The Beastly Word Magic of Law

The imperial court of law, the traditional seat of power where assembled the great offices of the empire, was one of the most majestic of architectural feats, built out of the finest limestone buffed and polished to a sheen. There were two sprawling wings with towers that thrust so high as to seem precarious, and looming above the broad stairway were vast balconies from which, in the distant past, legal proclamations had been made and great speeches given to gathered throngs.

The great temple, having been rebuilt and extended upon in numerous styles, stood some distance behind the court building. There once had been a large open space of lawn and gardens between the two institutions of authority, but now even the remnants of it were buried and overgrown. In approaching the main entrance of the court building, the temple was entirely obscured, as if it weren’t there at all. Standing before the court building, the awe of the edifice, covered in intricate stonework, crowded about with statues and gargoyles, entirely dwarfed the individual’s view. The impression it gave imperial subjects was that law and order had always been and always would be.

But not all was as it appeared. A secret underground tunnel connected the two buildings of the establishment, a passageway that had only ever been known and used by the highest powers of the land. It was a dimly-lit tunnel with water leaking between the settling and crumbling bricks overlaid upon rough-hewn stones, allowing a black mold to cover the walls that glistened in the flickering light. Among the keepers of archaic knowledge, it was believed that the tunnel was older than any other structure, the names of its early builders and their original purpose lost to memory.

It was so well hidden that, over time, fewer and fewer of the respective elites of court and temple realized it was there at all, each realm of power having become publicly treated as separate; if there lingered vague rumors of conspiracies that, of course, were never uttered out in the open among respectable company. Some of the ancient patriarchs, long ago having harnessed the magic of longevity, were the only ones remaining who held the knowledge of how to find and open the concealed doorways deep down in the underground labyrinth of corridors.

Though long-lived, one by one, almost all of the last old nobility died off. Those who survived were the most conniving and dangerous. Yet power had shifted across the centuries, and the old ones receded further into the shadows. The two buildings, facing in separate directions, had become almost entirely isolated in their spheres of activity. Gradually over the generations, the area between them had grown unruly with vegetation and was overtaken by a thick woods. Neither building could any longer be seen from the other, as if they existed in their separate worlds. Yet some of the ancient ones still traversed the passageway, holding their secret close because the fewer who knew about it the greater the power for those few.

What had changed within the imperial bureaucracy was an incoming coalition of young wealth and aspiring reformers, with little concern for entrenched customs. This new governing class knew nothing about the history of the institution they had inherited. Nor did they know the true identity of the old guard. The old ones, having in the past been accepted as aristocracy, increasingly came to hide behind other identities. Few realized how old they were, as living memory no longer reached beyond the buzz of events that occupied the public arena. It wasn’t only that these figures of the establishment were well up in age. The spells of long life had altered them. They were no longer human.

This was the darkest of secrets, around which the wildest of rumors couldn’t imagine. These powerholders hadn’t merely devolved to apes but further back to the reptilian ancestor of all mammals. It took all their guile, sorcery, and enchantment to disguise their true forms. This required so much of their strength and energy that they had little left over for other purposes. Even so, as long as they remained hidden at the heart of power, they could wield their dark magic. And the greatest spells they cast were the laws of the land, not mere codes and rules but words of power.

Without their legislative witchcraft, their masks of human appearance would dissolve and fall away. They didn’t impose laws to control the population but to control themselves, to maintain their false appearance. The most important of these laws, as symbolic incantations, involved animals for that is what they had become, subhuman. There were rules, restrictions, and regulations on which animals could be kept and how, the conditions of raising and slaughtering animals, in the preparation of food and what could or could not be eaten. But more than anything else, the linchpin of their magical order was the anti-bestiality laws, for the beastly lust of the old ones was barely suppressed. The greater control they had, the more they needed a system of control; for they had no control of themselves.

For this reason, though the true believers worshipped at the temple in the respectable formality of traditional rituals, the mainspring of theomorphic power had always been in the court, a place of concealed wizardry where the old gods, forgotten to all others, were still worshipped. The eroding command and authority among these licentious lawmakers was a threat to their very existence. If their dark nature was revealed, their whole charade would end and they would forever fade from the human world, never to again regain their position of dominance. They used every machination they had devised over the eons. But most of all, word magic, underlying the sway of legislative governance, was the ultimate source of their rule.

