­les­cent males (I know, I thought for sure I was an Objec­tivist for most of my 20s). It details an appeal­ing view, a utopia where only the best and the bright­est can live and sur­vive, always mak­ing ratio­nal deci­sions that fur­ther the utopia in its quest for ratio­nal per­fec­tion. It’s attrac­tive because who amongst us haven’t looked at some sit­u­a­tion, whether it’s the polit­i­cal process, the finan­cial indus­try or the scream­ing three year old who refuses to take a poop any­where but in his pants and thought “Screw it, I’m throw­ing in the towel, con­se­quences be damned, and start­ing over. It’s just not worth it to fix it.”

The desire to start over is strong. It’s the appeal of the blank slate, the chance to make all the right deci­sions this time, to explore new bound­aries with­out the con­straints of pre­vi­ous mis­takes and silly ideas like the law. It’s the dirty lit­tle hope we have when we wish for peo­ple to get what they deserve because doing what’s required to fix the sys­tem is harder work than we’d like to bother with. It’s the prepa­ra­tion of the sur­vival­ists who assum­ing the shit ever hits the fan hard enough all think they are going to blend off into the woods, leav­ing the rest of us to suf­fer as civ­i­liza­tion breaks down.

It’s nice to fan­ta­size about peo­ple get­ting what they deserve for being bum­bling, ill-advised inac­tive blobs of pro­to­plasm and use­less­ness. How­ever, here in the real world, not only is that not fea­si­ble, it is typ­i­cally counter pro­duc­tive, more likely to lead to chaos than it is to improve­ment. When you hope SOPA passes “because that’s exactly what we need to wake up from this slum­ber­ing, do-nothing, “occupy every­thing,” stag­nant, non-action slump we Amer­i­cans are in”, you’re essen­tially say­ing “you peo­ple deserve to be pun­ished because you can’t find the time to stand up and fix things, I hope you rot in hell” (you’re also say­ing you fun­da­men­tally mis­un­der­stand the Occupy move­ments but maybe we’ll dis­cuss that at a later point).

Does the author really think SOPA pass­ing is going to be the eye opener when the finan­cial cri­sis of 2008 wasn’t? Does he think inter­net cen­sor­ship will make things com­pletely dif­fer­ent when the Pres­i­dent assas­si­nat­ing US cit­i­zens didn’t? Does he think utopia will be estab­lished after SOPA passes and we see the light when Fed expand­ing its bal­ance sheet by tril­lions of dol­lars enabling bank­ing exec­u­tives to con­tinue to reap lav­ish bonuses while the rest of us slogged along in 1% inter­est land didn’t?

It’s fun to get your panties in a wad about SOPA (if you don’t know what SOPA is, it’s Con­gress’ lat­est heavy handed tac­tic to fel­late the movie and record­ing indus­try by try­ing to shut down piracy. Read more about it here) and go off on a tan­gent about the lazy, com­pla­cent Amer­i­cans who can’t bother to stand up and change things. But the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion is that lots and lots of Amer­i­cans have been stand­ing up over the past sev­eral years and actu­ally imple­ment­ing change. And that change is hap­pen­ing, albeit at likely too slow a pace to please the folks like the author linked above who would pre­fer some sort of punc­tu­ated equi­lib­rium to occur in the polit­i­cal process. The Tea Party rose out of the finan­cial cri­sis and lots of those folks are work­ing hard behind the scenes to get peo­ple elected in an attempt to change the pol­i­tics of the nation. Occupy Wall Street rose out a desire in a large group of peo­ple to protest what they saw as an unfair play­ing field, one that enabled the cheaters and manip­u­la­tors to suc­ceed while nor­mal peo­ple con­tin­ued to suf­fer. The protests of SOPA actu­ally con­vinced sev­eral Con­gress­crit­ters to remove their sup­port for the bill includ­ing one who actu­ally co-sponsored it.

The com­plaint comes up that these things will hap­pen again, that Con­gress will try to shill for the record­ing lobby again and that defeat­ing SOPA is just treat­ing the symp­tom instead of the cause of the disease.

My prob­lem with this huge online protest against SOPA, and the rea­son I rarely take part in such protests, is because it doesn’t address any prob­lems, only the symp­tom. The prob­lem isn’t this shitty bill, it’s the peo­ple who spon­sored it. So we protest this bill today, bang enough pots and pans to shame a few back­ers into not let­ting this bill pass, then what? Those same dip­shits who wrote this leg­is­la­tion still have jobs. They’re going to try again, and again, and again until some muta­tion of this leg­is­la­tion passes. They’ll sneak it into an appro­pri­a­tion bill while nobody’s look­ing dur­ing recess, because there’s too much lob­by­ist money at stake for them not to. We defeat SOPA today, only to face it again tomor­row. It’s like try­ing to stop a cold by blow­ing your nose. It’s time we go after the virus.

The prob­lem with that anal­ogy is that once you have a virus, you’ve just got the virus. There’s no going after it, not in the sense he means. You can only do things to mit­i­gate the effects of the virus. Of course, you can develop a vac­cine for a virus that pre­vents peo­ple from get­ting it but let’s face it, the virus of pol­i­tics prob­a­bly doesn’t lend itself to vac­ci­na­tion. Peo­ple don’t go into pol­i­tics to fix the world, they go into pol­i­tics because they are power hun­gry indi­vid­u­als who love to lis­ten to them­selves talk (except Ron Paul. Well, maybe even Ron Paul but the jury is still out). Instead, you treat a virus by always being vig­i­lant and aware, watch­ing for out­breaks and squash­ing them at the fastest rate you can.

That’s the bet­ter anal­ogy for what’s going on in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics today. We have become infected by a polit­i­cal virus that thrived for decades on igno­rance, con­tin­ued pros­per­ity of the mid­dle class and the grow­ing com­plex­ity in reg­u­la­tion of the US Gov­ern­ment. But over the past few years, the peo­ple of Amer­ica (in admit­tedly slow and some­times odd ways) have decided that enough is enough. We aren’t to a boil­ing point yet, where we have mil­lions of peo­ple march­ing on Wash­ing­ton or civil unrest (none of which is out of the ques­tion or even that unlikely I’m afraid) but things ARE chang­ing. The blow­back on SOPA shows that.

Life will never be ratio­nal and clean like so many of the “blow it all up and start over” folks want it to be. Fix­ing the sys­tem from within is hard, long, tedious work, work that may not ever be fin­ished. But throw­ing up our hands and say­ing “I hope SOPA passes because that’s what we deserve” is like say­ing telling a lung can­cer patient “I hope the radi­a­tion and chemo fail because that’s what you deserve”. Regard­less of how we got here, regard­less of what igno­rance we accepted and encour­aged, regard­less of the crit­i­cal­ity of the dis­ease (and trust me, I think this patient is insanely sick, pos­si­bly ter­mi­nally), we have to treat the patient in the best way we know how until he’s bet­ter or dies. Throw­ing up our hands and declar­ing pre­ma­ture defeat is a sure way to a dis­as­trous end that serves no one but the par­a­sites best inter­ests. The very fact that prac­ti­cally the entire inter­net rose up Wednes­day and said “enough is enough” in response to SOPA should be not a cause for despair, but a slight ray of hope in a long, ardu­ous treat­ment of chemother­apy that our polit­i­cal process must go through to make the patient whole again.