Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We know these ideas, but rarely see them in action. When we have a genuine social problem, Covid, power needs to be used. Action has to be taken, and people need to be managed.
There is a new truism that we need to consider: the larger the problem, the greater the action, and the less granular the control. Covid has shown that the management and the control is a one-size-fits-all, this does not work.
There’s also a second problem when a set of controls that have been put in place and are then found not to be effective, that the science does not support the mandate, and then the governing bodies cannot rescind the control. The power has corrupted the governing body as it (she) cannot afford to look weak, to change their mind, to backtrack, to follow the science, and so they Double Down, they keep a mandate in place that is obviously medically and scientifically wrong.
Such is the nature of politics.
When you’re keeping a bad mandate in place, how do you manage the obvious discontent that that mandate is going to produce? You treat everyone like rats in a cage.
A quick recap on what rats in a cage is.
This is a series of experiments that has been done many times to see how social animals act towards each other in times of stress.
Put one rat in a cage.
Electrify the cage floor such that at random times the rat gets a shock.
Set the cage up so the rat has no way to avoid getting a shock.
Quickly that rat becomes so stressed that it curls up in a little ball and just suffers the shocks.
Now introduce a second rat into this cage.
Shocked them at random intervals.
Very quickly they will start fighting each other. They can even fight each other to the death.
They don’t know where the shock is coming from.
They don’t know why the shock is coming.
Each rat blames the other rat for their tortured life.
Does this not sound like our country today? We have various sectors of our society manifesting anger and frustration against another sector of our society.
We have two sets of rats being shocked by an unknown external force and being pitted against each other, even to the point of violence.
This is then fueled by the rhetoric coming from our political overlords, our media overlords, our tech overlords, our business overlords, our law enforcement overlords.
However, all of these overlords are also rats in their cage getting shocked.
How much is Jacinta (or Trudeau or Biden or Boris or Morrison) being shocked by forces we have no idea they are under. They also are rats in a cage.
This does not excuse these people from the mandates they have enacted. Our democratic system is such that they got into politics to serve the People, not themselves and especially not some other unelected power structure.
When it comes to the police, I’ve been very pleased to see the actions of the freedom protesters to encourage everyone to not react to the police’s overextending of themselves, to their bad use of force and the police outright lying to the protesters and to the media.
I’ve also been glad to see the way that the freedom protesters have been presenting themselves to the media, even if the media does a poor job of actually reporting what is going on.
The police are rats in a cage, getting shocked by the system, just as the freedom protesters are getting shocked as well. And what the police do and how they do it is less to do with systemic violence in the police system, and more to do with the situation we all find ourselves in getting shocked by this situation.
The media is another great example of this. The shock that exists for the various people in the media sector has them pre-wired to only follow that narrative that is now well-established in the media system. Talk about a crazy feedback loop.
The alternative media structures that are coming up, from bloggers to podcasters to live streamers, feed into shocking the mainstream media such that they cannot help but react against them.
And finally, another great example of this ‘shocking’ is the rhetoric from Jacinta asking us all to be kind. And Kindness was the very thing she did not show as she shocked the nation again and again and as she herself also got shocked. Whoever is pulling her strings is making her a rat in the cage. She is stuck in a corner of her cage where she cannot let go of the mandates and can only lash out at anything and everyone.
With all these rats and all these cages getting all sorts of shocks, we need to not react, to not lash out, to not see the other rat as the problem.
Rather we need to be redemptive, we need to act with true kindness, to still say things that others may not like, to speak truth to power, but to do it without trying to shock those rats in those cages.
We need to stand our ground and find a way forward that will release all the rats from all the cages.