It’s attractive to reach into your own moral framework, your thoughts, and pull out an OUGHT to treat it as an IS, but it’s a falsehood. We often think we know things because we are an assessment engine, our brains are evolutionarily advantaged with the capacity to figure a lot of shiz out. But, it’s not a perfect engine, likely it’s leaking oil, running a bit rich, needs some new bearings and belts, and makes a clanking noise when it’s revved from a cold start.
Purveyors of ideas, snake oil salesmen we might call them, exploit this inane ability, specifically it’s many flaws, to seed into us ideas that are enticing, yet at odds with actual existent laws and precedents. The suggestion of an ought, as if it was an is, is what the daily mail does in clever language. The suggestion, because that’s what it is, not a statement, that a group of people feel a certain way, and that the measurable demonstration of what is manifest from that group, is what underpins the legislation of a rule in a society, is misleading. I’m not dismissing people or their feelings, merely pointing out that these are not legislative, and they are not legitimate, other than being the truth of how those people happen to feel, not demonstrable. Also, quite often those people feel that way simply because they have been manipulated to do so I would contend.
If I were to be bold I might suggest that nobody has measured the amount of people who do not feel as they, or do not take action, as a counterpoint that also diminishes the validity of the cause in front of us on the TV. That is an important point, how many people have not turned up to march or wave a flag? Noise is not majoritarian but any noise at all captures our attention regardless of its validity. If we count the people at the rally and then present that as a percentage of the whole population we might have a more relational figure to work with. Or we could go more granular and count the people at a rally in comparison with the population of the area it is in.
I like protest, I’m not against it, but better is political pressure, simply because that is where power is. All the marching can make no difference unless that marching is accompanied by actions of protest, the withdrawal of labour, or the creation of a nuisance at the very least. Successive governments have been very successful in re-imagining protest as terrorism and making protestors look like lunatics. But in the comparison between two scenarios we can easily spot where this is a tactic and not a moral legitimate action. For instance, we can look at the longest standing democracy in the world, the US, and see that their judiciary has treated insurrectionists as heroes while at the same time treating people who picked up floating debris from the surface of the badly renovated reflecting pool at the capitol as terrorists. In the UK our police arrest people for wearing an anti-genocide t-shirts, while spending quite a lot of their time protecting Islamic fundamentalists who march in Luton and other UK cities spouting ant-democratic rhetoric with megaphones. This makes no sense to anyone, and cannot be justified.
Combined with the noticing that there are such things as private militia protecting Jews, and private Jewish charities, healthcare facilities, and schools, and that those objects are protected by the state. We maybe see that most religious-institution created objects could be being given some sort of special treatment in comparison to the majority of citizens that are not they. Have a think about that for a moment, and consider is it fair that some folks get to express a greater set of rights or privileges bestowed by the state that you enjoy? Then further consider why some people wish to express anger against them. I am not saying that anger should lead to any sort of violence, but I can see where it acts as a contributing factor. We cannot simply say that we are surprised when people who have little to no political capital, and seem to have nobody on their side that is being truthful, turn toward, and are hoodwinked by, the fanatics on the right like Farage and his ilk, who seem to be speaking for them.
My pal Bing keeps repeating an ought as if it is an is, his mistake is to be a parrot, an echo chamber to a falsehood said by those political actors who will readily tell a lie because they know the sort of voter they control does not think independently of their favoured party. The lie, the ought, he repeats is that people seeking asylum are “illegal”, the truth is that nobody that comes here for asylum is illegal because it is not illegal to claim asylum. Their method of arrival is usually by boat, but this is a consequence of the UK government not processing them efficiently, there is no other way to get here in physicality other than a boat since we are an island. These folks have travelled thousands of miles through European nations, if they were doing anything illegal then they would have been detained long before they got here, and if they were doing anything illegal when they arrived here they would be arrested by our police. We are subject to the same asylum agreements as other European nations. Ergo, they are not illegal immigrants, they are asylum seekers.
My pal’s hope is that his repeat of the lie, along with the masses that also do this, will create a change of the law, and he may be correct, it might, but his assertion is incorrect and what he is saying is still a lie. He says is, I say he means ought. There is a big difference, you cannot act on an ought, you can on an is. An ought is a suggestion, imagine you phoned the police because those youths ought not to be hanging around at the shops making noise? There would be no actions taken because there is no law that says they cannot do so. We’ll go back to the US for another example, a shall statement in reverse, a shall not. this is just an is (existent) in a different form.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
This statement prohibits a body from doing a thing, it is quite clear in it’s meaning and application (unambiguous). Yet this does not deter some political actors from pursuing the founding of a state religion because they think that there ought to be one. The is is that it is not possible given the constitution, the actions are that it is possible given the feelings of some people. And this my friends is where the US constitution shines out as one of the greatest documents ever produced by human endeavour, in that it gets ahead of all the problems that could be caused to a democracy by motivated religious fundamentalists with a will to power. I say written by mankind because no religious document has ever been the equal of this majestic piece of work.
I suppose the point of this story is… keep protesting, it matters, but don’t break things even if that is necessary. Instead, pressure the political system, don’t get your opinion from hearsay or suggestion, and find out why you feel the way you do, is it moral, is it factual, is it rational, or is it just emotional reaction to media…
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