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Life Without Consequences
I had a good friend in college (we’ll call him “Trey”) who was one of the best natural athletes I’ve ever seen, and he was absolutely brilliant. He didn’t do sports, and he was a fifth year senior with a ‘C’ average. His Dad owned some type of factory in New York State, and Trey knew exactly where he was going when he graduated. He knew his Dad would hire him regardless of his grades, so why study? And he liked college (mainly, he liked girls), so every time he got close to graduating, he’d change his major so he could stay longer. He was an alcoholic, drinking heavily several times per week. Trey invited me to a party one night, and I said I couldn’t go. He said, “C’mon, man! It’s Friday night!” I told him I had to study. He asked why I had to study on Friday night, and I informed him that I didn’t have a guaranteed management job lined up for me, and I knew that I had one chance at a better life by going to college, and I was not about to screw it up, thank you very much. He said he didn’t understand. And he probably didn’t.
I saw a news story this morning about a group of protestors who were blocking traffic on an interstate in some city. A commuter drove his pickup through the crowd and hit one of the protestors. I watched the video. The other protestors were horrified that one of them had been seriously hurt. So here we have a group of people who stand around on the interstate and are genuinely surprised when they get hit by a car. These are people who are not accustomed to experiencing the consequences of their actions. They have a lot in common with Trey, come to think of it. They have little hope for a better tomorrow, they sense a lack of control over their future, they sink into nihilism and despair and begin to see the world as a strange, depressing place. People in this situation sometimes do things that look stupid to the rest of us. Like drinking themselves into oblivion six nights a week. Or standing around on interstates.
I was fascinated by the video, because most of the “protesters” on the interstate were wearing surgical masks, to protect against Coronavirus. They were being very conscientious of safety precautions against a virus which poses little to no threat to young people like them, while they stand around on an interstate, which most certainly DOES pose a threat to young people like them. When they carried the young lady off the interstate, after she’d been hit by the pickup truck, I saw someone pull her mask back up over her bloody nose.
Safety first, right?
And then many of them returned to standing around on the interstate. Remember that these people are not clinically insane. These are just people.
People are strange. I love them, but they’re strange. Of course, so am I. I cast no stones here.
But my point is that people get much more strange when they start to lose the connection between their actions and the consequences of those actions. Once someone loses that connection, it’s just hard to say what crazy stuff that person might do.
My Uncle Fred often spoke of the seen vs the unseen. Some consequences of government actions are seen (like a new bridge being built), and some are unseen (like a new business not opening, because too much money was taken out of the local economy).
People losing the connection between their actions and their consequences is an unseen consequence of too much government. A safety net that is too robust leads to erratic, self-destructive behavior. Like not studying hard in school. Or standing around on interstates.
And like Trey and the protestors, as we lose the connection between increasing the influence of government, and the many unseen consequences thereof, then we start to do stupid things with that government.
One reason to spend less money on, say, The War on Poverty, is that it doesn’t work. But I would argue that a better reason is that as we further insulate poor people from the consequences of their actions, then their actions will predictably become more erratic and self-destructive. Like Trey, who for all I know is still drunk today. Although if he’s running a factory now, as I suspect he is, then he might be sober now, which I suspect he is. The chains of responsibility that he spent his life fleeing may end up saving him.
Life is funny that way.
It’s not just the government that causes such problems. Suppose you train someone from kindergarten that the biggest threat to the world is global warming, and that they should recycle their cans. Ok, suppose one day, that person just tosses a can in the regular trash somewhere. What is the impact of that? Nothing, really.
But suppose you take a kid who just lost their farm, like me, and you give them a scholarship to college. You don’t have to tell that kid to study. Believe me, he will achieve whatever he is capable of. Because the connection between his actions and their consequences is a lot less abstract to him.
Life is not a game, to kids like that.
Trey’s Dad had protected him from the consequences of his actions for his entire life. And did Trey love him for that? No, he resented his father. I never understood why, but he hated his father. That made no sense to me at the time.
