Appeal to Authority

The police man looked down at Py.

"You've got to stop that."

Py looked up, still holding the fireworks, mildly bewildered.

"I've gotten three complaints about you from parents who want you to stop..."

"Really?" Py asked, not cheeky but genuinely bewildered, "Nobody has said a word to me."

***

Lines and lines of feds sit glassy-eyed in an auditorium while an African American woman paces up and down the front to continue our Prevention of Sexual Harassment Training. Personally, I liked it better when they called it Sexual Harassment Training because I could respond that I did not require any further training in how to sexually harass people.

"We have to be," she says, "understanding of the comfort levels of different people. For example, some people might not feel comfortable with something you consider harmless, such as a miniature of the statue of David..."

For a split moment I considered the image of my laboratory decorated with dozens of miniatures of the status of David. To distinguish them I could put little feather boas and ill-advised flamboyant hats...

"But you have to realize it is wrong even if nobody says anything. Your coworkers might not feel comfortable confronting you, so you need to be considerate on their behalf and think of how other people might feel."

***

I understand that sexual harassment is serious business, but I can not agree to see it as a reason to automatically stoop to the lowest common denominator.

***

"Mom!" a seven year old me stomped into the room, "Why does Amy always go first and chooses everything when she comes to visit us?"

"Because that is proper manners. Amy is our guest."

"But when I'm at her house she always gets her way because her mom says it is her house and her rules."

"What does Amy say?"

"She says what her mom says goes."

***

This pattern became familiar to me over the next few years: my peers, who were either unable or unwilling to advocate for their own needs, appealing to figures of authority to enforce a system where they would be catered to as much as possible.

***

"SHARPIE!" I shouted the first time I saw him in the cafeteria. He was year older, but still the same shaggy looking kid. His eyebrows raised and then his face cracked into a huge smile, "Hey Pika!"

"It is so good to see you!" I ran up and hugged him. Sharpie flinched and stood stiffly when I reached out to hug him, and then, as if to not to rub in my foolishness, extended his arms to offer the most contact-free return of my gesture humanly possible. I stepped back a little puzzled, when I lived with him and Carne I always hugged him hello.

"Uh, so they just hired you recently didn't they?"

"Erm, yeah..."

"Alright let's get some food."

***

"Look," I said, pointing to the mini roller coaster we had hastily erected on my new boss' desk when he was out for a day.

"Where?"

"There," I returned, still futilely pointing.

The man down the hall turned his head and still missed the obvious point.

"Here," I said and grabbed his wrist, carefully by my thumb and index finger, and took two steps away, dragging him along with me to a better view.

"Woah!" he said, "You can't do that."

"What?"

"You touched my arm, that's sexual harassment."

I looked at him as blankly.

"No physical contact man..."

***

I would like to tell you that Amy grew up and eventually learned to advocate for herself and make reasonable compromises, but I haven't any idea what happened to her. I do know that by the time I moved away she, like so many of the little girls I spent childhood playdates with, was royally fucked up.

The scarier part is that I know that there is absolutely no reason she should have grown out of this trend. We have created a society where appealing to authority to force others to cater to you is a wildly successful tactic, and if done right, requires no compromise at all. This is opposed to confronting people with your issue, discussing it rationally, and seeking a compromise.

People have all but completely done away with person to person conflict resolution. Now you always need a mediator, or so many top-down rules that you have completely rewritten normal human interaction.

This constant appeal to authority and top-down thinking means that everything eventually gets boiled down to a series of rules which are made to handle all situations. The reality is that our world is far more complicated than these rules can handle, and that you can not lawyer morals into a society. The rules enforced on us tend to swing from extreme to extreme depending who is winning the appeal to authority, and they make an awful lot of people spend time doing very stupid things.

"Pika." Gadget had a fantastically wicked grin as he walked out of the Sexual Harassment Prevention Training, "Do you think I can order miniature statues of David online?"

A Brave New Job

We're being taught how to write and how to speak.

"Never say we would crush the competition, we have only the utmost respect for our competitors..."

