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[Return to Home] [Return to Reflection Room] In the Absence of Rules
Right from the get go, one group backstabbed the rest of us. And from that point on, no one trusted anyone else. By the end of the exercise, the highest grades in the class were D pluses in one group, and Fs in the other two. What the lesson taught us was that without knowing the other people around us, we refused to trust them, and when it came down to it, it was every man for himself (I went to an all-boys Jesuit High School). When suddenly the laws and rules that were at one point imposed on us were lifted and we were given control of our own destines within a physical framework, it was chaos and selfishness that ruled the day. Following the Rodney King riots in 1992 across the United States, it can be seen that despite the presence of an organized police force, if the people are driven by anger, there is no police force that can intervene without inflicting massive amounts of casualties. Subsequently, many police forces simply let the rioters do what they wanted, unwilling to fire on them and risk killing them. When I talked to a few friends who were caught up in the riots, they told me that within the mob when they saw people breaking windows and grabbing things, they did the same. They felt somehow protected in doing that by the event swirling around them. They were people who would normally not act in that way in the presence of law, but immersed in lawlessness and the knowledge that no one would act to stop them, they took some gleeful guiltless pleasure in its participation. A recent Russian immigrant surveyed the scene in LA and complained derisively that this is what happens when there is too much freedom. Is freedom the issue? Those who have lived without freedom will tell you it is a powerful thing, something they will never take for granted. But what do our actions in the absence of punitive consequence say about us as human beings? Are we born either good or evil and are we truly predisposed to mistrust and selfishness? It can certainly be argued that all children are born with varying degrees of selfishness. Those who work with children will tell you that all children ARE selfish. But simultaneously children are tremendously accepting, trusting, and almost instinctively tolerant in what many adults would call naivite and innocence. It can be argued that any self-aware creature has to be selfish to a certain degree in order for a species to survive. Put a human in unfamiliar surroundings, and odds are more likely than not they will behave defensively and selfishly. Limit the resources and there will be a fight. From a young age, children are imbued with the values and morals they are given by their parents. Their peers and teachers influence these values and morals, but at the end of the day, it is the approval or disapproval by the parents that shape their understanding of right and wrong, proper and improper conduct, and what things and/or emotions to value. What the majority of children are born with is an intrinsic knowledge that hurting people is bad and makes them feel bad/guilty. Many of us call that a conscience. This conscience is groomed from a very early age by whomever the child considers the primary caregiver. What's more, the child will also absorb any values the primary caregiver advocates. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that a greedy parent will always give way to greedy children. It means that it is one of the earliest ideas they'll be introduced to, and very easily a value that will influence their thinking from a very young age. So why did the reports of widespread looting in Iraq on April 10th and 11th take so many of us by surprise? The U.S. military and certainly the U.S. government didn't at all seem to expect it, clearly to the point that there was no plan at all for the military to use its resources for peacekeeping or police operations. Banks, museums, hospitals, and some key elements of unprotected government infrastructure were looted. Did we believe that religious Muslims in Iraq would behave any differently than Christians, Pagans, Atheists, or anyone else in the U.S. when it came to such things? What exactly does this say about Muslims or Iraqis? I believe what it says is that we are more alike than any of us would like to admit. That religion can give us a framework for behavior, but in the absence of physical enforcement or direct punitive deterrents, people as individuals behave based on their core values and morals. People behave freely and choose the actions that define who they are. In a country where the people were materially deprived, many justify their actions as taking back what had been stolen from them. However, what kind of person steals from a hospital? Or steals objects of their own cultural heritage from a museum? What meaning or value is there in debilitating the crucial public services to aid those who are hurt or dying, or stealing the history from your children? Does greed truly run to such levels within each of us that we wouldn't give a second thought to all the people who will die because of our actions, or the heritage we deny our children? Are most of us so shaky in our values and morals that if tested, we would fail and give in to our darker sides? Mark Twain wrote "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" about exactly this topic. In it, when faced with temptation, none of the renown participants in this incorruptible fictitious Christian town of Hadleyburg stood by their morals or their values. Everything they claimed to believe in collapsed under the pressure of greed because none of them had ever truly been tempted. At the end of the story, the town changed its motto from "Lead us not into temptation" to "Lead us into temptation", understanding that the true definition of the values and morals that make up a person can only exist when confronted by the temptation of the things that can undermine everything you claim to believe in. What the realities of the world have taught us time and time again with Iraq being no exception, is that no matter what morals and values you claim to subscribe to, and no matter how piously Christian, Protestant, Muslim, Buddhist, Pagan, or whichever religion you claim to follow, when faced with the full brunt of temptation, you will always choose the action truest to you and behave exactly the way you are. And in the end, the only person responsible for your actions is you, not the person who didn't stop you from doing it. And knowing this, when confronted with a situation where the welfare of the whole will be placed without the benefit of the consequence of enforcement, it is sadly always wisest to assume that a large percentage will fail to live up to the morals and values they aspire to. In truth, it only takes an active fallen minority to ruin things for everyone else. |