[drblast]

I think in many ways it's impossible to have this discussion with a U.S. audience.

The idea of force and violence being the solution to everything is deeply, deeply ingrained in U,S, culture. Simply suggesting that reason and cooperation can solve some of the problems we in the U.S. attempt to solve with more violence is usually met with the "starship troopers" ideology that violence is the actual source of legitimacy of all government.

And we do treat everything this way. We have a problem and declare war on it. War on drugs, war on poverty, war on obesity. That might sound like a tongue-in-cheek way to state a problem is serious, but consider that mindset an entire culture must have to make "war" be the perpetually used shorthand for the ultimate solution to every social problem.

And a large portion of the U.S. apparently has no concept of a social contract and a sense of cooperative action or "doing my part."

It's like violence and force is the only tool we have in the U.S. so every social ill is met with the further application of it, way beyond what is reasonable.

And it seems to be a one way trip. You can never suggest that we have gone too far. Apparently there can never be too many police, too much military spending, or too many people in prison. They only right answer is more of that, please.

We are teetering on the precipice of complete authoritarianism because of our culture and it's scary.

[mgraczyk]

This is not a US specific problem. Pretty much any way you try to quantify this, the US looks similar to many European countries in terms of how the public feels about government uses of force.

For example, when asked how confident they are that the military will act in their best interests, Americans give similar answers to people in France, UK, Italy.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/04/trust-in-th...

The US may be more partisan, with a larger portion of people on a side that can be identified with "increased use of force", but I don't think the US is qualitatively different overall.

[bostonpete]

This comment would've made more sense a decade or so ago. You say you can "never suggest we've gone too far" or "it's impossible to have this discussion with a U.S. audience" but the topics you raise have increasingly been a part of the public discourse in recent years. I agree that it's distressing to see how some people view the world w.r.t. these issues but I don't agree that applies to the whole country, or even the majority at this point.

[null000]

I blame religion. Not all religion, not every religious person, and not exclusively, but looking back - there was a strong emphasis that "we're all awful people really at our core, and the only reason anyone is half decent to anyone is because they don't want to burn in hellfire" in my religious teachings (protestant Wesleyan, primarily).

I bought into that for a long time. Then I dropped religion, and realized I didn't really want to be an awful person, just as a rule of thumb. It wasn't too much of a jump to realize most people weren't awful most of the time, and it's only a handful that, for whatever reason, didn't get the memo. Even if many people manage to convince themselves otherwise.

[baryphonic]

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties. The minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation, instead of converting merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.

--Randolph Bourne, The State, 1918 (http://fair-use.org/randolph-bourne/the-state/)

Bourne was a Progressive, but was a critic of WWI, a minority position among his peers. This led him to significant ostracism before his death from Spanish Flu. I find it almost undeniable that Bourne was correct, especially in the contemporary political situation. Progressive president Woodrow Wilson was jailing socialists for sedition, and his administration was thoroughly in love with its own power.[1] It stands to reason given what we've seen since that groups in the media, the academe and the state itself have explicitly adopted the warlike posture Bourne criticizes.

So I think you're right, but it's a phenomenon from the last century or so that had originated sporadically in the decades after the Civil War. The reductionist debasement of all problems into enemies vanquished by a conquering army is mostly an artifact of the constitutional structure we've had since then, and the institutional founts of power that sustain it.

[1] See e.g. Philip Dru: Administrator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Dru:_Administrator)

[warning26]

> And it seems to be a one way trip. You can never suggest that we have gone too far. Apparently there can never be too many police, too much military spending, or too many people in prison. They only right answer is more of that, please.

Personally, I think it's not taken far enough. Leveraging force to eliminate ignorance would, I believe, benefit society. If we allow those who would push untruths for either personal gain or simply out of ignorance, what does society have to lose by ridding itself of them?

[ssalazar]

In the US ignorance and overuse of force go hand-in-hand, so I don't think this is going to work out too well.

[warning26]

Fair point, I can't imagine it would be possible to implement it in a way that wouldn't immediately become corrupted.

[crispyporkbites]

How do you define ignorance?

That’s a rhetorical question by the way.

[warning26]

Flat earthers? Anti-vaxxers?