»Mother State Will Take Care of me.«
Do we really need the comforting authority of a feminine tyrant?
Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in an idyllic restaurant away from the hectic city life and enjoying the view. Suddenly a large SUV parks right next to your dining table and a prole jumps out. Clearly he’s not disabled! You yourself had to walk about a hundred meters to get from the visitor’s parking lot to the restaurant. And this gentleman is quite ignorant of the disabled parking lot!
There is great resentment — and there is another one coming soon! Didn’t they read the signs? Rules apply here! But there is no one to enforce them…
The rage is at least as much about them breaking the rules as the fact that you yourself acted in accordance with the law. Then you could just park here next time. Why would anybody behave?!
You may not notice it right away, but you argue with the ›broken windows theory‹ and maybe rightly so!
Broken Windows: The First Step To Chaos
James Wilson and George Kelling used the mental image of a broken window to convey their theory. In their opinion, all it takes in a block of flats is a broken pane to trigger a chain of decay. People saw the damage and immediately thought the neighborhood was shabby. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy until eventually broken pieces lay everywhere and people move away.
Any zero tolerance policy, be it regarding soft drugs or illegal parking, argues based on this assumption that we must establish order, to prevent further chaos.
Sure, when the brazen parkers on the disabled parking lot still occupy the last spot and a person in a wheelchair now has nowhere to go (sorry!), then ruthlessness has triumphed. How disagreeable!
Sure, if you gave all these crooks a hefty bill, they’d think twice next time! But can we even teach these people? After all, they made it until a driving age without having learned the lesson. Instead, they will probably stop visiting the restaurant — but instead find another one that tolerates their behavior.
Consistent consequences have their appeal and can be effective. They are seldom found away from the cities, in the idyll. Perhaps that’s why you come here? The long fingers of civilization still flatter the palate, but you can already taste the pleasure of freedom at the same time.
Well, this freedom has its price. But it can also reward. What if the restaurant in question has a maximum of three disabled guests in the evening, but there are dozens of parking spaces for them?
Then there is a break between ›law‹ and reality.
This break can also be a broken window. Where the rules seem arbitrary and unpragmatic, the respect one has for them diminishes. It is better not to let a senseless law come into force in the first place, because it lowers the legitimacy of sensible ones.
So the unwelcome peasants are at the same time a smoldering test for the set of rules: Is this rule sensible enough to enforce it with all your power? The disabled shouldn’t suffer from the healthy, but do they really? Maybe they almost always find a parking space and are not at all outraged themselves?
And well, as a non-disabled person you have certainly not found a parking space before. Do you have a right to a parking space near this or that restaurant? Doesn’t the restaurant have to decide — and isn’t it a voluntary decision to address a specific target group if it did?
Who are you as a guest to feel vicarious indignation here?!
The question of whether one thinks it is decent not to park a hundred meters away for convenience is another. You can base your own decision on this assessment. But who is the state that, in your opinion, should put the interests of many behind those of a few?
Outrage is the cry for an arbitrating parent.
The tyranny of care
›Father State‹ is a popular term. The authority of the state with masculine connotations probably gave him this nickname. His gently but firmly pointing hand ensures that the citizen — the curious child — can explore their freedom without getting too close to the threatening abyss.
In Western European countries, however, we can now observe a development that is moving towards what I would like to call a ›mother state‹. Regarding the misleading gender implications of this formulation, I should note that this alludes to the two terms patriarchy and matriarchy, but the dominant stereotypical properties of these two systems are more in focus than the personal.
The characteristic of the father state was minimal intervention, with simultaneous instruction in basic values. It encourages citizens to set out bravely but with a compass into the wilderness of civilization.
The quality of Mother State is concern. It emphasizes avoiding hazards. The child citizen should not run too fast because they could fall. They shouldn’t wander around outside after dusk. The citizen of the mother state must be protected from himself, if necessary.
»Mother State will take care of me.«
Both models have their merits, they more or less attract different people. Regardless of what you think about it, you can hardly deny that in Western European countries, under the banner of feminism, people are clearly heading towards the latter, with the result that Sweden and Spain have recently elected governments that even describe themselves as inherently ›feminist‹.
But both models have their advantages as well as their disadvantages. And the trend away from patriarchy towards matriarchy resulted from a changed awareness of shortcomings in the former, but should give us reason to look at those of the latter as well.
The double-edged blade of patriarchy was the high performance and great strength of society on the one hand, the high pressure to perform and little squeamishness with the individual on the other.
The double-edged blade of matriarchy is maternal-tyrannical care.
Martin Heidegger states in Being and Time that the essence of existence is care. On the one hand, there is concern for the self, which emerges immediately from life experience. And then there is caring that extends to others.
When speaking about protruding care (»vorspringende Fürsorge«), Heidegger refers to those measures taken to empower an individual to care for themself. In political terms, we can understand this as the satisfaction of basic needs, such as the guaranteed supply of food and drink. Citizens have to deal with many further problems on their own.
As intervening care (»einspringende Fürsorge«), however, he understands those measures that relieve an individual of the burden of caring for themselves, but thereby push them into a relationship of dependency. This would be, for example, the prohibition of firearms, since now the individual supposedly does not even think of abusing them — at the same time, however, the citizen has to rely on the authority of the state to avert danger.
While the protruding care can be assigned to the father’s state, the maternal counterpart is the intervening care. Western European countries are increasingly shifting their priorities from freedom towards security — and in the United States of America such demands have been growing for a long time.
The choice between both poles must be made by the individual. Both mother and father state are able to allow law and order to prevail. But where the state is small, culture takes over the administration of the masses. As cultural heterogeneity is constantly growing, this approach could soon seem utopian. The same applies to the idea that freedom remains the same in a security-optimized matriarchy.
Well, do we want to go back to a more ›dominant culture‹ or do we let our state swell into a maternal bosom? Cheers.
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