They did not so much oversee the governing bodies of the empire as they mastered the human mind. If thoughts and identity could be molded and shaped, then those under such influence could be pulled this way and that like puppets. The incantation of words, not only in law books but also in the voices of town criers and decrees etched on stone pillars, was what put the spell on the public mind. They couldn’t actually alter or even hide their scaly skins, their unblinking lizard eyes, the stench they exuded. But they could cause the people to not perceive them as they were, and to not see is to not know. The enforcement of laws in the world was less significant than the imposing of the laws on the human psyche. Appearance was everything. And so they invested nearly all their wealth in spectacles of power.

All of that was to obscure what happened behind closed doors, far uglier than any corrupt dealings and crony machinations. If it was ever discovered the wild abandon of beastly orgies they committed in the bowels of the court building, the last vestige of deception would be undone. What was seen could never be unseen, what became public knowledge could not be undone. Yet their facade of respectability had long ago begun to peel away, had already revealed glimpses of what lay underneath, but only the briefest of peeks and only for those who were looking. Even then, not many could quite believe it for the ruse of word magic was quickly again invoked in comforting stories, even if it left a spreading sense of unease — it could not be true, it was too horrifying to even allow into consciousness.

This put the lizard people in a state of precarity, for eventually the pretense of denying the undeniable would fracture and with it the foundation of their world. In their terror, they pushed ever harder the lever of legalistic power, constantly layering spell upon spell such that it barely held together. It was all they had left. Their sneers of narcissistic confidence belied a fight for survival and, in desperation, their actions became ever more extreme, their word magic ever more obscene. The suspicions that had already floated in whispers were then being spoken out loud, if at first only outside the halls of power. They still held key leadership positions, in having maintained their grip over the court, so as to invoke their public glamor. But for how long could that last?

Biased Jury Selection and the Unjust Justice System

After the past year of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests, one of the early cases of police brutality finally makes its way into trial. Check out this article about the jury selection in the prosecution of the “former Minneapolis police officer who faces second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd.” Did you notice the makeup of the jury? “The seven jurors consist of three white men, one white woman, one Black man, a Hispanic man and a multiracial woman.” That one sentence says a lot about what we might expect, but one should pay attention to the other details given. The piece is fairly decent reporting, although even greater detail would’ve been preferable, as what goes unstated speaks loudly.

In case one has been living in a cave and is unfamiliar with this incident of police brutality, it should be noted that the victim was a black male and the defendant is a white male, the latter being a person intentionally left unnamed here as he deserves to be forgotten beyond his status as an anonymous figure of an unjust system of racial and class oppression. One might add, to be fair, that there have been plenty of non-white women and poor whites who also have been targeted by police (in fact, combined they form the majority of such incidents), if they don’t receive the same attention in the corporate media and political discourse, unfortunately but as expected.

Right from the start, there is a bias in what is reported in the ‘mainstream’ news and what is ignored. For various reasons, the “black male” has been chosen as the stereotypical stock character for the controlled narrative agreed upon by the media and political elite. Rather than the authoritarian system being on trial, it becomes a debate within the white patriarchy about which male bodies are of value and which can be sacrificed (the bodies of women and poor whites being less directly relevant to the system of power as defined). The tricky part is that the white patriarchy, in order to maintain its rule, must present itself as if it doesn’t exist. So, the real debate is whether this guardian of the white patriarchy overstepped the respectable bounds of allowable oppression in making violence too blatant to be rationalized away according to the ruling rhetoric of perception management.

Anyway, the jury consists of five men and two women. And that includes at least four whites, one non-white, and two others who might or might not identify as white to some extent. Even the one black is an upper middle class professional. None of these people appear to be either poor minorities or to otherwise be typical victims of systemic prejudice and violent oppression. There is no evidence that any of these jurors have had personal experience or direct witnessing of police profiling, police brutality, etc. There is no evidence that any of these jurors lives in an impoverished and segregated neighborhood that has been treated as a war zone with militarized policing, along with racial profiling, school-to-prison pipelines, mass incarceration, etc. Their perception of these issues is, therefore, likely to be mediated secondhand through the ruling narratives of corporate media and so would carry predictable biases.

