Amerika

A TSA agent spent several minutes groping a 10 year old girl after finding a juice box and cell phone in her luggage, explaining those actions by saying “we don’t live in a make sense world.”

This reminds us that not only are government officials just following orders and applying standard procedure, they feel no need for any of it to make sense. This is appropriate for a society that expects senseless actions and employs no tolerance policies mandating rigid responses that remove reason and judgment from determining appropriate handling for any situation.

In a reason-based society, you should be able to interrupt an official performing a mandated task and receive a satisfactory answer when asking them what they expect that task will accomplish. If they don’t know, or don’t think it will accomplish anything, they should not mindlessly perform their duty.

Some Luddites have warned us that the technology that promised to make our lives easier has instead enslaved us to an avalanche of email, texts, and links we need to check for and click on. Just as we have turned humans into procedural robots that work for the needs of computers that should function on our behalf, we have likewise inverted our relationship with rules by creating binding directives at odds with our goals.

Our system of rules is in constant expansion and is assumed sensible and benign only because this was previously the case. With reason increasingly banished from society and rational scrutiny considered offensive and antisocial, we may have reached the limits our of ability to design governing systems.

Surveying the chain of derailment shows us we got lost with successive waves of revolution against reality, accelerated most recently from 1950-1970 with waves of beatniks, hippies, and feminists who proposed compelling fantasies of flower-power, equality, trigger warnings and peace through surrender, despite significant conflict necessitating actual resolution.

This set the stage for political correctness, which ushered in microaggressions, pretending to feel threatened because alternative ideas are communicated, and identifying as whatever characteristics one wished themselves to possess. Surely future methods of crafting fantasies will continue to disconnect further from the real world.

We should consider simplifying all this by returning to a world that makes sense.

Tags: blockheads, bureaucracy, feminism, government, trigger warnings