Victor Davis Hanson
America is facing a number of existential crises—an open border, 30 million illegal immigrants, $36 trillion in debt, borrowing at the rate of $1 billion every 100 days, a suicidal war on gas, oil, and coal production, a recrudescence of premodern racial and ethnic tribalism, the destruction of deterrence abroad, blue state exoduses to red states, the implosion of America’s big blue cities, 1 million plus homeless people, a military that is woke, short recruits, warped by lobbyists and revolving door ex-4 star defense contractors, and a corrupt administrative state.
But amid such bad news, one common denominator seems to explain the collective suicide of America—the end of consequences, or the expectations that laws will never be enforced, threats never realized, and punishments negotiable. And we can extend that to include national debts not paid down and student loans never repaid—all to be rationalized by lies.
Punishment for breaking the law does not deter most people, whether the fear of shaming oneself and family or the reality of losing six months of freedom to a jail cell. But when there is no bail release, or an exemption of $950 for looting, then theft soars, and the law becomes a lie.
The criminal in a cost-to-benefit analysis figures his theft can be fenced for more profit than the chance of going to jail for stealing something that is not his. So even the enabler Rep. Adam Schiff becomes not safe as he robbed of the very clothes on his back. After serial profitable stealing, the criminal class has less respect for the authorities who empower them than for the rare mayor or district attorney who prosecutes them.
In other words, the longer the law is trampled, the more emboldened the criminal, and ironically the weaker and more impotent and more despised become the authorities who allow it.
Even the worst criminal in his dark heart yearns a bit for an adversarial relationship with the police and prosecutors, rather than being given free rein to run wild and so easily destroy civilization.
In a Road Runner/Mad Max/The Book of Eli world, even among the chaos there emerge criminals who try to reconstruct some sort of codes and laws. Even the Hell’s Angels amid their felonious creed live by codes, a low sort of law to create animal order among their ferity.
After all, to paraphrase Plato, even thieves must resort to some sort of protocols or law when they divide up equally the profits from their criminality—to prevent a free-for-all fight that might squander their loot.
Yet in a land without any laws and consequences, the criminal has too much competition, and so ironically functions better with fewer rivals in an ordered and lawful society. And so given that human nature innately has respect for strength and confidence, even the worst murderer has more respect for the hardest-nose penalty prosecutor determined to try, convict, and put him away for good than the buffoonish George Gascóns or Oakland’s Pamela Prices who destroy the distinction between lawfulness and illegality.
The same logic applies to campus unrest. The more mobs grow, as the rhetoric becomes sicker, and as the masked punks become more aggressive, so even more the college president issues serial platitudes. Usually, the president simply levels obviously empty threats, sometimes daily sermons that sort of praise the “courage” of the thuggish students, sometimes expressing worries that he might have to, just maybe, one day, sooner than later, enforce his own campus rules.
Have you sensed what might follow if just one brave campus president announced:
I may be fired, I might be hated by my faculty, but by God, I am going to enforce this campus’s rules and protect the freedom of passage and speech and communication of most of my hard-working students who are paying for instruction, knowledge, security, and the protection of the Bill of Rights. And so, anyone who breaks our campus laws will be arrested, immediately suspended, and face a hearing on permanent expulsion. Anyone who damages campus property, or who forces the university to clean up after his mess, will have the ensuing costs added to his tuition payments and be prosecuted for vandalism. Anyone who is not a student will be subject to arrest and prosecution for trespassing and unlawful entry. And anyone, who is a foreign student or resident immigrant, and breaks campus rules and laws, shall be summarily expelled and face deportation on suspension of his student visa.
We know that such a college president might be fired, would be certainly reviled in the media, spat upon by the faculty, but also canonized by the country and admired as a rare profile in courage.
And yet no one wishes to be martyred. So, the loud therapeutic talk continues without even a small twin of enforcement.
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>Civilizational Collapse Follows When Laws and Consequences Mean Nothing: Part One appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.