Basically, it’s mostly a jury of men and whites, and probably mostly middle class. Yet there is no place in the entire country where the majority of the population consists of middle class white males. Since this officer is a middle class white male, does a jury of peers mean everyone else also should get a jury of their peers as defined by their own demographics of identity politics? If that were true, then why don’t most female defendants, most non-white defendents, and most poor defendants get juries consisting mostly of women, non-whites, and the poor? Heck, maybe more than the defendant it is the victim, as a silenced and opressed minority, who needs and deserves a jury of peers or, failing that, a jury representing the fuller spectrum of the American population — assuming this legal system is a justice system.

With that in mind, it’s telling that there was not a single juror who didn’t have some pro-police sympathy, even among the few that nominally agreed that black lives matter. What really stood out was that apparently not a single juror agreed with the BLM message that police departments are systematically racist and need to be reformed, even though that specific BLM message is supported by the majority opinion of Americans in diverse polling, even from Fox News. This seems like a case where the moral majority and demographic majority was pre-selected to be excluded from the jury, whether consciously and intentionally or simply through in-built biases. As the American public, we really need to publicly understand why this happens, but that would require the possibility of actual public debate, the one thing that the ruling order can never allow.

Here is the problem, in practical terms. Even if this unrepresentative jury comes to a guilty verdict, as it might, it’s unlikely to be the strongest verdict they could come to, as it’s clear they are going into this with a probable tendency to side with the police in at the very least offering the benefit of the doubt, as based on the normative assumption that the official authority of police violence is to be assumed justified until proven unjustified (a normative assumption not shared by many other Western countries where police violence is less accepted as a normalized fatalistic inevitability). The officer is likely to get a slap on the hand or some extremely minimal sentence. This jury, like the elite that helped select them, appears to be to the right of the general public. They may not be far right and so might have less imbalance than in other cases. But why does the elite system always somehow manages to define the ‘center’, the ‘moderate’, the ‘reasonable’, and the ‘normal’ as being on the right?

Biased jury selection and the scripting of trials, as part of narratized social reality, is a great example of how perception management as propagandistic mind control (and hence social control) is enacted in practice. It’s similar to how the corporate media and corporatist parties get to select which candidates are allowed to participate and which excluded (as silenced into disenfranchised non-existence within public perception) in televized political debates during presidential campaigns. This kind of process is so subtle as the public only sees the end product, but not how the sausage is made. The establishment system of the status quo operates invisibly, as a default mechanism of how the system is designed. The results, within a narrow range, are largely predetermined or constrained. It’s yet another way that democratic self-governance is made impossible, not only in socipolitical reality but also in public imagination.

Doing a web search on jury selection bias, a massive amount of results come up, not limited to articles but also academic papers and scientific research. It’s been a heavily studied area, as one would expect. It’s the type of thing that could be used as a topic for a lengthy analysis in exemplfying a larger system of corruption and injustice; but the motivation to do so is lacking and, instead, we’ll keep it as a more casual commentary. Still, one could support all of the claims made here with endless evidence, not that it would make any difference and not that any new insight could be added to the vast literature already written over the decades. Anyone here visiting this blog is likely part of the silenced majority who was not invited to the table of power. This post is not going to shape the debate and decisions at the elite level. Still, we should continue to speak truth to power, if only screaming into the void or preaching out in the wilderness, as we never know what might finally break through the silencing.

This topic makes one think of a lot of things about our society. We know about problems of racism, inequality, corporatism, corruption, climate change, etc. Most Americans, typically a large majority, understand these problems and agree we should do something about them. Also, the scholarship in these fields often shows a consensus among the experts. Yet, the ruling elite ensures that nothing ever changes. And the corporate media never allows much public debate about it. It feels so disorienting. It creates a schizoid experience of reality, what one knows in one’s experience and in relating to other Americans versus what one is told is true in the dominant media and politics. Another trial about injustice can feel like yet more spectacle to distract us with no repurcussions for the system of injustice, no matter the outcome of the trial itself. At best, this individual police officer could be prosecuted and, at worst, he could be made into a scapegoat. This could be taken as further proof of our powerlessness, if we let it stand without challenge and without voicing protest.

