Sultan's piece that we linked this morning, Our State of Police, is a stimulating one. I had never thought about these things from this angle before. One quote:
"Oppressing everyone to avoid oppressing anyone is the egalitarian ethos gone mad."
Of course, we are talking about the sorts of insoluble problems that arise in a non-totalitarian society, problems rooted in the many "flaws" in human nature. Another quote:
The left can't fix the social problems that, in some cases its welfare state helped cause. It certainly can't fix those that predate its intervention. Its efforts are all the more hopeless because it attributes the cause to its usual suspects of capitalism and intolerance so that it never addresses the problems, instead it uses people from failed societies as ammo in a cultural war. The right's tactics temporarily contain the worst of the violence, but not its expansion or its causes.
No society or culture can be conflict-free, nor can even any family or tribe or anything. We must be humble when thinking about "solutions" of all sorts. It has been said that Conservatives like me temperamentally embrace the Tragic View of life as contrasted with utopian views, and there is something to that. It is, indeed, the story of man's fall - broken from the very start.
