So Long As They

Like most people in the United States, I was raised to be Christian; Roman Catholic, to be more precise. It didn't really take; by the time I was 8, I harbored serious doubts in the existence of a deity, in junior high school, I had come to regard gods as imaginary friends for grown-ups and when I graduated from high school (and a Roman Catholic high school at that) I was completely convinced that religion was little more than a faerie tale that had been the beneficiary of a grandfather clause granting believers the right to not be laughed at. (Depending, of course, on the local prevalence of one's religion.)

I'd also come to understand that many people didn't really make a distinction between genuine faith and mandated lip-service; so long as people did as the faith required, what they might actually believe was secondary. As I grew older, I came to understand that this wasn't just a trait of the religious; the ability to deploy some sort of force or coercion to demand that people behave in some or another fashion was often seen as obviating the need to make the case for the specific system of behavior desired.

Any voluntary agreement between some number of parties, generally speaking, only lasts so long as all of the parties involved understand that it is in their interests to abide by the provisions of the agreement. Once the cost-benefit analysis of compliance no longer pencils out, one can expect, at the very least, a request to renegotiate their terms. And this is generally fine, so long as all of the parties involved, are on a roughly equal footing relative to one another, and attach roughly the same importance to the agreement holding. But give one or more parties the ability to exact unanswered consequences if others don't abide by the terms that are preferred and the sense that those terms are of outsized importance, and they'll generally seek to remove the options of either non-compliance or renegotiation.

And so I've been seeing a back-and-forth playing out in American politics for some time now, as various parties, having come to believe that various parts of the social contract are too important to be left to voluntarism (and, in any event, despairing of their ability to convince people to volunteer) have sought gain the power to enforce them without the need to offer any concessions other than refraining from punishment.

What's interesting about it, at least to me, anyway, is that fact that this all seems to go unsaid, except on the fringes, because of a cherished ideal that says that politics isn't about the use of power. Again, it reminds me of what I'd come to understand about religion when I was young; people would often warn that disbelief and disobedience would lead to an afterlife of eternal torment, yet insist that there was no threat involved. Rather than the exercise of the ability to reward and punish, concern was at work.

Or rather, people didn't understand how the way they presented things came off to others, and I came to see this as a conflict between how people wanted to see themselves, and how another person might perceive them. It's interesting to observe all of the various scales that this sort of thing plays out on. From the individual to the broad political coalitions that dominate the political scene, the desire for the power to ignore dissent, and the apparent ignorance of that exercise of power create a fascinating, if not particularly hidden, view into how the conditions people (and institutions) place on their self-regard play out in daily life.