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The Killing of Conscience by John Markley Exclusive to STR June 16, 2008 It
is a commonplace among libertarians that most people consider it
acceptable for the state to do things that would land a private person in
prison; indeed, this is the state’s essence.
However, the double standard does not just apply to matters of
justice and property rights. It
also holds for what people normally consider to be the demands of
compassion and basic human decency. As
any libertarian who been following politics for more than a week can tell
you, statist measures of all kinds are frequently justified with
insistence that the proposed law or action is for the sake of children.
Drunk driving is an excellent example of this, with groups like
Mothers Against Drunk Driving pushing a neoprohibitionist agenda by
terrifying people into believing that their children will be mangled
unless MADD’s desires--greater police power, greater restrictions on
alcohol--are fulfilled. They
enjoy an almost unassailable position in the mainstream--what sort of
monster doesn’t want to protect children from drunk driving?
What hooligan would attack public-spirited and bereaved mothers? And
yet, Many
juniors and seniors were driven to tears – a few to near hysterics –
May 26 when a uniformed police officer arrived in several classrooms to
notify them that a fellow student had been killed in a drunken-driving
accident…then left the class members to process their thoughts and
emotions for the next hour. The
program, titled “Every 15 Minutes,” was designed by Mothers Against
Drunk Driving… About
This
is what the efforts of the more-caring-than-thou defenders of children,
unrestrained by any serious public skepticism or scrutiny, have come to:
Mothers Against Drunk Driving has teamed up with law enforcement to
psychologically torture high school students.
You’d think a group with “Mothers” in the title would be
somewhat averse to the idea of tormenting innocent kids, but I guess not.
Perhaps they could change their name to something along the lines
of “Mothers From Mommie
Dearest Against Drunk Drivers.” Much
of the response has been an excellent representation of Even
sillier are the claims that people dismayed by this want to “shelter”
kids from reality or “keep them in a bubble.”
Apparently, lying to kids by telling them that their
friend is dead and letting them stew in grief for an hour is the only
way to teach the kids that the world is sometimes a harsh place.
Anything else is just coddling them, and anyone who objects to
sadistic treatment of children is keeping them from the real world and
probably dragging Still
others have argued, “Wouldn’t you rather this be done to your kid than
have him actually die?” The
false dichotomy is one of the most common statist forms of argument, and
it’s especially likely to be trotted out for topics that have caused as
much public fear as drunk driving has.
We are meant to believe that telling kids cruel lies and seeing
your child die in a car wreck are the only possible outcomes.
There are no other conceivable means to discourage kids from
driving drunk, and therefore anyone who doesn’t support this specific
program doesn’t care about kids. Thus,
morality not only allows but demands support for behavior that would
otherwise be considered sadistic or outright sociopathic. However,
I’m not clear on how, exactly, this MADD program discourages drunk
driving. The lesson the kids
received wasn’t, “Drunk driving kills people.”
No one actually died, after all.
The lesson of this particular exercise is “The people who
insistently claim that drunk driving kills people are liars.”
Sadly, that’s often true, but it’s more likely to lead to the
natural but invalid inference “Therefore drunk driving does not kill
people” than to a keener appreciation of the real dangers.
Aesop’s story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf does not end with the
townspeople developing greater vigilance against the threat of wolf
attacks. The
article continues: Though
the deception left some teens temporarily confused and angry, if it makes
even one student think twice before getting behind the wheel of a car
while intoxicated, it is worth the price, said California Highway Patrol
Officer Eric Newbury, who orchestrates the program at local high schools. “When
someone says to me, 'Oh, my God, you're traumatizing my children,' I'm
telling them, 'No, what I'm doing is waking them up,' ” said Newbury,
whose father was killed by a drunken driver. “If
you don't do your job as a parent...the only thing I can do is either
arrest them and take them to jail or scrape them off the ground and tell
you, 'I'm so sorry.' ” “If
I sit there and lecture somebody in a nice way, it's going to go in one
ear and out the other,” he said… “I want them to be an emotional
wreck. I don't want them to have to live through this for real.” And
so here we are, with police openly boasting to the media about their
desire to use deceit to turn large numbers of kids who have committed no
offense into “emotional wrecks” as part of a poorly thought out scheme
that they hope will make the kids less likely to break the law in the
future. What’s most
bothersome isn’t really that he considers his behavior justified, awful
as that is. What’s most
bothersome is that he clearly has no fear that bragging about it to the
press will cause any trouble. And,
of course, his confidence is quite justified, because people will tolerate
almost anything if done by a government with “good intentions.”
The moral standards that otherwise govern human life are quickly
forgotten, and so the moral degradation spreads from the perpetrators to
the rest of society as people rationalize and accept reprehensible
behavior. Remember:
Law enforcement feels no guilt about lying.
The people who run MADD feel no guilt about lying.
For all their proclaimed concern and compassion, they feel no guilt
about causing extreme psychological pain to the members of society who are
probably the most vulnerable and sensitive to this sort of emotional
shock: teenagers. These are
the people who are acting “for the children.”
These are the people who consider themselves entitled to raise
other people’s kids, and to do so with methods like these. The sad thing is, when they say they are motivated by concern for kids, I believe them. People can do far worse than this when they’re convinced that their cause is so holy that normal ethical concerns cease to apply. The state, by diffusing responsibility and presenting itself as an entity that really does have the right to do what would be immoral for anyone else, greatly amplifies this tendency and gives it free reign. Vile as this program is, its cruelty is but one relatively minor example. With the freedom from moral restraint that the mystique of the state provides, it’s quite easy for people strongly driven by their cause to grow crueler and crueler--and still sleep soundly at night. John Markley is a freelance journalist in Illinois. He maintains a blog at www.thesuperfluousman.blogspot.com
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