When we’re kids we play cops and robbers, and watch cartoons about evil criminals being stopped by virtuous crime fighters. Then when we mature we learn that all the most evil people are operating within the laws of our nation, and nobody ever sends them to jail.
Ask a child to draw a Bad Guy and they’ll probably draw a bank robber, a thief, a supervillain, or somebody breaking the law in some way, because that’s what young people are trained to believe wickedness looks like in their world.
They won’t usually draw a politician, a billionaire, a media mogul, a tech plutocrat, a warmonger, or any of the rich and powerful people who are causing the real suffering in our world. The ones who impose laws upon our society ensuring the continuation of poverty, inequality, war, oppression and tyranny. The ones destroying our ecosystem and poisoning our minds with empire propaganda.
We give kids an infantile view of the world where the villains look like bandits and the heroes look like superpowered crimefighters and GI Joe. Which in a sense is understandable — no parent wants their young child exposed to the real horrors which exist in this civilization. You wouldn’t tell a six year-old that we are ruled by psychopaths who make the most sadistic serial killers look like cuddly little Pikachus.
The problem is that far too many adults never grow out of this worldview. Post a video of police brutality online and they’ll come crawling out of the woodwork frantically defending whatever monstrous act it reveals, no matter how self-evidently damning the footage might be. Oppose the latest war propaganda narrative and they’ll come falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell you the government would never lie to us and the Evil Regime of the Day definitely needs to be overthrown via US airstrikes.
They never unlearned the cartoons they ingested as children. They still think the struggle of good versus evil is a struggle of lawbreakers versus law-upholders. They never learned that there are many kind and decent people in prison, and that all the most horrific abuses in history have been perfectly legal under the law of the land.
Genocides are legal under the governments who authorize them. Wars are legal under the governments who wage them. Capitalist exploitation, imperialist extraction, oligarchic corruption and ecocide for profit are all legal under the governments who pass laws making them possible.
The police never show up to arrest the men who do these things. The police show up to arrest anyone who tries to stop them.
The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the most malignant members of our society, the law exists to protect the most malignant members of society from ordinary people.
A mature understanding of the world clearly recognizes this. And it’s the exact inverse of the understanding of the world we are indoctrinated into as children.
The real villains of our world look like the powerful plutocrats and empire managers who are inflicting unfathomable suffering upon the innocent. The real heroes look like the brave revolutionaries and truth-tellers who work to dismantle the power structure that those tyrants wield against the rest of us.
Becoming a real grown up means recognizing that the monsters were never under your bed. They were standing in broad daylight wearing expensive suits and ruling the world.
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Caitlin Johnstone 