I dislike crusaders, as I dislike almost all blind fanatics. There are always people telling us to change our ways, or to change the ways of others, save them from themselves, save society from their influence. Get the government to ban… 

Well we all know about US prohibition. And it is the nub of the problem. Our species, like many, enjoys the effects of alcohol. But these effects can be disastrous in the short run, debilitating in the long run, especially if drink is abused. 

The clear solution – to crusaders – is to simply ban it. Most of us know someone who has had awful experiences or even ruined their lives from alcohol. We also mostly know many more who have glasses (and even a lot of glasses) day after day and are quite happily normal. Experience tells us that it is not quite the “demon” portrayed by fanatics. 

And crusaders never really consider trade-offs. We endanger our lives every day we leave the house, but life is a pretty poor thing if we are afraid of everything all the time. Some people enjoy the dangers of swimming, or hiking, or eating a good dinner. Or, yes, having a glass of wine or smoking a marijuana cigarette. 

There are substances that mostly kill, and surely they should be controlled. But there are others – like alcohol and marijuana – which are simply part of the many awesome contradictions of life for most of us.

And the reason for existence for some crusaders. 

I sit a lot more than I used to.  In spite of a sedentary career of computer coding, I always managed to take a daily walk – not for health as much as happiness. But now I quite enjoy hanging out on the couch. 

Alarming “new studies” come out periodically of how awful a sedentary lifestyle can be. Typically these ” scientific researches” include a big group of people tracked over a fairly short time – say a thousand folks over 20 years is the best case. 

Results are prepared on outcomes for the whole bunch. Hardly even a breakdown by age, weight, height, diet, job, or any of a thousand other factors. And, to be honest, for that reason many of them seem to be useless. And that is before panic laid-in statistics along the line of “sitting 4 hours a day triples risk of heart attack.” Not mentioning perhaps that for a 30-year-old the risk “triples” from 0.1% to 0.3%. Nor if said adult stuffs himself with Twinkies daily and binge drinks on weekends. 

I’ve always paid attention to my body, always gave heed to common sense, and all in all reasonable activity has seemed a good thing. But a senior who does not sit a good part of the day is, in my experience, a freak who has bigger issues than a sedentary lifestyle.

I’ve already noted that some words and phrases – like “homeland” or “freedom through work” – leave me cringing. They disguise an often troubled core belief in a trivialized honey coating. Another one _ which I hear a lot lately _ is the “rule of law.”

Humans exist in a social contract. Much of that _ a good example is a family, another the work group _ formalizes ancient principles of cooperative interaction. There may be all kinds of rules, strict and otherwise, but they are always applied _ at least in successful tribal/units _ with a great deal of common sense. Flexibility using rules supports a known consensus of behavior.

The “rule of law”, on the other hand, implies that law should be applied ruthlessly and by the letter. “Rules of law” are tools of the rulers manipulated by the slickest minds available.  “Rule of law” supported Nazis, Confederate slave owners, the aristocracy in 1785 France, and _ for that matter _ the gang leading the reign of terror in 1790s Paris. 

One typical response is for the ruled to revolt and rewrite the laws. However, what we desire is an enforcement of common consensus. Obviously that is nebulous, but then so is the “rule of law” after it has been twisted, misapplied, and otherwise ignored so as to be practically effective. “Mitigating circumstances” and all that. 

No, I would much rather not live in a “rule of law” society. Unfortunately, it’s all we’ve got. But I can wish there were something better and I refuse to glorify our current methods. 

Not me. I’m 77 today, and studies of “hunter-gatherers” holds only terror for an old man. I’d hate to live even a hundred years ago. It is hard to conceive how hard it was to live back then, when one was long past the bloom of youth. 

The young tend to be romantics. They plan on great deeds, wonderful accomplishments. They regret that they cannot be old time heroes, saints, generals, priestesses. Some of them try strange diets or rituals to be more like their ancestors who were supposedly more connected to the ways of the Sun, Moon, and Earth spirits. 

Not me, not now. Not long ago half the “civilized” people would have been dead by 50, in terror at 60, definitely gone soon thereafter. Three score and ten was largely a pleasant fantasy, and even in that time frame no guarantees of being healthy nor active. 

I’m not the new 30 or 40. But I’m quite good. And I never ate paleolithic, nor lasted long on most other dietary fads. In fact, I tended to avoid fads altogether and mostly trust my own body senses, and brain. Not perfect, I know, but here I am.

What most astonishes me these days is how little understanding the young have of how good they have it compared to how my parents and grandparents lived. Some of them secretly covet a desire to have everything go smash and return to the good old days, full of toothache and other horrors they never now endure. 

Well at least I can be aware and grateful that the paleo era is long gone.

Current Chinese governance worries us because it is the first advanced technological civilization to impose full identification on everyone for all acts at any time. Street lamp cameras record every action anyone does, and permanently file the good, the bad, the ugly, the generous, the illegal _ a computer replacement of an omniscient god who never forgets anything.

Meanwhile, tribal profiling does not work anymore. Stores used to be able to ban whole groups of people they did not much like _ blacks, Jews, Italians, Irish, or hippies. Until now there has been more to gain by letting masses of those folks shop than by keeping a few criminals out. 

A modern workaround has been places like Costco and online retailers who can simply refuse membership to anyone who has done something bad to them in the past, a form of profiling. In fact, it is hard to see how these trends do not soon merge, replacing profiling with intimate ID recognition. 

