A Case For Vigilantism
I am in no way encouraging vigilantism, nor encouraging the reader to go out there and break the law. However, it doesn’t mean I can’t make a point on why it is superior to modern day police, and there is a meta reason as to why we outsource a very integral part of a community to the state since the inception of the second industrial revolution.
How do you domesticate an animal? You extend its adolescence. A friend of mine brought this up to me a few weeks ago, and it has stuck with me as a filter for perceiving human beings through my daily life. In fact, what I realize is my own criticism of modern times is mostly rooted in the extension of childhood well into people’s twenties, if not their entire life. Adults have unlimited whim to live life through the lens of their ten year-old self who loved star wars, action figures, and Mountain Dew. Most boys, however, shouldn’t be in government facilities away from their parents, but we’ve belabored this point continuously. Childhood needn’t be such a process, but we make it one, and it is the perfect tool to dissolve responsibility from the general public and their obligation to family and community.
A culture in America who does not have such a compulsion for extending childhood, and aberrating goals, are the Mexicans, and also Tejanos for that matter. Many young men I grew up with who come from sizeable Latino families already had basic handyman skills in their teens, and if they didn’t, they had several ins at jobs where they could develop such skills. Not only this, but they are a machoistic culture that values toughness and grit. White America (the consumerist skinwalker of white American culture, that is) is in stark contrast to the idea of working, of being a tough but respectful man, of subsuming obligation into your lifestyle. I am not here to glorify Latinos, but they are the only native culture here that isn’t totally degenerated and can be used as a familiar example.
These people are not unfamiliar with taking responsibility into their own hands. If you’re white, your ancestors from a hundred years ago wouldn’t have, either. If someone touched your daughter or flirted with your wife, you’d hold up your honor (and what is right and just) and put the wrongdoer in their place. You wouldn’t kill them (though it would be understandable), but you’d make a point about how they should act around you and your community. Nowadays, we offset this responsibility to “the authorities.” The same authorities who will let your children get slaughtered by psychopaths, diddled by drag queens, and indebted by financial alchemists. These authorities, regardless of their all-around character, are there to uphold unjust laws of man, and not the Eternal Law of God. It is that simple, and until you recognize that, you will not understand why your cities are a mess, your children are dying their hair and removing part of their genitalia, and why cops seem to not give a shit about you.
Obligation is something we learn at a very young age, and if we don’t, we always feel as if we can procrastinate and push away our responsibilities. Wonder why Americans hop from job to job more than ever? Wonder why they have to obscure unemployment numbers to make it seem like our workforce is strong? Shit, wonder why your manufacturing jobs have been leaving the country for sixty years? Because Americans could absolve their personal responsibility to be their brother’s keeper. We had a complex system that worked, and apart of how it works was giving the rest of the world the burden while we got fat.
Nonetheless, right and wrong are quite clear in a community because the community recognizes all which damages and builds up itself. The people within it know that it is worth sacrificing what it must to keep the community together. And apart of the increasing complexity in the global economy and this world order est. ~1945 is that we absolve our obligations to family and community for the broader whole of humanity. Unfortunately, that has not turned out well. Consequentially, it has made us the most unhealthy, unprepared, lazy, and impatient we have ever been. It has led to the paradigm we are in now where we would rather call the cops than lay down the Law ourselves.
In a normal nation, a community is given some autonomy to elect sheriffs and community leaders whom they know personally. Generally, these figures do not have to be elected, and are just generally liked for their quality as managers and fighters. However, this is not the case anymore. On its face, it seems we still do this, but who here knows their local sheriff? Who goes to town halls and potlucks with police officers? These are jobs. These are easy paths to pensions. The quality of a community that once was assumed and acted on, is now a pensioned job of the state. This is the sickness of our modern world. All responsibility, all obligation, all true self-realization, all prostration at the Presence of God has been diminished in the name of the unholy state.
And that is the worst of it. Taking matters into your own hands is now seen as an affront to the state. Doing Good is now seen as rebellion. That means one must work in the shadows, right? Well no. Actually, big no:
You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:14-16
A time is coming for all Christians to act just, where for you it might be tomorrow or thirty years, and for another it could be even longer, but we are facing a prototype of chaos that sees itself as God. The followers of modernity, whether druggies on Skid Row, participants of a rave, suburbanites in their burb, or city slickers sipping mimosas, will fall under the spell quite easily if it means status be maintained. We operate in a world where to take the helm probably means doom for your soul, and heftier and heftier prices to pay to simply maintain the malaise of what we have now.
Acting in God’s Law will seem like it is impossible, accepting a life of poverty at times, and even being jailed for refusing to speak the esoteric language of the demon-possessed, but it is your place to be rehearsing your occupation in the Kingdom of Heaven.
I do not know what doing right looks like for you in your specific community, but I am sure it means relying less on a dying nation’s long arm of bureaucracy and man’s law. However, as Tainter pointed out, the regulations and laws of a collapsing society become less and less coherent, and less and less enforced, and if you don’t think that’s where we are at, then I beg you to reanalyze the liberal brigade on insisting the system can become even more complex (even more like a DMV).
It is scary to accept obligation, but it is what makes for the greatest societies - ones built by family, love, and faith. Refusing obligation means putting the responsibility in the hands of people who aren’t there to save you, but receive a paycheck and inform you, “That just isn’t my jurisdiction.”
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
Matthew 5:13