You’ve found out your coworker has been lying on their time card. Pretending to punch in and punch out while not really working the hours they have claim they’ve allotted. Meanwhile, you’ve been picking up the slack, always feeling something was off but never knowing what until now. You print out your evidence. You approach them in front of everyone, “You liar!” You denounce them in a fury but the outburst lands you in as much trouble as the person that has effectively been stealing from the company and causing you stress for weeks and months even as you carried your team forward.
Management isn’t happy with how you handled things. You’re in as much trouble as your dishonest co-worker? Why? Because we consider self-righteous outbursts entirely inappropriate in polite society. It’s for this reason that most people, having found proper evidence of compromising evidence, would turn it into the powers at be and pursue the appropriate avenues. Most of us would leave the decision to management or law enforcement. That’s how we’ve been taught to go about things. Many companies even provide flowcharts to their employees to inform them on exactly how to go about escalating an issue. Everyone must do their due diligence. Anything that usurps the queue is seen as vigilante justice that can land the whistleblower in as much hot water as the probate.
More and more, I find myself wondering why this is. How is it that as a society can we be opposed to something inherently good like justice simply due to the way it’s pursued? Likewise, time and time again throughout history human beings as a community have been patsy to despicable acts of savagery and wrongdoing such as the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears or slavery simply because at that time and place in history and the world such terrible proceedings were considered “lawful.” What an absurd lot of creatures human beings truly are.
As a collective, human beings are able to accept wholly terrible concepts and actively employ them while shunning wholesome choices for two simple reasons - how the ideals matured within their communities and whether or not they find their peers to be accepting.
The now famous Milgram Experiment conducted by Yale University’s Stanley Milgram tested human subjects to see if they were more willing to harm another if they were ordered to do so by an authority figure. The subjects falsely believed they were turning a switch to electrocute a volunteer. Even upon causing the volunteer what appeared to be great pain the subjects continued when ordered to do so by a perceived authority figure like a doctor overseeing the study. The results of this experiment and many others like it have shown overwhelmingly that the answer is a startling yes, people are willing to harm others in a controlled environment when they are told to do so. The answer is affirmative even throughout different types of societies.
How feeble our identities and morals are when cast upon the rocks of society as an entity unto itself. In school we’re taught about the establishment of great nations from America, to Britain and Rome. However, increasingly, in modern, polite society factual history might as well be fantasy. The older you become the more you realize how quickly time moves and how truth, whatever that was, is diluted with each of the hundreds of children born each hour. A new generation swallows up the last. In a world of smartphones, video games, a shared global economy and lightning fast communication how relatable are stories of nations won over with guillotines, muskets and spears? At face value they aren’t and we live in a world built on short time spans, flash pan marketing and surface value rhetoric.
Just as the current life on this planet is many worlds removed from the history upon which the present is layer we are many worlds removed from actualization. Just as there is something nefarious about meeting whistle-blower and thief with the same level of admonishment there is something nefarious about a society that has begun to propagate its status quo instead of the well-being of those that comprise it.
First world countries, Western society, developed nations --- call them what you will --- are living in a global community but also a global dichotomy far removed from the violence exacted by their countries and the devastation felt by underdeveloped communities throughout the world. Americans are living in a nation that enslaved human beings and denied women rights for over a hundred of year while proclaiming philosophies of liberty and freedom. We now live in a country where despite slavery and the eventual trials of segregation being a fundamental part of our history there are Americans currently living who will claim that race relations are “worse than they’ve ever been” without the slightest smack of irony. How can this horrific reality be?
Society is comprised of us all but it takes on a life of it’s own. Society can be a monster that devours justice when left unchecked by the people and all of the components of a community that produce “us” instead of “I.” Ernest Hemingway famously said, “Never confuse movement for action.” We are living in a society unlike any other before it. We have instant access to information and misinformation that moves at the blink of an eye. There is a lot of movement. There is much sharing of this information and misinformation. But where lies the action? If we are not careful, the inaction of sharing information then doing absolutely nothing about it will be what represents the people as a whole. It’s what history will remember as our downfall.
If we are a to create a world that is efficient, clean, healthy and just the people here on this planet and those to come have an incredible important task ahead. That task is not to learn about the creation of society nor to understand that status quo. The task at hand is to learn to dismantle societies. The task is to learn to recognize toxicity and uproot it as quickly moving as society has now come to be.
We have learned to grow, spread information, develop technology and medicine. However, we have not yet learned to escape impulse and use those technologies to treat and feed all of the world’s citizens. Until we can do those things all of our progress is for naught. We are letting our pre-conceived notions of polite society, money and the intensity of truth (perhaps even our fear of truth) impede our ability to support the denizens of this world in a way that is wholesome.This world has been drawn over by the invisible lines and squiggles that form nationalities and it’s all been tied down by centuries of antiquated, now brittle, red tape. Eventually, human beings must learn to cut through that bureaucracy and dispose of it like the litter upon humanity that it is.
I argue that a vigilante of justice and good is still an executor of justice and good. We must recognize our bias and that the concept that bureaucracy is not maintaining homeostasis for us all. No, it is simply propagating itself and the powers that lord over the world’s resources. The world is a flawed place where both flora and fauna are being destroyed. We must look out ourselves and our communities objectively with logic instead of Machiavellian tactics that trade out words like lies for misinformation to make injustice seem more peaceable. We have run out of time to be demure about past, present and future. We must speak out, pursue action with logic and a sound mind but not with the preconceived notion that we must do so in a way that protects authoritarians or relies on their approval. They will never approve of their demise.
Speak out, people of the world. Rise up to form something new. Laws put into place have not protected us or this planet upon which we dwell and rely. The laws of this land, divided by the claims of imagined nationality have served only to divide the people and plunder the resources that belong not to corporations or politicians but to animal and man. We are stealing food from the mouths of the world’s children to line the pockets and gild the plates of the grossly wealthy. Question the looming figures that have become our collective inner voice telling us to obey instead of trusting the agency that we all have over ourselves in many way over one another.
