Society and Control

     The last blog I wanted to write is a quick one about an idea I had when I was driving home with my dad and brother. We were discussing about how police give people speeding tickets and how it takes up a lot of police resources just in order for this task to be accomplished. I suggested that why not just have radar traps along the highway at intervals to track when a car is going over a certain speed and then tag their license plate. Despite the fact that it might be hard to actually get a good picture of someone’s license plate with a roadside camera my brother brought up an interesting point that people would actually hate this. And it’s definitely true. People would protest at the thought of not being able to bend the rules a little bit or at the thought of the fact that they would almost ALWAYS get caught for exceeding the speed limit.

Anyway, I didn’t mean for that anecdote to be too long it was just to lead into a more general thought I had about society. It seems that while people in society are constantly clamouring for control and order and stability, there is a definite need for the enforcement of laws to be somewhat ambiguous. In order words, there needs to be obvious imperfections in the laws and how they are enforced for people to really be happy. If everyone was flawlessly caught every time they broke a law, people would hate it. They would call it totalitarian and an invasion of their privacy. 1984-esque, no doubt? But at the same time, one could argue that these invasions of privacy or totalitarian laws are only to strengthen society by allowing no one to be above the law.

      So it’s a real catch 22. People want security, but at the same time I guess they need to believe there’s little loopholes and not everything will be seriously enforced. In other words, I guess they need some room to breathe. Why is this the case? I’m not entirely sure. Apart from the obvious part about society failing, I don’t see the big deal as long as it was not another human judging us. Maybe a computer system that could analyze whether someone was doing something right/wrong without any bias. But this leads into a whole other philosophical debate…about humanity building god with it’s own hands and how counter-intuitive it would be for some kind of software entity to judge us since of course, it’s not even human. Yet the irony is, why would some kind of higher “god” be anything like a human anyway? As in, have emotions like a human…to be omnipotent would it not have to judge us in an unbiased way? I think it’s almost demeaning to ascribe human emotions to a truly omnipotent “god” or one which might’ve created us. How could we /possibly/ relate to its emotions? It’s like an ant trying to relate to a human. Either way, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
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