Yeah, I suspect we are in the inchoate stages of building something like that. Some of the components seem to be:
Defining what emotional violence is, and getting everyone on the same page that it’s wrong. This involves lots of back-and-forth. “Well, I only said Y because you said X!” Through this process of synthesis and antithesis, a new code begins to take form.
As consensus develops around the definition of emotional violence, new consensus authorities spring up to reify it. Therapists and social workers, workshops and self-help, TED talks and politicians, teachers and parents.
With the code and low-level authorities in place, a pipeline for the worst offenders slowly gets established. But now, the final destination isn’t jail or death, but ostracism. If niceness-code-following offers an organizational advantage, they will eventually take over the government, and become increasingly able to use state power to do things like putting more money into therapy, education, and remaking the police force to incorporate social workers.
They get access to bigger guns: when Jeff Bezos cheats on his wife or says something offputting in a press conference, they can paint him as a villain, then leverage the state’s power to tax Amazon to punish him for his personal transgressions.
On the grassroots level, ordinary people, who are the beat cops in this system, get better and better trained to enforce the niceness-code. Here are some examples of strategies:
Overwhelming force (Twitter mobs)
Record-keeping (encouraging the discussion of people’s misdeeds, putting up websites or social media posts listing their past transgressions)
Hot-spot policing (identifying the worst-offending demographics for extra scrutiny)
Broken-windows tactics (heavily police low-key rudeness, so that it’ll feel beyond the pale to use more serious forms of emotional violence)
Surveillance (using the internet and social media to gather information on current and past transgressions)
Community policing (recruiting your friends and family to field low-level issues and gather information)
Entrapment (making an outrageous statement, just to tempt people into violating the niceness code)
It’s a messy process, just like figuring out how to do conventional policing effectively. A state can’t have a monopoly on violence unless it has the consent of a sufficient fraction of the governed. So even though there’s a substantial grassroots component to all this, I think it’s safe to see it as linked to establishing a state monopoly on emotional violence.
Of course, every community in the world and throughout history has had intense monitoring of emotional violence. What’s different about the 21st century?
Partly, the niceness-code is being redrawn. It’s confusing. People who aren’t partisans of one side or the other feel caught in the middle of two unpredictable sides that are battling for legitimacy. We also have new tools for defining and policing emotional violence. First and foremost is the internet and social media. It enables record-keeping, lowers the bar for overwhelming force tactics, and enables surveillance.
The end goal of the niceness-code is that individual people no longer need to defend themselves against daily threats of emotional violence. When I think about how much I like living in a state that has a monopoly on violence, I have a lot more sympathy for the niceness-code.
Of course, my own state’s way of monopolizing violence looks pretty terrible, from unjust wars, to mandatory minimum sentences, to an appalling lack of public defenders, to racist and unscientific policing, to an overweening surveillance state, to private prisons, to the insanity of what behaviors are criminalized. So we can’t expect that the process of establishing a state monopoly on emotional violence will be enjoyable, nor that it’ll be successful, nor that it will be a just code with just enforcement if it does succeed.
My conclusion, for now, is that there’s less of a dichotomy between state regulation and self-regulation than I formerly perceived there to be. Having state regulation requires underpinning systems of self-regulation and a widespread sense of legitimacy, or else it won’t work. Likewise, self-regulation and grassroots regulation always have the potential to manifest in forms of law that are ultimately backed by state violence.
Yeah, I suspect we are in the inchoate stages of building something like that. Some of the components seem to be:
Defining what emotional violence is, and getting everyone on the same page that it’s wrong. This involves lots of back-and-forth. “Well, I only said Y because you said X!” Through this process of synthesis and antithesis, a new code begins to take form.
As consensus develops around the definition of emotional violence, new consensus authorities spring up to reify it. Therapists and social workers, workshops and self-help, TED talks and politicians, teachers and parents.
With the code and low-level authorities in place, a pipeline for the worst offenders slowly gets established. But now, the final destination isn’t jail or death, but ostracism. If niceness-code-following offers an organizational advantage, they will eventually take over the government, and become increasingly able to use state power to do things like putting more money into therapy, education, and remaking the police force to incorporate social workers.
They get access to bigger guns: when Jeff Bezos cheats on his wife or says something offputting in a press conference, they can paint him as a villain, then leverage the state’s power to tax Amazon to punish him for his personal transgressions.
On the grassroots level, ordinary people, who are the beat cops in this system, get better and better trained to enforce the niceness-code. Here are some examples of strategies:
Overwhelming force (Twitter mobs)
Record-keeping (encouraging the discussion of people’s misdeeds, putting up websites or social media posts listing their past transgressions)
Hot-spot policing (identifying the worst-offending demographics for extra scrutiny)
Broken-windows tactics (heavily police low-key rudeness, so that it’ll feel beyond the pale to use more serious forms of emotional violence)
Surveillance (using the internet and social media to gather information on current and past transgressions)
Community policing (recruiting your friends and family to field low-level issues and gather information)
Entrapment (making an outrageous statement, just to tempt people into violating the niceness code)
It’s a messy process, just like figuring out how to do conventional policing effectively. A state can’t have a monopoly on violence unless it has the consent of a sufficient fraction of the governed. So even though there’s a substantial grassroots component to all this, I think it’s safe to see it as linked to establishing a state monopoly on emotional violence.
Of course, every community in the world and throughout history has had intense monitoring of emotional violence. What’s different about the 21st century?
Partly, the niceness-code is being redrawn. It’s confusing. People who aren’t partisans of one side or the other feel caught in the middle of two unpredictable sides that are battling for legitimacy. We also have new tools for defining and policing emotional violence. First and foremost is the internet and social media. It enables record-keeping, lowers the bar for overwhelming force tactics, and enables surveillance.
The end goal of the niceness-code is that individual people no longer need to defend themselves against daily threats of emotional violence. When I think about how much I like living in a state that has a monopoly on violence, I have a lot more sympathy for the niceness-code.
Of course, my own state’s way of monopolizing violence looks pretty terrible, from unjust wars, to mandatory minimum sentences, to an appalling lack of public defenders, to racist and unscientific policing, to an overweening surveillance state, to private prisons, to the insanity of what behaviors are criminalized. So we can’t expect that the process of establishing a state monopoly on emotional violence will be enjoyable, nor that it’ll be successful, nor that it will be a just code with just enforcement if it does succeed.
My conclusion, for now, is that there’s less of a dichotomy between state regulation and self-regulation than I formerly perceived there to be. Having state regulation requires underpinning systems of self-regulation and a widespread sense of legitimacy, or else it won’t work. Likewise, self-regulation and grassroots regulation always have the potential to manifest in forms of law that are ultimately backed by state violence.