From Community to Legalism

The United States has become a legalistic society. It has always been more legalistic than some countries, for various reasons, but it’s become even more legalistic over time. Earlier last century, most problems weren’t dealt with through the legal system.

This is why it’s hard to compare present data to past data. A lot of criminal behavior never led people to the court system, much less prison. And even when people ended up in court, judges used to have more legal freedom to be lenient, unlike our present mandatory sentencing. This meant that there wasn’t much in the way of mass incarceration in the US until this past half century or so.

Take juvenile delinquents as a key example, far from a new problem. As urbanization took hold in the late 1800s and into the early Cold War, there was moral panic about teenagers being out of control, turning into criminals, and joining gangs. But most kids with problems didn’t end up facing a judge.

There were community institutions that figured out ways to deal with problems without recourse to legal punishment. Kids might get sent to family members who lived elsewhere, to a group home for delinquents, to reform school, etc. Or they might simply be made to do community service or pay restitution. But none of it would end up as a criminal record, likely not even getting reported in the local newspaper. It would have been dealt with quietly, informally, and privately.

There were cultural reasons at the time. It was assumed that kids weren’t fully responsible for their own behavior, as kids were treated as dependents of adults. The problems of kids was seen as the failure of parenting or social conditions. There was little tolerance for bad behavior in many ways at that time, but also society was much more forgiving. A kid would have to commit many major crimes before he would end up in a court and in jail.

The downside of this is that individuals had less rights, as people were seen more in social terms. It was easier to institutionalize people back then. Or if a girl got pregnant, her family would make sure she was sent somewhere else and not bring shame on the family. Juveniles were considered dependents until well into young adulthood. A 21 year old woman who was accused of prostitution, even if false, could find herself sent off to a group home for girls. Early 20th century childhood was highly protected and extended, although far different from present helicopter parenting.

Parents were considered legally and morally responsible for their kids, in a way that is not seen these days. Individual rights were still rather limited in the early 20th century. But there was also a sense of community responsibility for members of the community. It was accepted that social conditions shaped and influenced individuals. So, to change individual behavior, it was understood that social conditions needed to be changed for the individual.

In present American society, we see the past as socially oppressive and it was. We now put the individual before the community. We think it’s wrong to send juvenile delinquents off to reform schools, to separate the low IQ kids from other students, and to institutionalize the mentally ill. But this typically means we simply ignore problems.

The kid with severe autism in a normal classroom is not getting a good education or being prepared for adult life in any kind of way, although there is merit to his being socialized with his neurotypical peers. The mentally ill being homeless instead of in institutions is not exactly an improvement, even considering the problems of psychiatric institutions in the past. And the world is not a better place for our warehousing problematic people in prisons.

Our society has been pushed to an extreme. It would be nice to see more balance between rights of individuals and the responsibility of communities. But that isn’t possible if our main options are to either ignore problems or turn to the legal system. This is a difficult challenge, as increasing urbanization and industrialization have led to the breakdown of communities. There was a much stronger social fabric a century ago. It’s harder for us to turn to community solutions now since communities no longer function as they once did. And growing inequality has undermined the culture of trust that is necessary for well-functioning community.

Yet it’s obvious, according to polls, that most Americans realize that social problems require social solutions. But our political system hasn’t caught up with this social reality. Or rather the ruling class would rather not admit to it.

A New Rule On Immigration

I have a new rule. *

We can only deny immigration to citizens of countries where the US government and military has never meddled in their society. We will demand any immigrants to go away and leave us alone, if and only if we have done the same to them.

We should make the Golden Rule a law. Also, self-righteous ignorant hypocrisy should be made illegal.

* * *

Why do those on the right love to complain about government but then demand that government is the final arbiter of reality?

