Flaw Salad

A few ideas are coalescing for me around trust and the social contract, but the shape is still hazy. My thoughts are wandering and circuitous. Writing is thinking, and my mind can’t quite untie the knot. Sharing these half-baked reflections still feels incorrect somehow, like I should produce an entire thesis before venturing words into the world. Silly. No one will drag your mind through this labyrinth without your consent. 

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What started this line of thought was LinkedIn, of all things. I’ve been posting lately about ethics, mainly around AI, which is a deviation from the expected silence of a corporate cog. Yes, anyone can post. But people in my position (low-tier corporate professional) don’t usually spout opinions that contradict not only their employer but also the accepted norms of their professional network. (A lot of people I once respected have embraced AI.)

My posting amounts to the tiniest of subversions, but a subversion nonetheless. When I found myself delighting in it, then, I felt compelled to question whether that delight was earned. I am a person who believes in the value of rules for the healthy functioning of society, but when I am honest, there are many I choose to break. Many I view as harmful. Many I believe we are morally obligated to break.

But who am I to decide?

Who is anyone to decide?

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My mind is a nightmare always trying to solve the problems of the world, and it spins often on the notion of laws. Which are beneficial, which cause harm, and who gets to determine the difference? From a first principles perspective, how does a society define acceptable behavior and punish those who defect? No one has adequately answered this, in my opinion (and limited knowledge set, of course). At best, we have the utopian vision of Star Trek, where the entire species has apparently healed from trauma and decided to act right en masse. And even then, when faced with 20th century barbarism in the episode “The Neutral Zone,” the 24th century characters are ill equipped to respond. A wholly gentle people has no need for punishment; the impulse atrophies.

Obviously, we are not a wholly gentle people. We have many rules—more laws than any of us can know. Even attorneys confine themselves to areas of specialty.

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We need laws and punishment because we cannot trust our fellow citizens to look out for one another. That’s the grotesque truth of the matter. When it comes to a choice between one’s own convenience and others’ safety, I see Americans choose themselves every day, many times a day. Even out in the country, I am routinely tailgated for driving the speed limit. Even in neighborhoods where children are present. Even during school release hours. Usually by vehicles large enough to kill a child at 10mph. Which we allow to roam our streets freely for some reason.

To me, the choice to break a speeding law is a harmful abandonment of the social contract. It puts human beings in direct, physical danger. But breaking this law is part of the norm in our society. It is one of the clearest signals, to me, that our values are sick. That and the willingness to invite untested technology into schools and homes, exposing children to harms both known and unknown. (Yes, that comment is once again about genAI.) Well, and the concentration camps. That’s a bit of a tell.

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Over on Bluesky, where I hang out since X became a Nazi bar (if you’re still on X, yikes), there has been a lot of discussion about a Twitch streamer’s (joking) comments about how people should do more “cool” crime. Acknowledging that this streamer is a habitual troll and should not be taken seriously, he speaks to something boiling under the surface that I fear: an almost explosive revulsion toward the oppressive rules of our authoritarian society.

I mean, I feel it, too. I am a nonbinary person. I recently changed my name. I dress androgynously. I am attracted to women, men, and everyone in between. I am a walking middle finger to a massive sect of the American population, who would like to see me mothering at home in dresses. (Gross.) (For me.) And I feel their resentment in stares and strange aggressions. Once, someone stopped their car to flash a taser at me as a threat. Yesterday, some guy charged me in his SUV. This shit is part of my life now.

With people like this in power, of course I want to rebel. Of course the idea of crimes against them feels like an evening of the scales, payback for every time they force me to misgender myself just to piss in public or complete a form for HR. I would like to see any consequence imposed on these people for their oppression, and if all I can do to clap back is petty crime, that starts to look appealing.

But the problem I have with this line of thought is that celebrating crime undermines social trust. If everyone comes to believe that laws are only to be selectively followed, your society falls apart. You can’t have everyone walking around thinking, “Laws for thee but not for me.” Which makes sense to think when that is the literal case for oppressed populations. When enforcement mechanisms fail against the powerful (e.g., wage theft, corporate monopolies, war crimes, climate destruction, etc.) and are imposed harshly against the most vulnerable (e.g., family separations, abductions at immigration court, vagrancy laws, etc.), you create a society that cannot trust the benevolence of its government because they have been shown the opposite. Laws for some but not for others. How long can that last?

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When it comes to an ideal system, I tend to land on the side of fair democratic governance—actually by the people and for the people—coupled with a socialist/communist resource model that meets everyone’s basic needs (and then some). A society that agrees upon its rules, follows them willingly, and enforces them fairly is one that builds trust. You release the need to control each other because you know that the people around you are neither competition nor a threat to your safety. They behave for the same reason you do: the social contract pays dividends. That’s the kind of society I think most of us want to live in.

