Someone asked the question, so I answered it: I don't know that I'd go to jail for my beliefs, much less die for them. I don't know that I'm not for sale for the right price. (Make me an offer.)
In the first place, I don't know how strong these beliefs are. I change my mind. I know I've been wrong about things in my life, and that strong feelings don't always correspond with strong evidence. There are things I used to think that I don't believe anymore. Life starts happening to you, you acquire new experiences, you grow. You're a different person than you were when you were younger.
In the second place, I've no reason to believe that I'm stronger or braver than the average person. And I don't have much faith in the average person's ability to resist authority. Mostly we grumble and go along. Maybe we tell ourselves that there's nothing we can accomplish by resisting in any way that exposes us to real consequences. We tell ourselves that we're really not in a position to make any sort of real difference. And we're not.
I think most of us come to an accommodation with authority; we find a way to rationalize our acquiescence. We find a way to put aside conscientious objections. And authority helps us to do this by telling us it's acting in our interest, that it is protecting us from some element, some Other, that seeks to undermine our way of living. Authority seeks to enlist us in its cause through appeals to our patriotism and loyalty to our tribe. Authority is always on the side of the right-thinking people, so maybe it is incumbent upon us to get our minds right.
It's also possible in a culture such as ours to ignore the petty indignities that might be inflicted by authority. After all, we have television and video games and enough diversion to occupy us for the rest of our lives. It is always possible to turn inward, to sink into alternative realms and escape any meaningful engagement with society. This is why some people don't want politics in their sports or on their award shows -- they want a hermetic seal between their dream world and reality. They want their actors to act and their ballplayers to ball and the national anthem to be performed in the same style as they first heard it.
And I get that, for I believe in the primacy of private life. My little dogs are far more important to me than starving children I do not know. I can be horrified in the abstract by all sorts of injustice, then sit down and have a nice supper and a glass of wine. I can dismiss all that does not impact me. If my neighbor loses a job or struggles to pay for his health insurance, I can feel genuinely bad about that for precisely as long as I remember to think about it.
It's very easy for us to pretend to care about the world, to make a post on Facebook (or write a column) about how authority abuses the powerless while serving a few wealthy clients when you understand that no one is going to come looking for you. But what if the stakes are raised? It might be prudent to calm down, to accept that there are limits to what can be accomplished in an environment where facts can be custom manufactured to fit any odd turn of mind.
It's very easy to insist that you can't be bought when nobody makes you an offer.
In America, it has sometimes been tempting to see politics as just another kind of sport, a cynical and relatively meaningless game. Often the stakes seem fairly petty to the individual; one might pay a little more or a little less in taxes, the economy might purr or sputter, but the machinations of the silly people in the legislatures and in Washington might seem to have little effect on most of us most of the time. But history assures us that cataclysmic events occur with regularity. We will wheel around to depression and world war again--there's no reason to believe we've evolved beyond the bloody vanities that have compelled us in the past.
It's a matter of time before mankind spits out another Hitler, a mesmerizing fear-monger willing to capitalize on the weaker minds of ordinary folk. And there's nothing you can do to stop that. It will seem perfectly normal when it comes, just a common sense reaction to the nuanced permissiveness of a decadent age; just a resetting of society. Sweep away the intellectual fussiness, the complicated moral algebra, and divide the world into Us and Them.
Then maybe you can see it's always been only about winning by any means necessary. Even if that means redefining "winning."
I don't think human nature is ever going to change much; we might have as little power to change the psychological climate of the planet as we do the actual climate. A lot of the world's population lives in terror either because they have real problems or because they attend to fear-mongers who are forever identifying people and things of which they ought to be afraid.
And some of us love fear because it makes us alert and in the moment. When we're scared we're not preoccupied with our past mistakes or future obligations. Fear makes our lives exciting. It dumps dopamine, endorphin, serotonin, and adrenaline into our system. It's just like any other drug.
I don't think there's anything I can write or say that will make anyone less fearful, especially not if fear is their drug of choice. I think there are plenty of reasons for a lot of Americans to be afraid, even if I don't feel particularly scared. After all, I'm not black or gay or poor. I'm not sick or caring for a sick person. I'm not going to go to war.
And if it comes to it, I'll get in line just like our elected representatives have. I can pretend as well as they can, I can make up some corny shtick that'll sound nice. I can preach it either way.
I'm no hero. A man would have to be a fool to go to jail because America isn't what it pretends to be.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 03/14/2017