Immigrants are illegal because they’ve broken the law. Others have noted there are so many laws on the book that every American regularly breaks laws every day. Are we illegal citizens? Unemployment is so high that a large part of Americans work on the black market. Are these Americans illegal workers?

Why do some people argue that people should serve the legal system instead of the legal system serving people? Is the legal system simply a system for defending power? Why, for example, have we allowed the War On Drugs which is a war against the American people?

When law and governance is used for oppressive social control, why should we allow that power structure determine our reality? Maybe we should make our own reality through self-governance.

* * *

* I was ‘inspired’ by an discussion about President Obama’s Immigration Actions on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. It was hosted by John McArdle. The guests were Jon Feere (Legal Policy Analyst of Center for Immigration Studies) and Crystal Williams (Executive Director of American Immigration Lawyers Association), the former from the right and the latter from the left. It is one of those mainstream media debates where both sides frustrated me.

A Divide in Justice, a Divide in the Mind

I got sidetracked into reading some of Matt Taibbi’s just released new book, The Divide. A review of it in the Wall Street Journal of all places caught my attention. It was a surprisingly good, although short, review by Matt Welch. The reviewer ended with this damning conclusion:

“Though Mr. Taibbi doesn’t couch it in these terms, his warning is all about moral hazard, in two senses of the phrase. When swindlers know that their risks will be subsidized, and their potential crimes will be punishable only through negotiated corporate settlements, they will surely commit more crimes. And when most of the population either does not know or does not care that the lowest socioeconomic classes live in something akin to a police state, we should be greatly concerned for the moral health of our society.”

If that conclusion is correct and the Wall Street Journal was doing its job, that should have been front page news. Instead, I found it printed in a small corner of a back page of the newspaper. I guess one should be thankful that a review like this gets published at all in the mainstream media, however hidden away it remains.

This hiding in plain sight demonstrates a point made by Taibbi, maybe the central point of the entire book. His conclusion is that wealth disparities are causing unequal and unfair end results in the US justice system. But that is more just the ‘what’ of his argument, the evidence in support of a more probing insight. It is the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ that is the real issue of concern.

Taibbi speaks of implicit knowledge, that anyone who is paying attention knows all of this and yet it remains in the background. This is the key to understanding his argument. He introduces and emphasizes this perspective of implicit knowledge in his introduction. It appears he offers it as the foundation for building his analysis throughout the rest of the book. It is the sad fact that this knowledge is implicit, rather than explicit, that allows and encourages the growth of this divide.

Near the beginning of the introduction, he presents his case and puts it into context (Kindle Locations 67-75):

“The other thing here is an idea that being that poor means you should naturally give up any ideas you might have about privacy or dignity. The welfare applicant is less of a person for being financially dependent (and a generally unwelcome immigrant from a poor country to boot), so she naturally has fewer rights.

“No matter how offensive the image is, it has a weird logic that’s irresistible to many if not most Americans . Even if we don’t agree with it, we all get it.

“And that’s the interesting part, the part where we all get it. More and more often, we all make silent calculations about who is entitled to what rights, and who is not. It’s not as simple as saying everyone is the same under the law anymore. We all know there’s another layer to it now.”

Taibbi doesn’t pull his punches. He goes straight to the tender weak point in American pride by making a comparison to Soviet Russia (Kindle Locations 76-86):

“As a very young man, I studied the Russian language in Leningrad, in the waning days of the Soviet empire. One of the first things I noticed about that dysfunctional wreck of a lunatic country was that it had two sets of laws, one written and one unwritten. The written laws were meaningless, unless you violated one of the unwritten laws, at which point they became all-important.

“So, for instance, possessing dollars or any kind of hard currency was technically forbidden , yet I never met a Soviet citizen who didn’t have them. The state just happened to be very selective about enforcing its anticommerce laws. So the teenage farsovshik (black market trader) who sold rabbit hats in exchange for blue jeans outside my dorm could be arrested for having three dollars in his pocket, but a city official could openly walk down Nevsky Avenue with a brand-new Savile Row suit on his back, and nothing would happen.

