squash the understood you

Who gets to give us orders?  My Intro Soc. professor (who someone told me was a Communist*) invited us to imagine the state as being like the Mob, offering us "protection" in return for the right to tell us what to do and to break our knees if we disobey.  Each of us surely at some point or another in her** life has had the thought, "Now, hold on—when did I agree to these rules?" and has scrunched up her face a little with displeasure when she realized that when she'd agreed to them was when she was born, and how she'd agreed to them was by being born.  Indeed, at my very most radical, I find myself wondering why the police get to tell me what to do, why employees of the government have the right to imprison or even kill me if I break their rules.  I'm not even saying the rules are wrong...it's more like if I picture myself face-to-face with a policeman who's telling me I'm under arrest, I can't help but imagine being like, "Really?  Come on, we're both adults here..."  (Here I suppose I'm with Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall: I've always loved the scene in which he tears up his license in front of the cop.)

So if even the authority of our elected officials and their goons regulators can rub us the wrong way, how about the unauthorized authority (yeah, no, that makes sense) that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis?  How about, e.g., when a corporation—or not even the corporation itself, but an ad agency hired by the corporation—gives us a direct order?  I'm talking not just about the orders hidden with varying degrees of subtlety in the messages of the ads themselves, but about actual flat-out undisguised, unsubtle commands:

I was watching a commercial the other day—I think it was some car commercial where a car was driving really fast along the edge of a cliff or something—and I noticed, in capital letters on the bottom of the screen, the words "DO NOT ATTEMPT."  Now, I know: what are they supposed to say?  "The corporation paying for this advertisement does not endorse the activities depicted in this commercial, so if you do it and get hurt, don't come crying back to us"?  On at least some level I suspect—no, I'm sure—I'm just being oversensitive.  Still, there's something about that imperative, that direct order...and I think it's that we're told so much from so many directions all day, and it's up to us, very often, to distinguish between "real" and "fake" authority.  Like those construction workers who step into the street and hold up a hand to stop traffic: if they did it in a friendly, help-us-out-here kind of a way, like a request, I wouldn't think twice, but as it is I can't help but think, "Now, you're not a traffic cop; I don't have to follow your orders!"  Maybe there's a law stating that motorists must obey the commands of construction workers; if there is, I don't know, and that's sort of the point.  We're often told what we can and cannot do, and in a lot of cases this is not helpful information about the law but rather...

Wait, no, I know what it is.  It is that I'm oversensitive, but the reason I'm oversensitive is that there's real danger involved.  Human beings are inclined to follow leaders (see Escape from Freedom), partially because we fear uncertainty—because, in turn, uncertainty means we have to take responsibility for our actions...for our inaction, even (there is no default, is part of the horror).  Our avoidance of responsibility and our consequent compliance are involved in much of the evil in the world.  And anything that exploits that, profits from it, or even just plain touches it is, I think, deserving of our most intense, hypercritical, and, yes, oversensitive scrutiny.

So the next time a construction worker tries to stop traffic, run him over.  Just kidding.

* Whether that was meant as an attack or was actually the way the man identified himself politically I do not know.

** I just can't go to "their."  DFW does it, surprisingly (to me, given his grammar fetish), in Infinite Jest—I guess he concluded the battle's lost?  "His or her" or a P.C. "her" strikes me as pretty lame, too...I'll probably cave before too damned long myself.