Get Comfortable Playing Dirty

What happens when your values get in the way of your ability to accrue and maintain power? This is the paradox that those who favor justice face today. Too many of us are math-ing this wrong.

There’s a calling when you join the armed forces. There has to be. It’s kind of like a whisper in your soul that maybe at first you don’t get. For instance, when I joined, I didn’t know what the USMC was other than the name. But I knew I needed a purpose. I knew I needed to be part of something bigger than me, something that pushes in the right direction. I knew I had values, which I saw less and less of in other institutions, so I signed up.

I knew I was in the right place when every leader I ever had told me that it’s my responsibility to uphold the Constitution, and not to serve a leader who doesn’t. This was very important to me because I’ve always been into philosophy. By this time, I’d read John Locke’s Two Treatises, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and several other Enlightenment writers. What these books taught me was that reason can be used to deliver positive changes for our society. What they didn’t teach me, and what it took me over two more decades to learn, was that reason is like a hammer: it can be used to nail in a tile on a roof and just as easily, like a Guiding Light episode I once saw, can be used to bash someone’s brains in.

Everything, and I mean everything, starts with values. Without a foundation upon which to build, a hammer can be used for almost any purpose. Values tell you how hard to look and in which direction for evidence. If you value truth, for example, you keep looking until what seems to be an objective truth is found. Then you challenge that truth until you see that it holds water. After that, you use that truth and other truths to build a world based on truth. If you don’t value truth, and you feel you are constrained unreasonably by truth, then you seek a way to muddy, to distract, and to divert from the truth.

Reason can do both. Logic doesn’t understand concepts like right and wrong. Logic only understands taking premise A, joining it with premise B, and making conclusion C. Neither of these premises necessarily must be true for logic to work just fine. For example, if a unicorn eats grass, and grass only grows during droughts, then to save the unicorns, we need less rain. It doesn’t matter to logic whether unicorns exist or not (they don’t) or whether grass grows better with less water (it doesn’t). The conclusion based on these two premises is a perfectly reasonable logical deduction.

I’m not writing about unicorns and grass, though. I’m writing about the implicit assumptions we make as people. One big assumption we all make is that other people are like us and share the values we hold. This isn’t true in the least. People who share values are people who share values. Those who don’t…don’t.

That’s the truth.

And right now, a lot of people who share the same values, roughly equating to “might makes right,” have stolen power from the rest of us. They cage their assumptions as truths, and cleverly wire these together to come up with other assumptions. This compels us to spend time arguing their wrong conclusion instead of rejecting the premises straightaway. I had an hour-long argument with someone in person not long ago; the majority of the time was spent by me interrupting to deny their assertions, but boy, did they talk fast. So fast that I’m convinced there were a couple of assertions I missed shooting down during the argument.

Which brings me to something else, but related: this whole “be the bigger person” thing. I have an anecdote for this, too.

Once I was watching a middle-school basketball game. Every time the ref wasn’t paying attention, the opposing team did things that should have been fouls. The net result was that the home team was losing. It’s a middle school game. Nobody cared.

I did.

Because cheaters were taking apart the home team, and the referees were missing it all. This would result in damage to the sport if allowed to continue. Players who want to play fair would be squeezed out in the long term.

The home team eventually took a timeout. I knew the parents of one of the players, so I pointed this out to them in front of their parents. My advice to their child was to follow the same approach as the other team. You should have seen the glares I got from the other parents who happened to hear my words.

Well, they got to keep their sense of morality.

And they lost.

In middle school basketball, it's not a big deal. In politics, essentially the game of power, once you lose, you can very easily be locked out of winning ever again. Now, those parents likely assumed everyone shared the same mentality. Surely, eventually, the cheating team would get caught or reprimanded by their coaches for such bad behavior.

I’m not convinced this ever happened.

Because, as I’ve mentioned, it’s pretty much bullshit to think that other people have the same values as you.

Am I against high-minded values? No. But when, as it is today, the hammer of justice is being used to bludgeon the innocent, then we can’t assume that the people doing the bludgeoning share our values. And, when we get the chance, we don’t have any choice but to hammer them right back. It’s not great, and it’s not pretty, but it’s what must be done. I’m encouraged to see some states and political leaders on the left finally stepping up, but the American people will have to as well.

There can be no pearl-clutching this time.

I say this because some of what must be done is not pretty, and it’s not upstanding work. Some of it will be downright dirty work.

But, America, it’s time to start questioning our assumptions. The hard truth is that there are people in our country who would quite willingly see over half of the rest of us as indentured or slaves or doing slave labor in prisons. And right now, those people are running things.

Get comfortable playing dirty, or give up the game.