The opposite of Common Sense is emotion

Last Tuesday, Cinda and I were driving to have dinner with my parents, as we do almost every Tuesday. And she asked me what I thought about the new computer law “they” wanted to make that she had heard about on NPR. Apparently, NPR was not terribly clear about who they were or at what governmental level they wanted to make a law, but conceptually Cinda and I understand what sort of law was being proposed. I should note that when I say “proposed” I do not mean in a specific sort of way; I have seen no proposed language for any statute. The proposal is more in the nature of a general suggestion at this point. Because I do not have the who and the what specifically, I am going to use the ubiquitous law and they in my post. What can I say; sloppiness is contagious. I would also note that Cinda had some rather strong feelings about the proposal which I invite her to post in a comment.

To understand the proposal, you have to know about a local news story. It seems that some teenager lived in the St. Louis metro area and like many teenagers, she was emotionally fragile and technologically competent. (By the latter term I mean she could surf the web, chat with her friends, send e-mail, and participate in social networking sites.) It seems she had a MySpace page or some other similar web presence. It seems that someone else, a neighbor I believe, found her page and pretending to be someone else (a boy she liked at school, I think), sent her “mean” messages. Distraught, the teen committed suicide. Obviously this is a sad and tragic occurrence, and quite emotionally charged. The police even apologized because they could not arrest and charge the neighbor who had, in fact, violated no laws.

Community groups have formed and reacted demanding that they pass a law to prevent things like this from happening again. Depending on who you listen to, they want to make it illegal to either send mean messages, illegal to pretend to be someone else on 1) the internet; 2) MySpace; or 3) when sending messages to a minor, required for parents to monitor their children’s MySpace pages.

WARNING: I’m about to be unkind and politically incorrect or at least uncharitable to the late young lady.

It seems to me that, these people are casting about for someone or something, anyone or anything even, to blame for what happened except the primary cause. A young teenager chose to take her life because someone said something that upset her. Tragic? Absolutely. But let me rephrase it in a much more unfeeling way. An emotionally unstable teenager selfishly chose to end her obviously angst-ridden life just because of something someone else said. Is that a logical choice? Of course not. It indicates that this teen had a lot more problems, emotional, mental, or whatever, than just the fact that someone left her messages that upset her. The messages, may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, but the person to blame for the decision of how she would react is the deceased. It seems unkind, uncharitable, and maybe even unjust, to blame this poor girl though; after all she’s dead and to most of us it seems unjust to heap any more on her. So, in the same sense that corporations hide behind what the computer will not let them do, it becomes easiest to blame the computer for this. After all, computers don’t have feelings and don’t care if they are blamed. It seems easier, more charitable even, to blame the inanimate machinery than to say its this girls own fault she’s dead. And if it’s the computer’s fault/problem, then you obviously, and logically, solve the problem by fixing the computer. (Plus, no one has to feel guilty for blaming the poor dead girl or her parents who have obviously been through enough.) Shazam, we can now fix emotionally misguided teenagers by regulating their computers. Bullshit.

Consider, how differently we would be looking at this if instead of getting fake messages through her MySpace page, she got fake notes stuffed in her locker at school. You know, pages of college ruled notebook paper alleged written and signed by who ever this was that said “mean” things to her. Or what if one of her “friends” told her a lie about what this guy said about her over the lunch room table? Would we be clamoring to legislate regarding what could be written in a notebook or discussed at lunch? If this message had been sent in the U.S. Mail or delivered over a telephone, would we be looking to regulate those devices? Somehow, I doubt it.

Anyway, back to the topic I began with: The above example illustrates and emotional reaction to an event. And that emotional reaction leads people to want to Do Something™ to prevent the event which caused their emotion. Because the public is in an emotional frenzy, the legislators, ever conscious of the winds of the mob opinion tend to scurry around so their voters can see them Doing Something™, even if the legislator knows the resulting law is ill thought out or unconstitutional. They will rely on the Courts to overturn it or make it work because that way they won’t have to be the bad guy in the eyes of the voters. Pure pettifoggery.

You don’t have to look very far to see bad laws passed as the result of mass public emotional reactions. After September 11, 2001, we passed the Patriot Act because suddenly it seemed alright to cast aside basic freedoms on a wave of emotion. Before that, concern about Internet porn lead to the Communications Decency Act. Hitler swept into power riding a wave of emotion. And so forth. The proof is copious; strong emotion usually makes bad law and bad decisions, and when the public is most emotional, especially when it is fearful or angry, is when it should most avoid making any laws. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true.

Somewhere buried in either The Prince or The Discourses (neither one of which I have in front of me), Machiavelli makes a point that usually when the public says it wants freedom what it really wants is security. The obvious follow up is that a public, scared for its security, will offer up its freedoms to get that security back. Since an emotional public is not a long-term thinking public, this is most likely to happen when the public is emotional. The problem is that once a freedom is given up, sometimes, it will not be recovered quite so easily. (See previous references to Nazis.) Modern day Russia provides an good example. Putin is undoubtedly less democratic and less tolerant than Yeltsin was. However, the Russian economy is better now than it was and its people feel more secure. Thus they like Putin and give him the power to go ahead with his undemocratic actions because of it. Come the day when or if they change their minds, I suspect they will discover that Putin will not be so charitable in returning the power and by then it may be too late for them to do anything about it.

Common sense, the most uncommon of things, goes completely out the window in the grips of emotion. So, in response to the death of this teen, I’m calling on “They” to take a moment of pause and to let their emotions cool before Doing Something™ that might be regretted later. I call upon the public to give Them the chance and the opportunity to pause and reflect, instead of demanding that They take instant action. I believe we will all be better for it.