Most of us follow most laws most of the time.
But for those times when people color outside the lines, We the People have agreed to hire those who would ensure compliance. We dress them differently from the balance of the population, we train them, we supply them with weapons and we authorize them to use them.
Because we accept that there is both good and evil in the world, we imbue a certain segment of our society with extraordinary power to try to ensure that the balance of power sides with the good, that good that we have chosen to protect by written law backed by the armed threat of police action.
There have been abuses and probably always will. It’s a difficult job where the common denominator is regular contact with the seamier side of life. It’s a profession that draws on skill sets embracing physical ability and mental toughness, but also on some psychological traits less common.
Most of us will do what we can to protect ourselves and the ones we love, even to the point of taking a life. But taking a life, for most of us, comes at a great emotional and psychological cost. In the book “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” psychologist and former Army Ranger Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (Ret.), writes how few people can take a human life without severe emotional scarring.
Most people are “sheep,” not in any derogatory way, but in the sense that they are not prone to violence and really just want to go about their lives in peace, and will try to settle confrontations in non-violent ways.
But there are also wolves. Grossman writes, “If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf.” That’s a person who not only can kill, but likes it.
And then, as Grossman explains, “But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then?” He wrote that that person is a sheepdog, someone who will kill to protect the heard, and doesn’t necessarily like it, but he’s not going to lose sleep over it.
Despite the proclivity of violence depicted on TV and movie police shows, most police work is mundane, shuffling through the deck of human misery, lies and deception. Only about 1 in 10 officers in the US actually fire their guns in the line of duty; in most industrialized countries the percentage is even lower than that.
But they have the training, and it’s safe to say that, many, if not most of them are sheepdogs. And there are probably a few aggressive sociopaths in the mix, but the hope is the training would ferret those out.
So We, the People agree to this arrangement, and for the most part, it works.
The thought it brings to mind for me is that it seems reasonable to find a way to bring a similar rule of law to bear on world affairs. It would require a re-thinking of foreign relations, but it could begin the process of eliminating war as foreign policy.
For example, those who brought down the Twin Towers in New York were criminals, pure and simple. Wolves.
If there had been an appropriate police force, they could have been hunted down and dealt with in a manner appropriate to their crime.
Instead, the US, in hot pursuit of its own interests and those of a small cabal of like-minded individuals, sold America on war; sold America as a whole on fear, terror and Weapons of Mass Destruction, and invaded Iraq. We chose to rage like a bull loose in a Mideast bazaar, capitulating to revenge and war rather than pursuing the true perpetrators of the crime. The bait and switch worked nicely for the war industry, and insured increased funding to our military, and hence to militaries around the world trying to keep up.
The direct result we have is a Mideast seething in reactionary hatred and war.
If, instead, we had been able to rely on a police force tasked with the mandate to bring the criminals to justice, it is likely much of the present turmoil could have been avoided.
A global police presence, funded by all nations, bringing criminals to a World Court already in existence, has the potential to bring about an end to war as foreign policy. We have some framework for that possibility already, in the United Nations, but it is a toothless artifact at present, and idea unrealized.
It has done much good and brought nations to the bargaining table, at least in principle. But it is hamstrung by the major powers ignoring almost entirely the possibilities inherent in working together to ensure a rule of law.
There are problems with the idea without a doubt.
But the idea of countries being able to shake off the shackles of the military industrial complex and free up the $1.5 trillion now spent each year on military spending is mind-boggling.
The advances that could be made and the humanity saved in bringing criminals to court instead of countries to war staggers the imagination.
The idea that $1.5 trillion might not be spent on the military industrial complex shakes that complex to the core, and ensures that millions upon millions will be spent to ensure the next war is a go. And the next. And the next.
It’s a vicious cycle that keeps the warlords on top, the wealthy elite exceedingly comfortable and the general mass of humanity in the dark about the real reasons great bleeding chunks of that humanity are periodically hurled at one another.
So the idea of a universal police force to deal with the wolves out there, in particular the wolves dressed in the clothing of governance and multinational corporate profit, meets with well-financed campaigns of misinformation masquerading as nationalistic fervor and patriotism.
All of which is designed to distract the general mass of humanity from realizing that just as the good and evil in the neighborhood needs policing, so too do the halls of government and the boardrooms of those who profit from war.
It’s not a new idea.
Next: Einstein & Freud