Big Brother?  Of Course!!

 by Paul Hein

The remnant among us decry the encroachment of government into areas not in any way justified by our Constitution. They bemoan a paternalistic interference with the lives of citizens, who, they say, could manage their lives better than Uncle manages them. Don’t these whiners and complainers watch TV, or read the papers?

Begin your education by watching Judge Judy, whose short and evil temper is unleashed against the pitiful creatures who elect to appear on her show. With remarkable consistency, the pattern is revealed: a dispute about money—is it a gift or a loan?—with someone with whom the plaintiff was engaging in adultery/fornication. The striking characteristic of all of these litigants is overwhelming, malignant stupidity. The idea that they could manage their affairs with even the slightest degree of propriety or competence simply won’t wash. They can’t speak a coherent sentence.

If Judge Judy’s victims are scraped from the gutter, the cast of Court TV probably resides on the sidewalk, a few inches higher. Here we can watch actual court proceedings. What a contrast with the courtroom scenes of fiction! The attorneys are not golden-tongued, but scarcely more articulate than their clients. Their questions often seem as inept as the responses which they engender. The trials may be murder trials, but they manage to be boring nonetheless. And when individuals connected with the trial are interviewed, we again are impressed with the impassive, inarticulate stupidity of many (thank God not all!) of the interviewees. One wonders if a mastery of grammar is no longer a prerequisite for graduation from grade school.

School, in fact, is what it is all about. We could debate whether or not the actual purpose of public education is to produce a populace of virtual idiots, but regardless, that has been the effect. The elimination of any reference to traditional standards of morality from the curriculum is also sadly evident from the behavior of these wretches. What they have been taught about the difference between right and wrong is nil, or nearly so, and what they are able to figure out for themselves is similarly miniscule. And they VOTE!!!

Even an anarcho-libertarian must find himself thinking, as he watches the pathetic performances of these people, that someone needs to tell them what to do, if only so that they can stop placing themselves in the idiotic situations in which they find themselves. The Big Brother types have succumbed to this temptation, but find themselves on the horns of a dilemma: Without these milling masses of ignoramuses, big government has little reason to exist, and little constituency. But to bring them out of the intellectual darkness into the light will fill them with a natural revulsion for the very government which has done so. 

Modern government, then, is steeped in hypocrisy. It wrings its hands at the plight of the poor and ignorant, but cannot exist without them. It must, while extolling the merits of education, and, not surprisingly, seizing large chunks of private property (i.e., income) to maintain a system of schooling, be sure that the students learn nothing resembling eternal verities. Indeed, were it possible to graduate students who didn’t know how to tie their shoe laces, it would be done, justifying the existence of a federal footwear bureaucracy. (Perhaps the only reason it isn’t done is that shoe-tying is learned at home: one of the few things still taught there by parents who are themselves graduates of state schools.) When government workers are caught with their pants down—when they shouldn’t be—there is an outpouring of language about propriety and morality. Suggest teaching propriety and morality to schoolchildren, however, and watch the worm turn! Rather, teach children about “safe” sex, ensuring an abundant supply of bastards born to moronic parents, and the need for more day care centers, where strangers—with even less maternal instinct than mother--will raise the children.

Do you loathe and despise Big Brother? Of course you do! But look around with your eyes and ears open, and you’ll see the justification for his existence. Before you can get rid of him, you’ll have to get rid of his schools. The fools produced there are his fodder!

January 18, 2002