“Everyone understood this hypocrisy implicitly, almost at a cellular level, far beneath thought. For a Russian in Soviet times, navigating every moment of citizenship involved countless silent calculations of this type. But the instant people were permitted to think about all this and question the unwritten rules out loud, it was like the whole country woke up from a dream , and the system fell apart in a matter of months . That happened before my eyes in 1990 and 1991, and I never forgot it.

“Now I feel like I’m living that process in reverse, watching my own country fall into a delusion in the same way the Soviets once woke up from one. People are beginning to become disturbingly comfortable with a kind of official hypocrisy. Bizarrely, for instance, we’ve become numb to the idea that rights aren’t absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale.”

The example of Russia is an apt comparison. Like the Soviet Russia, the United States is in a precarious situation. We have immense power (or rather our government does) while at the same time having a population that is immensely deluded. Many American citizens have become disconnected from certain realities. Most Americans simply aren’t paying attention to what matters or not paying attention at all. But some Americans do notice, as the author acknowledges (Kindle Locations 95-101):

“This is obviously an outrage, and the few Americans who paid close attention to news stories like the deferred prosecution of HSBC for laundering drug money, or the nonprosecution of the Swiss bank UBS for fixing interest rates, were beside themselves with anger over the unfairness of it all.

“But the truly dark thing about those stories is that somewhere far beneath the intellect, on a gut level, those who were paying attention understood why those stories panned out the way they did. Just as we very quickly learned to accept the idea that America now tortures and assassinates certain foreigners (and perhaps the odd American or three) as a matter of routine, and have stopped marching on Washington to protest the fact that these things are done in our names, we’ve also learned to accept the implicit idea that some people have simply more rights than others. Some people go to jail, and others just don’t. And we all get it.”

This systemic and institutionalized injustice has become normal to us. We rarely think to even question it. Even when we do give it more than a passing thought, we typically accept it as the way the world operates, maybe inevitably. There are just those on the bottom of society as there are those at the top.

We see these problems and yet we don’t really see them. We never look at them head on. We never think about them carefully and talk about them openly. We live in social isolation and our minds are trapped within media bubbles. We don’t see the larger view (Kindle Locations 154-160):

“Most people understand this on some level, but they don’t really know how bad it has gotten, because they live entirely on one side of the equation. If you grew up well off, you probably don’t know how easy it is for poor people to end up in jail, often for the same dumb things you yourself did as a kid.

“And if you’re broke and have limited experience in the world, you probably have no idea of the sheer scale of the awesome criminal capers that the powerful and politically connected can get away with, right under the noses of the rich-people police.

“This is a story that doesn’t need to be argued . You just need to see it, and it speaks for itself. Only we’ve arranged things so that the problem is basically invisible to most people, unless you go looking for it.”

In our society, there is an implicit knowledge that is rarely ever overtly discussed publicly. I came across this same idea of implicit knowledge in a number of other books (and have written about this previously). The phrasing I kept coming across was to “know and don’t know”, a truth so dangerous that even to acknowledge it is frightening. What are we to do with such information? It makes us uncomfortable because it puts the lie to so many of our shared beliefs and assumptions, our collective self-image.

To know and not know. It is, at a fundamental level, a psychological dissociation, a splitting of the self based on a splintering of awareness. What we know in one context is separate from what we know in another context. We know and yet the full knowledge never gets our full attention, the different truths never quite connecting to help us see a greater truth that threatens our contentment and certainty.

There is a direct link between a disconnection of awareness and the social disparity of justice and wealth. The class and racial divide is part of the divide of ideological rhetoric, of political narrative, of media reporting, of public debate. There is a disconnection between what so many of us know on some level and what gets spoken in public forums and what gets implemented in public policy.

Reading a book like The Divide can be depressing. That was my initial response. The author, however, ends on a note of optimism. The divide was created and so can be changed. Going by the last examples in the book, it appears that changes are happening. “As this book goes to press,” Taibbi writes at the end of his concluding chapter (Kindle Locations 6405-6422),

“the Justice Department is sending signals that it’s beginning to realize its mistakes. Eric Holder is reportedly thinking of nominating a tough prosecutor, Leslie Caldwell, to permanently fill Lanny Breuer’s vacated post. Holder also talked about raising the statute of limitations on Wall Street cases, to give themselves another shot at all the crimes they ignored in the last five years, warning that those who committed crimes are “not out of the woods yet.” Hedge fund villain Stevie Cohen is being put out of business. As this book goes to press, criminal cases are reportedly coming against the megabank Chase for the “London Whale” episode and perhaps other misdeeds, including some related to its status as Bernie Madoff’s banker.