I say most of us because there are people who genuinely do desire control, to exert their will over others, to exploit. And they get what they want. We have allowed them to get it. They are leveraging it to make almost everything worse for all of us all of the time. American society, driven by capital interests, has eroded precipitously in recent years, and we are all much worse for it. We are morally stained by it.

People like this exist and will game systems to gain control, as we witness daily, so the idyllic society I’ve imagined requires clamping down on certain behaviors to eradicate them. And the clamp-down must be ruthless. You can’t protect malevolent actors’ feelings by allowing Confederate statues to remain standing, for example. Greediness must be punished. So must dishonesty, recklessness, cruelty, etc. To have a prosocial society, people must demand prosocial behavior—with force, if needed. 

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Now, here’s where I get a little turned around. As a nonbinary, neurodivergent, mentally ill gremlin of a person, I cannot possibly be suggesting that the answer to our authoritarian environment is one of… more laws? More enforcement? This sounds more authoritarian, and I have once again confused myself. A majority of people already (incorrectly) believe gender is a binary, and here I am suggesting that if they all decide nonbinary people should not be allowed to exist, then what? People like me get omitted? Rounded up? A majority of Israelis support the military actions the rest of us recognize as genocide. Does that make it okay? 

And we come back to: who gets to decide?

Theoretically, global governance bodies such as the United Nations should be able to override decisions of a genocidal nation, but we do not have such a democratic ideal. The United States has veto power over the United Nations, along with Russia, China, France, and the UK. So, the US can swing its big dick military around for our buddy Israel while the rest of the world sits around saying, “Holy fuck this is bad,” and doing nothing as atrocities unfold before our eyes (with weapons funded by taxes Americans pay). Global impotence. Compassion has failed to govern on a planet-wide level. 

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What recourse do we have? That’s the question on the table. What can people who abhor violence and desire a high-trust global society do about those who prefer this brutal world ruled by military might? Are we doomed to be forever subjugated? Forever disappointed?

I cannot see an answer. Liberation from oppression requires violence. How else do you get out from under a violent thumb? What, besides retaliatory violence, do we do about those who view poverty as a moral failing yet inflict it upon others? A genuine question to which I cannot see a gentle answer. And here is the biggest problem I bump against, time and again: violence begets violence. Control is always a negotiation. You can control me as long as I am either happy with your conditions and willing to submit (are you making it worth my while?) or less powerful than you. If I am unhappy and can gain more power than you, I can wrest control by force. This is how violence will always promote greater violence: an eternal leapfrog.

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An ideal government, then, is one that makes its people so happy they willingly submit to its laws. A contented people. But how does that scale? What can 8 billion people agree upon as acceptable behavior, and what conditions would create such contentedness that compliance is natural and enforcement becomes vestigial? Do you believe in a universal moral truth? That having material needs met brings people closer to it?

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My father genuinely believes, with whatever moral framework he has, that I have harmed him by changing my name. That is his moral truth. And he, like many others, is materially comfortable. He lives in a big house in the country with a giant swimming pool in his backyard. In a climate like Minnesota’s, this is no small luxury. Nor is his Cadillac. Nor his Harley. Nor his basement full of arcade games. Yet he is perpetually aggrieved, including by my gender. What do we do about people like him? People who can have all the material comfort in the world and still wish to impose their worldview on others? What if all the people who believed my gender was an offense comprised a majority of the U.S. and also agreed that every person in the country should have housing, food, and healthcare? Would it behoove me to submit to their will, to live under an identity that didn’t fit because the people agreed my existence should be illegal, and I would rather my neighbors not starve? Is this a good society?

What is a good society? How do we scale it? 

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I don’t have answers to these questions, nor do I pretend to. I am not convinced the violent nature of humanity can be regulated. I am not even sure what the point of writing this is, except that we seem to be at a time when questions of, “What would be better?” hold particular weight as more people wake up to the reality that what we have is horrific.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with this: Chidi is my favorite character on The Good Place. I relate to his cyclical thinking, his search for an answer that does not exist. His arc is my favorite as he makes peace with the unknowable, letting go of questions that have consumed his life in order to embrace being present with people he loves. It’s beautiful. But he is a fictional character operating in a fantastical afterlife. He has the luxury of letting go while the rest of us here on Earth need to figure out what to do about this quagmire of global governance. 

At least, that’s how it feels to me. Urgent. Necessary. Impossible. More important than just about anything else.

Then again, humans have always felt the world is ending. Maybe this is not important at all. Just noise. Sound, fury, etc. The pathetic squawking of yet another animal on its journey back into the ground.