I used to be afraid of becoming a “petty bureaucrat.” You know them–those people who staff the customer services windows at the DMV or who horde secrets at work, forcing you to jump through their inane little hoops before giving you what you want. Not all people are like this, but enough are.

Now that I’ve had more experience with these types of people, I know that it’s unlikely I would go down that path. I hate telling people what to do and what everybody to make their own choices and forge their own path.

Yes, people need to follow the rules–but we also want to do things like “be ethical” and “follow the law.”

There’s a huge difference between the law and someone’s personal authoritarian tendencies.

Shepard Fairey is one of those people that I agree with on the WRONGNESS of things but not on the cause of that wrongness.

Lately it seems like the authoritarian left has become increasingly prominent and increasingly baldfaced about their strategy and tactics.  Everywhere you look, there are examples of the modern leftist ideal of central planning, the hubris of any human being thinking that they are far-seeing enough to dictate the outcomes of any sort of endeavor.

Maybe I’m just seeing it more clearly now.

  • PowerPoint presentations that project song lyrics in church instead of printing words in the bulletin or using hymnals. Doing it this way strips the congregation of the ability to orient themselves in the song and demands that they submit to the authority of the worship musicians (who inevitably is LARPing as an indie band) and the PowerPoint person.
  • The trend in higher education to dictate learning outcomes for each course and even each lesson. No matter if a certain class is ill prepared and won’t ever get there, or if certain people already know the “knowledge” that will be imparted to them and instead get a lesson in outsmarting the teacher or how to navigate the politicized classroom. It’s ludicrous to think that you could dictate the exact outcomes of a teaching/learning session–especially when you think about the fact that most worthy discoveries come when you’re not expecting them.
  • Obligatory bullet point on preferred pronouns.
  • Going to the doctor and having your entire visit, from questioning to treatment plans, dictated by the coding practices for the insurance companies.

These are more systematic than one-off user implementations, but you can see that every day there are little situations that are designed (?) to make us submit to an arbitrary authority.

No wonder we are losing our will to fight.