But now, watching these people with surgical masks protest against the government of the country that has given them such security that they don’t understand the danger of standing around on an interstate, I think I’m starting to understand Trey.
I hope he found his way. I really do.
Maybe all the wealthy kids that were sent to study with him taught Aristotle about the importance of virtue and responsibility. Aristotle felt that happiness was impossible without fulfilling one’s responsibility to others.
So Marx was half right. But the half that he missed is really important. Marx never supported himself. Never. So rather than making his world a better place, he stood around on interstates. And thus, it became impossible for his fertile mind to make the world a better place. It’s tragic, really.
By compassionately sheltering Americans from the consequences of their actions, we are making it impossible for them to make the world a better place. Quite the contrary, in fact.
It’s tragic.
Published in General
“They have little hope for a better tomorrow”
I beg to differ, @drbastiat. They have hope for a better tomorrow in which they are firmly in charge, telling everyone what to think, say and do, while the deplorables are dead or silent. These protesters don’t act the way they do just because they have no fear of consequences, but because they have no doubts about their virtue, righteousness and importance.
And the last line of the video is the incredulous by-stander asking, “Are you serious?”
“Are you serious!!!?!?!?” at the end is the chef’s-kiss touch. Why yes, young lady, they are.
I love the screaming as she’s hauled off. A 2-year-old couldn’t throw a better tantrum.
A year or two ago a video was widely circulated of a young woman (wearing a college sweatshirt) taking a sign from a person soliciting petition signatures or some such activity. She taunted the person from whom she had stolen the sign. A campus police officer saw this, and there was a verbal back and forth between the thief and the police officer in which the thief refused to return the sign because her cause was righteous and the sign owner’s cause was evil. So the police officer arrested her – handcuffs and all. She had this priceless look on her face indicating that she couldn’t believe that she was being subjected to actual consequences for her action of stealing the sign.
The whole things seems like a five-year-old’s tantrum. The voice, the stomping, adamant refusal to obey. The shrieking at being taken in hand.
I remember that. It’s almost as if young people view the world as a rice paper scrim. Stylized and without weight or substance. To be painted and viewed, the torn down and discarded at a whim, and replaced with something just as unreal.
The Soviet Union had that for a long time. It was all very future-based.
There were pluses and minuses. The minuses include the lying and the information that was left out,
Public
indoctrinationeducation delenda est.This example was not so much about the future, but I was talking about Rachmaninoff with a Russian woman who came to the U.S., got her PhD and became a successful university professor. When I talked about how he had left the USSR after the Revolution and came to the U.S. where he composed some of his music and died, she said, “Oh? In school we were taught about Rachmaninoff, but we weren’t taught that he had gone to the United States.” It was somewhat of a surprise to her. She just hadn’t known.
We had a few other conversations where things popped up about things she hadn’t been taught in school, but I remember this one. (She usually uses the phrase, “We were taught…”)
I think it’s important that education be about the truth. Whether that makes teachers optimistic and excited about the future will vary.
Sergei “Sputnikov” on his YouTube channel tells of a vivid memory of the time when he was maybe 9-10 years old (around 1980) and walking in Kiev with his uncle, telling him excitedly about the great things the Soviet Union was doing. It was stuff he had learned in school, and was all very futuristic and exciting.
They were alone, and his uncle stopped and decided to have a talk with him. It was an important moment in his growing up. Sergei started looking at things a little more carefully from that point on.
He lives in Michigan now. He is not a political ideologue like most of us on Ricochet. He appreciates the great childhood he had in the USSR, but is in a position to explain to his viewers, who include people who have been educated in illusions about the wonderfulness of socialism in comparison to capitalism, just how it really worked. He doesn’t have illusions about capitalism, either, but here in Michigan it has worked well for him.
A videogame mentality.
Remember Rachel Corrie? Quelle surprise.