“. . .dominant male monkeys had a much higher levels of brain serotonin than lower-ranking animals, but that their serotonin levels dropped once they were prevented from maintaining eye contact with the monkeys they had once lorded over. In contrast, low-ranking monkeys who were given serotonin supplements emerged from the pack to assume leadership. The social environment interacts with brain chemistry. Manipulating a monkey into a lower position in the dominance hierarchy made his serotonin drop, while chemically enhancing serotonin elevated the rank of former subordinates.
There are a number of things that have occurred to me in connection with this. I don’t remember half the ideas that float through my head, but I will pass along those that I recall.
First, it seems to me that we need to ponder the relationship of the police to black people in black ghettos from a position of dominance and power. The police are like a super-gang: they dress alike, they act alike, they use the same words, observe the same culture, and back each other up no matter what, come thick and thin, and show loyalty to their own even when they know they are in the wrong.
It is of course as wrong to accuse all police of being criminals as it is to assume all of them are innocent. My own experience, having worked for 3 years in a police department in college, having shared a locker room with cops, having attended their line-ups more times than I can count, and having shared a radio frequency with them for a thousand hours or more, is that most departments have a few bad apples, everyone knows who they are, and they tend to get away with what they get away with for long periods of time, if they don’t take it so far they force others to act. If they are honest, I think most cops would admit this.
And on “the street” the whole game of being a cop is being dominant. In most times and places, but particularly in rough neighborhoods, they are always at risk of being outnumbered and overwhelmed. This is the root cause of being more aggressive than needed.
But if power is a literal drug, if you get a literal hit of serotonin every time you yank somebody’s chain, that can get addictive. I think in most poor neighborhoods a lot of cops can justify acting arrogantly and with using force often. And arresting someone is the most obvious use of force. All sorts of laws seem to get enforced more in the places where the police spend more time, because there is more crime of all sorts.
And here is the question I would raise: what is the psychological cost of getting arrested? What does it say to you as a person when your hands are cuffed behind your back, and you are locked in a cell, for any reason? Blacks get arrested at very high rates for things like marijuana possession, petty theft, public drunkenness, etc. Does not every arrest breed some bitterness? Is not every arrest, in its own way, a crime too? You have more or less kidnapped someone and held them against their will. Is this not directly disempowering?
I think in discussing the violence in the ghetto this is an often-overlooked factor. Over and above police abuse of force, what about simple legal use of force? When people say the so-called War on Drugs is a war on blacks by proxy, I cannot disagree with this notion. The people at the bottom of the food chain will logically have the lowest serotonin levels, and thus the highest need to get high. It is one of the tragic ironies of life–and this world is filled with this sort of thing–that the people with the most need to escape their reality are punished the most for it. The people most likely to get kicked are those already on the ground.
What I would assert is that the process of policing, as it is practiced in most cities, actually exacerbates crime, by increasing the sense of impotence, the sense of worthlessness, of powerlessness, to which people react in predictable ways. I think many cops view the ghetto as a playground. I think many cops view a shift in which they don’t get to lock up a person or two as wasted. It probably makes them mean, to the extent that in some homes the wife and children know instantly that they came up short that day.
And I”m talking average cops here. Not the particularly bad ones. I think the thrill of the hunt gets in their blood, and that even though most of them stay within the law, they enjoy what they do. One of the cops where I worked had a Far Side cartoon in his locker where two people are pouring hot oil on some people besieging their castle, and one is saying to the other: “I have a confession to make–win or lose, I love doing this.”
Now take this logic to Ferguson. I am not going to justify what Michael Brown tried to do, which is kill that cop. I’m not going to blame the cop for shooting Brown. He was alone in the ghetto, being attacked by a huge man, who was high, and extremely enraged. Legally, practically, Brown was wrong and the cop was right.
Nor can I stomach for a moment the Soros-funded agitprop which followed, because it was infused with left wing radicals who didn’t care any more for Brown than they care for the people locked in cages in Cuba, or who were shot in the back of the neck in Lubyanka, or who were forced to eat their neighbor’s children in Mao’s completely arbitrary and unnecessary famines. I dare say that sort of thing is likely happening even now in North Korea.
But if we are to use genuine empathy–and I do like to consider myself capable of empathy, even though I am often hot-headed, sometimes mean, and nearly always irritable–then we have to look at the root of the anger. Of course people want the cops when bad things happen. But when cops are the SOURCE of the bad things, the proposition is much more dicey. I suspect in that neighborhood at least half the young men had been locked up at least once for something that was not that big a deal. And being handcuffed and locked in a cage leaves scars. Eric Garner was killed through incompetence–and I will note again, with a black female officer on the scene as Officer in Charge–for the crime of selling cigarettes. Why did he react with such rage? Because he was tired of cops, tired of harassment, tired of being made to feel inferior, tired of having his chain yanked. Is this so hard to understand?
I hate the Left. I hate the people who hate humanity, who hate decency, who want power at any cost, for nothing. This post is long enough and I will deal with my original topic in another, but I will say that real change for the better will come when reasonable people on both sides sit down and discuss how to improve the situation. Such conversations are IMPOSSIBLE when radicals are in the mix. I might perhaps begin calling Leftists anti-humanists. That is what they are. They support nothing good. They help no people who matter. They are not working for the common good. They are not focused on decency and actual human lives.
In my view, some alternative to getting handcuffed and thrown into a cage needs to be on the table. In my view, a whole lot of things which are illegal need to made legal, or made subject solely to a citation. The same people who support Black Lives Matter, and who reflexively vote Democrat are the ones who made selling cigarettes without a license illegal. Curtailing freedom is what government does. Without that, it is useless. Even in the pursuit of national defense, it acts solely to curtail the freedom of our enemies. Some freedoms need to be curtailed, but selling cigarettes should not be among them.
And ponder the world people live in where they can only afford to buy a cigarette at a time. Ponder the feelings that must arise when even THAT is punishable by incarceration or unnecessary death. What hope is there? Why NOT lapse into drug abuse, lethargy, alcoholism, and chronic irresponsibility? Yes, I know that there people who rise above all this. But what merit can there be in a system which must be endured to be transcended? Why not make success the most common, most obvious, most available option?
Economics is a complex subject, and one filled with lunatics. But everything we need to know, we know. Free markets, the protection of property rights, and sound currency build generalized wealth. The more these things exist and are protected, the better for all but the authoritarians.