“At the very least, on the federal level, officials seem to recognize the political necessity of saying these things out loud, and this has to be in very large part due to the public outrage over the lack of Wall Street prosecutions. Decisions like the HSBC settlement were blunt bureaucratic calculations , where the risk of losing and/ or disrupting the economy was weighed against the benefit of receiving $ 1.9 billion in settlement money. But these new moves by Holder & Co. show that public outrage sometimes can change the calculus.

Exactly! Public outrage can make a difference. But public outrage requires public awareness. We are at an interesting moment in history that resonates with that moment when Russian society was awakening. With the rise of alternative media, Americans are becoming better informed in a way not seen before in my life.

Also, a large part of this shift comes from books like this written by Taibbi. It isn’t just the general public that is starting to question and doubt. More importantly, comfortably well-off mainstream media types such as Taibbi are beginning to look to new information and perspectives. And Taibbi isn’t alone. Many books like this one have been coming out recently and they are being read by all Americans, all across the economic spectrum:

“At the same time that Eric Holder was experimenting with a public change of mind, a federal judge named Shira Scheindlin handed down a ruling against New York’s stop-and-frisk policies. This was late in the summer of 2013. Scheindlin , among other things, cited a popular new book, The New Jim Crow, in her ruling and noted that since 2004 more blacks and Latinos have been accosted by police than actually live in the city. The ruling came at the end of a long and well-coordinated campaign by groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the NAACP.”

I liked the mention of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. That is another important book. It is surprising that Taibbi only mentions it right at the end and doesn’t even include the author’s name.  Alexander’s book goes into great detail about the data of inequality and injustice. The case made in The Divide could have been strengthened by Alexander’s analysis of data.

In his very last thoughts, Taibbi makes clear the power of public pressure and the necessity of more of it:

“Of course, a federal judge striking down stop-and-frisk as unconstitutional doesn’t mean the practice will end anytime soon. “You’re not going to see any change in tactics overnight,” promised Mayor Mike Bloomberg. But the fact that Bloomberg was put in the position of having to fight back— and that his successor, Bill de Blasio, won in part by running against those tactics— shows that public pressure can work . Just trying to do the right thing legitimizes the entire system. We don’t do it often enough.”

That is where the author leaves us.

A book is just a book. A writer can’t cause change merely through the act of being published. The only influence a book has is through those who read it and by what they choose to do with what a book offers. This may just be yet another book or it may be the start of a public discussion that we’ve needed for far too long.

We are on the edge of a historical shift. No one knows where this shift might take us or how it will happen. No one knows precisely when it will happen. But, one way or another, it will happen. We are close to the tipping point. Almost anything might push our society over the edge.

Neuroscience, Neurolaw?

One of the panelists made a great distinction between factual knowledge and collective beliefs. He pointed out that people used to believe in phlogiston and thought it was a factual description of reality, but scientific discovery presented a better theory about chemical structure and interaction. Similarly, people once believed in souls, but psychology presented a better theory with the idea of the will. We modern people look back at the naivette and ignornace of those from centuries ago. However, isn’t the will just a modernized version of the soul? The will in some sense may be no more real than phlogiston.

Why not base our justice system on science, on real world knowledge of how people actually behave?

Of course, retribution may feel good and maybe there is something in human nature that wants retribution. But what is effective in preventing criminal behavior? Is it possible to rehabilitate people? Just imagine a society that was based on actual knowledge and understanding rather than mere ideology. Retribution has proven to be a failure and yet we continue to do it. I think it would be nice if we as a society matured to the point where we actually wanted to bring the greatest good to the greatest number.

So, are our cultural biases and our collective beliefs more important than making the world a better place?