There continue to be those fighting for the dream of privacy. I suspect that is already as vanished as the ancient wild frontier. Most people already accept the benefits of being economically well known _ credit scores _ or socially famous over the internet. It’s not a slippery slope, but a free fall.

Of course, as always, “the honest citizen has nothing to fear.” Believe that and I’ll head over to sell you a bridge.

Many of us like to believe we are open-minded. Yet in fact we prefer to be in groups with others like us. We quickly form into tribes and cliques within those tribes. Although we, over time, drift fluidly from one to another, or may even be a member of multiple cliques and tribes at the same time, we genuinely relax with those who think like us. 

Many things were expected to widen our horizons. Writing, printing, television, and most recently the internet. The ideas of all the world’s individuals are now available to us…

Unfortunately, great choice can be upsetting. People tend to clump. Certain people like certain entertainments or ideas. It is more comfortable to be with those who share our views. It was ever so. Only lunatics seek to be different from everyone around them, and all those that they know. 

When there was less means of exchange, tribes and cliques had alternate ways to judge members “in person.” For centuries that has not been quite true. But recently, we may consider “our” group to be nothing but dead people and their books. Or robots on the internet whom we have never seen. 

So our cliques shrivel to ourselves and a set of often disembodied but supportive voices. For anything. And the echoes in our tiny little boxes make us feel we each must be right 

Unless we are a social psychopath, we tend to believe other people are like us. In fact, folks believe it too much. Kind people think others are kind. Those who cheat and steal are certain everyone else does the same. We even assign similar actions to animals.

But our brains are magnificently complex, so we can also clearly separate imagined groups of others into those “like us” and those “not like us.” I may be kind and peaceable, but those in the far valley certainly are not. 

Then our neurons kick into frenzied fractal high gear and we get into a game of trying to imagine what others will do, then what we would do if we were them, then what we should be doing with people like them and on and on. Never noticing contradictions and if the fever gets high enough even ignoring logic and experience entirely.

However, our simplest guidelines remain that most people are just like us, but what they do about it may vary. If I cheat on taxes I assume everyone else will too if they can get away with it. We end up projecting the worst of our personalities onto “others”, and only assigning the controlled better desires cautiously to those in our own tribe. 

And that is, of course, a vicious spiral as tribes separate, often over stupid illusions.

And almost all of it is fantasy 

I’m constantly amazed at how good and well-behaved most people are most of the time. Of course, I live in a good area in a very wealthy society. What amazes me even more is how many of my peers think our lives are horribly crime-infested.

Mostly, I guess, it’s the “media.” News and entertainments about horrible crimes are a lot more interesting than those discussing hobbies or good food. But the fact is that in this place, at this time, most violent crime involves fights between people who know each other pretty well. Most property crime is reimbursed by insurance and in any case rarely threatens someone’s health and well-being. I remember too well the bad old days when we all carried cash, and a street mugging (violent or not) could take a week or more of earnings and leave us unable to pay bills or even to eat in the days before credit cards. 

Nevertheless, folks seem to think the worst. 

People are much more likely to be involved in traffic accidents than to be affected by serious crime. “Abducted children” are usually involved in custodial arguments or are running away. Folks almost never encounter violent “illegal” immigrants. But the fears of all kinds of suburban and urban myths multiply. 

It’s one of the penalties we pay for partially inhabiting a distorted virtual reality on the internet where we are surrounded by more horrors than miracles all the time. The opposite, actually, of real life 

Any authoritarian movement can be evaluated by the size of its tribe and the strength of its boundaries. By definition it is led by one person absolutely certain of his or (rarely) her intuitions, intelligence, and abilities. After that, how toxic such a movement becomes mostly relates to how isolated its inner members are from the rest of the population. 

Leaders always know that. The first thing an authoritarian must do is separate his congregation from all the “others” who are either too stupid to know better or – in the worst cases – “not people” at all. 

Because once you have tagged those outsiders, you no longer need to treat them like your fellow tribesfolk. They can be defined as animals to be trained and enslaved, or simply germs to be killed. None of the tribal beliefs and laws apply to anyone who is not part of the cult. 

Authoritarian leaders only survive by being ruthlessly powerful. Their only core concern is maintaining that power whether they believe their goals are true and bright or whether they are simply augmenting their own status and wealth. Anyone in their way is – again by definition – an outsider and in the worst cases not a person at all.

It remains an open question whether those who believe “all humans are people” can endure against our modern, technologically enabled, authoritarian gangs. 

There is a serious court case where a man says no contraceptives should be sold to anyone because his daughter might use them to become sexually active which is against his “religious beliefs”. A band of native Americans are suing to stop people going to the moon because they consider it a “sacred object”. And much more.

Religious belief has always involved conflict because what is crystal truth to one person or tribe is foggy nonsense to another. America tried to solve this with individual right to freedom of religion, with no state enforcement of one or another as there used to be in medieval Europe. America has always been home to all kinds of imported, homegrown, or personal religions – each mutually crazy to one another. 

But the right to one’s own religion should never extend to control over others. Such rights stop at the boundary of your skin. “’Your religion” may say all short people should have their hearts ripped out. The state is not defiling your right to religious freedom by stopping you.

In the “normal curve” of people’s personalities there are always a certain number of blindly driven fanatics. The various laws try to keep them from hurting others. Even their own children, who also possess rights. 

Most people have a spiritual component, and need the right to express it as they see fit. But never the right to take away anyone else’s similar right because -well- those others are also absolutely certain they are cosmically right