The desks of the hall form a large semi-circle and we're all seated quietly, each clutching an identical bookbag, a gift from our new employer. We also each have a laptop, a shirt...

"And now it is time for lunch," the orientation lead smiles and leads the 20 of us to a cafeteria. We're all the people who began work on this day, they call us a class.

"Ribs or salmon?" the cafeteria employee asks me.

I stare at him blankly before finally managing an "uhhh."

The employee looks concerned, "You know...if you don't like..."

"Oh no! I like!"

***

It's a few weeks later and another smiling cafeteria worker is holding a lobster claw in a pair of serving tongs. I'm immediately struck with the realization that I have no idea how to eat this item and that I will be figuring it out in front of a large number of coworkers.

"It's ok," I tell her, "I have enough food, no thanks."

***

"You're so lucky," my friends told me.

"Is it true they feed you three meals a day?"

"Is it true they do your laundry?"

***

I roomed with a bunch of people from this place briefly years ago. Their refrigerator was eerily empty save the bunny food which contented Carne. I worked for the feds, she worked for something similar, and we use to talk about how the way our other housemates were so dependent on their workplace was a little creepy.

One of these housemates, Sharpie, fell off his bike and skinned his arm. The company nurse fixed him up, but he wore the bandage in the shower. Seconds later he came running out of the bathroom in a towel talking clutching his burning injury.

Carne and I laughed at him for wearing his bandage in the shower and expecting any differently. He laughed too once we pointed it out, "you know, I use to know that."

"They all drink some hardcore kool-aid over there," Carne shook her head, "bet you it's something they put in the water."

I laugh, "So that is what the cafeterias are for..."

***

The sign above the ribs says they were cooked in molasses. The meat is tender and falls off the bones, and a touch sweet. I assume that's from the molasses, though I have never had anything like this before so I wouldn't know for sure.

"You'll never be far from food," the orientation lead tells me, "we have snack kitchens..."

***

"Don't you think this is all a little excessive?" Giraffe asks me.

"Yeah, but it is how it is around here I guess."

***

I'm sitting at an awards dinner, courtesy of the feds, earlier this year. Sys's dad is sitting nearby and laughing with us.

"I wonder sometimes," I said, "if I could just hop from company to company on crazy employee benefits and just outrun the rate of reality catching up to these places and them realizing it isn't affordable."

His dad throws back his head and roars, "You missed out on the real chance for that, kid. This is nothing compared to how it was in the 90's."

***

"It's just like A Brave New World," Giraffe said.

"Isn't that about some crazy dystopia where everybody is oppressed?"

"Well yes, but it's completely voluntary and they are all happy."

"Then home come are they oppressed?"

"The book talks about that a lot."

"What?"

***

I'm walking through the halls for what turned out to be my final interview. A perky HR lady is asking me my least favourite interview question.

"And do you have any questions for me?"

My eyes clutch the walls, searching frantically for something which will make me sound smart yet curious.

"You changed the brand of juice in these refrigerators since I was here last, didn't you?"

"Oh," she smiles, "Yes, well we have panels here which study things like this, and if they changed it I suppose that means that the new one is healthier."

There is a brief an awkward pause where the HR woman innocently smiles, and then adds, "You really do learn something new every day here."

***

"When you start work," Doug said, gesturing to the Torii building, "We'll miss you."

"I don't understand."

"Well you'll never leave work there. You'll never come here anymore."

"That's silly."

"Well, why would you want to leave?"

***

I sat down and looked back at the mental list of things I wanted when I was homeless and compare them to the things I want now. While I still want a car and maybe a boyfriend or some other form of social ties to this place, pretty much everything else has been taken care of: food, shelter, medical insurance, free time, and respect for my work. I find it odd to realize that the list is a lot shorter but I am not a much happier person, in fact in some ways the optimism afforded to me when I was homeless of rapidly becoming un-homeless and general excitement probably meant I was happier then in my day-to-day life then than I am now.

***

"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill... they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave."

The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies."

"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead..."

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand..."

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

A Brave New World, Chapters 16-17

"You're still coming here," Doug smiled.

"Yeah. I think it's not good for me to spend all my time there."