The Full Badness of the Bad Thing

Let's leave no badness unexplored

Image generated by Dall-E 3.

A horrible event like Charlie Kirk’s murder makes it difficult to do comedy. The event is so horrific that it’s only possible to forage for comedic berries in the general context in which the event took place. So, in order to get where I’m going, I need to back up just a bit…

Civilization emerged in Mesopotamia around 5,000, B.C. By “civilization”, of course, I mean “a brutal autocracy in which basically everyone was some combination of prostitute and lifter of heavy stones.” But it beat trying to kill a mastodon with a stick, and it kept brigands from stealing your sad little peasant belongings (e.g. broken pot, a single shoe). People sometimes wonder which is worse, totalitarianism or anarchy,¹ but our ancestors basically answered that question by choosing totalitarianism over anarchy over and over again. In anarchy, might always makes right, the weak quickly perish, but in totalitarianism, a strongman at least protects you from thieves in the fleeting moments when he’s not pressing a hot poker into your genitals for messing up the words to His Glorious Birthday Song.

By the Middle Ages, the bargain between ruler and subjects was often pretty clear. The ruler would protect you from those filthy barbarians over the hill (whom scientists would later reveal share 99.9999999% of your DNA), and in return you gave him most of your crops and showed up when he wanted to go to war with the French, which he always did. In a few places, people managed to codify pieces of this bargain; if the ruler wanted to take your livestock, he had to pretend that God willed it, if he wanted to make you row a big ship until your heart explodes, he had to provide bathroom breaks — that sort of thing. These concessions might not seem like much, but they were hard won, and a strongman who brutalized his subjects too much risked being replaced by a less violent inhuman monster.

The Enlightenment saw the emergence of a radical idea: What if people chose their leader instead of being led by whoever was best at killing people without getting killed back? Some places overthrew their rulers and gave Just Any Shit-Smeared Jackass a voice in government. Eventually, civil rights and voting became the norm in the developed world, and so did thinking “Is having any turbo-turd off the street choose our leaders really the best way to do things?” after every election. Today, leaders are severely limited in what they can do, except for Donald Trump, who has broken free of executive constraints by adopting the toddler tactic of being so fucking out of control that everyone is too tired to enforce the rules.

My point is: The evolution of government is the story of separating political power from physical power. The defining characteristic of political progress is having decisions made through a process instead of having some skull-cracking brute hack and slash his way into the decision-making role. We have rights, there are rules, and we chart our course by voting. And that remains true even when you find yourself thinking “No, come on, this cannot be the best way to do things, my cousin voted and she walked down the aisle to fucking Limp Bizkit at her wedding, there must be some alternative.”

Charlie Kirk’s death is tragic on a human level. He had a family including two young kids, anyone who can hear about his death and not react in their stomach is someone I don’t fully understand. The only people whose killing should not invoke sadness are Osama bin Laden-level mass murderers, and I’m so serious about this that I won’t even make an “and maybe Maroon 5” joke here. Even Maroon 5 are not that monstrous — let’s get some perspective, folks.

But the second way that Kirk’s murder is awful is that it’s an assault on our ability to make decisions for ourselves. The shooter presumably didn’t like Kirk’s views, and now she² (#feminism) has silenced him. Kirk was prominent because large numbers of people wanted to hear what he had to say, but he’s been removed by someone who feels that they should have the power to dictate the content of our national dialogue. And, sadly, they do have that power — the shooter just used violence to make a decision that we all now have to live with. We’re subject to the whims of someone willing to use violence to achieve their goals, just like when brigands were stealing our sad little peasant pot and shoe.

People who don’t appreciate the awfulness of this event aren’t just lacking empathy — they’re naive. They apparently don’t realize that political violence pushes us backwards on the civil society evolutionary timeline. People on the right who seem to be steeling themselves for a second civil war are making the same mistake, except that the far right hears “go backwards” and thinks “great idea”. But anyone who values the hard-earned progress that humanity has made separating political power from physical power should view this as a tragedy on a human and a societal level. This is the type of shit that we just don’t do anymore, and let’s hope that we’re not about to enter an era in which that statement is less true.

---

1. Both are bad, though the worst form of government is Parrotocracy, rule by Jimmy Buffett fans.

2. As I write this, the shooter has not been found.