Making Authoritarians

by: Natasha Chart

Sat Apr 12, 2008 at 06:30

"The rulers of republics or kingdoms must therefore seek to preserve the principles of their religion. Having done this, they will find it an easy matter to keep the state devout, obedient, and united. They should seek to favor and strengthen every circumstance that tends to enhance religion, even if the themselves judge it to be false. The wiser they are about natural reality, the more they should do this." - Niccolo Machiavelli

Reporters, and bloggers, are people, too. No one wants their whole life to be on record, no one wants for everyone they meet to fear to speak to them or get close out of a concern that all will be an open book. Everyone needs, as the founders recognized in forbidding the courts to compel spouses to testify against each other, people with whom they can speak freely and openly.

But this is also, it seems, why DC political culture is so insane. People with a keen interest in politics uproot themselves from all those they grew up caring about and being comfortable talking to, and move to a city where their most likely cohort of people to make friends with includes many of the same people they're supposed to be dealing with from a public interest perspective.

Everyone needs people to spend our down time with. Needs, not wants. That's just how we work. When humans don't get enough company, their minds get dodgier over time, which is exactly why solitary confinement is a terrible punishment to endure.

And to those people with whom we can be comfortable, whom we come to have affection or respect for, that we can turn to with our problems or share our good times with, we become loyal. We don't want to speak ill of them. We want to protect them, as they protect us, even if it's only from spending too much time alone.

This loyalty, it's a good impulse, often a kind one. But it's also reflexive, instinctive, and ultimately self-protective. Like any other human emotion, it can come from bad or selfish motives, it can be base. If allowed uncritical exercise, it can be a path to vices great and small.

We fear to be on our own, to be exiled, even though that doesn't really happen to people like it used to. Not normal people, anyway.

For most of our history as human beings, being exiled from those close to you and with whom you were likely to share bonds of loyalty, was a death sentence. It stands to reason that those of us who are living today are mainly the children of people who learned easily and well how to be loyal to enough people to keep themselves from having to literally wander in the wilderness by themselves. Our fear of exile, after all that time, is powerful.

If our loyalties haven't been well chosen and stop making sense, we will often still be trapped in them for as long as our fear of being cast out rules us better than our reason.

Exile

So I write from this perspective because I literally was expelled from my tribe, though I chose that path. But only because I was super miserable and unrepentantly noncompliant. Even though I was still middling sure that a horrible fate awaited a rebellious person like myself, I thought it couldn't possibly be worse than living the rest of my life as a Jehovah's Witness.