Borrowed Thoughts

Politics are a funny thing.

Hell, if we're being honest, people are a funny thing.

People don't actually think about politics much anymore. They consume it. They find a favorite news outlet, a favorite podcaster, a favorite YouTube personality, or a favorite politician, and then they marinate in that worldview until they honestly believe every conclusion they reach was their own. Then they get together with friends who consume the exact same content, and everyone sits around nodding in agreement, convinced they're the only sane people left in America.

Meanwhile, another group across town is doing the exact same goddamned thing. Different television channel. Different podcast. Different talking points. Same certainty. Same confidence. Same belief that everyone else has completely lost their minds.

My favorite is when this spills over into the workplace. Somebody gets comfortable enough to let their politics leak into the conversation, assuming everyone around them agrees. Then they confidently explain why some politician is destroying America or saving America, depending entirely on which talking head they listened to that morning. And if you've actually spent any time studying the issue they're talking about, it becomes painfully obvious that those aren't their thoughts at all. They're borrowed. Sometimes word for fucking word.

That's the part that bothers me.

I honestly don't care whether someone votes Republican or Democrat. I don't care whether they're conservative or liberal. Those are just labels. What bothers me is how few people seem interested in arriving at their own conclusions anymore. Somewhere along the way we stopped distinguishing between journalism and commentary. Opinion became news. Political entertainers became trusted authorities. And millions of people stopped asking questions. They started repeating answers.

You can almost hear where the thought came from. It's like listening to someone quote a movie you've seen a hundred times. You know exactly which television host they're channeling because you've heard the exact same phrasing before. Yet they'll deliver it with complete confidence, convinced they independently arrived at that conclusion while brushing their teeth that morning.

And that's where this starts becoming dangerous.

Once people stop thinking for themselves, they stop questioning authority. Once they stop questioning authority, they become far more willing to hand another problem over to government. Something's dangerous? Government should fix it. Someone made a bad decision? Government should regulate it. Somebody might get hurt? Government should probably ban it. Little by little, freedom becomes permission, and permission becomes regulation.

Take traffic enforcement cameras.

They're popping up all over the goddamned place now. We don't even pretend a police officer witnessed the violation anymore. Your accuser is an algorithm. Yeah, maybe some underpaid city employee glances at the picture before they mail you a fine, but that's hardly the same thing as due process. Yet people shrug and say the same tired phrase every single time: "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

That statement is complete fucking horseshit.

Wrong according to whom?

That's the question nobody ever asks.

Because somewhere along the way we've started confusing legality with morality, and those are two completely different things.

Me riding my motorcycle faster than some magic number invented by a city council isn't a moral failing. It may violate a traffic ordinance, but those are not the same thing. There isn't a victim. There isn't a person whose rights I've violated. Someone simply decided that under no circumstances should I travel faster than whatever number happened to get painted onto a sign.

The same thing applies to automated enforcement generally.

What if I roll through a red light at three in the morning because there's not another soul within five miles? Is that really morally wrong? Or did I violate a rule that exists because, most of the time, following it keeps traffic moving safely? Those are very different conversations, but we've decided to treat them as if they're the same.

I like using ridiculous examples because they force people to think.

Imagine there's an infant standing in the middle of your lane. There are cars immediately beside you, but there's a small opening just ahead and to your left. The only way to reach that opening before you hit the child is to floor it for about five seconds.

Is it okay to speed?

Of course it is.

Every sane person knows it is.

Maybe even a few insane ones.

Because context matters.

Judgment matters.

Human beings matter.

Rules exist to serve people. People do not exist to serve rules.

Yet somehow we've convinced ourselves that every traffic regulation is automatically a matter of morality.

It's not.

It's somebody's opinion about safety.

And opinions about safety aren't universal.

Some people think loud exhaust pipes are dangerous. Others think they're one of the reasons motorcycles get noticed in traffic. Some people think motorcycles should never filter through traffic. Others point to studies showing it reduces rear-end collisions. Some people think thirty-five miles an hour is dangerously fast. Others think it's painfully slow.

These aren't objective truths. They're value judgments.

Once enough people agree with a particular value judgment, government turns it into law, and suddenly anyone who disagrees isn't just mistaken. They're somehow immoral.

That's a dangerous road to go down.

And don’t even get me fucking started on Flock cameras.

Those things are spreading like weeds. Cameras recording license plates everywhere you go, documenting where you've been, when you were there, and how often you travel that route. We are normalizing mass surveillance in the name of public safety, and hardly anyone seems bothered by it anymore.

Free movement is part of liberty. It always has been.

We are born free. We are born with legs, born with curiosity, born with the desire to explore. The entire premise of our Constitution was that government exists to protect those liberties, not slowly chip away at them every time someone invents a new technology capable of monitoring the public.

Just because we can build something doesn't mean we should.

Government works for us.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot that.

We've started acting like city councils are kings handing down decrees from the mountaintop instead of ordinary people hired to perform a public service. We could demand more transparency. We could require that meetings happen after working hours so ordinary citizens can attend. We could insist on remote participation. We could require major expenditures to be approved directly by voters. We could do all sorts of things if we actually cared enough to defend our own liberty.

Instead...

We seem content handing away one little piece of freedom at a time because someone promised we'd be just a little bit safer.

James Madison warned us about this in the Federalist Papers.

He understood that the greatest threat to liberty wouldn't necessarily come from a king.

It could just as easily come from the majority.

A majority convinced that its preferences should become everyone else's obligations.

A majority willing to use government to impose its own definition of safety, comfort, and acceptable behavior on everyone who disagrees.

Not because they're evil. Because they genuinely believe they're right.

That's how liberty dies.

Not all at once.

Not with tanks rolling down Main Street.

One ordinance.

One regulation.

One automated enforcement camera.

One surveillance system.

One "common sense" restriction.

One tiny surrender at a time.

And the whole time, people keep repeating whatever their favorite political commentator told them that morning, never stopping to ask whether the trade they're making is actually worth it.

What the actual fuck.