It will not surprise you, Gentle Reader, to learn that quite a lot of people think I’m “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Neither will it surprise you to hear that that doesn’t bother me. I’m a retired engineer. Most non-engineers consider my sort to be problematic company. Their reasons are fairly consistent.
Engineers understand the difference between intentions and results. It’s one of our defining characteristics.
To be a successful engineer, one must understand feedback: consequences of the operation of a mechanism that constrain its subsequent behavior. A well-designed mechanism will have such consequences designed into it, with an eye toward assuring the desired results. I’ve written about this before.
In that previous essay, I wrote:
Systems composed of people must incorporate the same sort of mechanism. Individuals who under-perform, mis-perform, or mal-perform must incur correction in some fashion. The usual problem is that they simply…don’t. When a system combines fallible people with under-designed components of other kinds, the ramifications can exceed even a good designer’s ability to incorporate the necessary feedback mechanisms.
If we look at private organizations such as the profit-seeking company, the most obvious feedback mechanism is “the bottom line.” If the company is making money, that will encourage its current behavior; the inverse is true as well. The ultimate feedback for a company that isn’t making money, but which persists in its losing behavior, is to go bankrupt and out of business. From the eagle’s-eye view, that’s the greater part of what’s required to get productive conduct out of a private firm.
But the feedback mechanism provided by “the bottom line” is absent from governments and their agencies. The constraints upon them are much weaker, mostly involving elections – and note that the overwhelming majority of government workers are not elected. Thus the agents of the State are far more likely to run wild than a private company attentive to the feedback of profit and loss.
The history of governments throughout the world testifies to their appalling lack of effective feedback. Ours are not exceptions. Yet a provision was built into American governments and governance to provide such feedback. It’s been there since the very start… but we’ve seldom invoked it.
The feedback mechanism the Founders intended to keep American governments on a proper course is the people in arms.
Very rarely, that mechanism has been activated for its intended purpose. The Battle of Athens, Tennessee is the most recent case I know of. (This short video nicely dramatizes the event.) Even nominally failed uprisings such as Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion served a purpose, for they reminded those in office that the citizenry retains the power to inflict harsh consequences on elected arrogance.
The people in arms have also arisen to enforce the law when “official” law enforcement has failed to do so. That’s usually called “vigilantism,” and is widely condemned by people who have an excessive regard for officialdom. I happen to disagree with them. I had my most popular fictional character demonstrate why:
It was an ordinary July evening in Onteora: hot, damp, the air too still, the black gnats too numerous. Most of the city’s residents had retreated behind closed doors and powered up their air conditioners, then turned their television sets up high to mask the compressor noise. On an unlit street in the abandoned part of the city, Joseph Follett and Lafayette Buskey were enjoying a special pleasure, raping a teenage girl who had wandered onto their turf.
They had cut away her jeans and panties, stuffed the scraps of the panties into her mouth, and bound them there with a double winding of packing tape. Buskey knelt on her arms and held a knife to her throat while Follett violated her at his leisure. They had changed places once already. Perhaps they would do so again before the fun was over. Neither had bothered to conceal or disguise his face.
They had been at it perhaps ten minutes when a quiet patter of footsteps from the far end of the street alerted the merrymakers that they were not alone. Both looked up to see the onrush of a short, slight figure, bearing down upon them.
Buskey had turned toward the sound but had not yet risen when Louis braked and planted. His right foot lashed out in a powerful placekicker’s arc and caught Buskey squarely beneath the jaw. The snap of Buskey’s spine resounded the length of the street. He flipped backwards and lay on the sidewalk, twitching spasmodically.
Follett pulled away from the girl and drew his own knife. Louis turned to face him.
“Keep back, motherfucker.”
Louis made no reply. He advanced.
Follett dropped into a knife-fighter’s crouch. He kept both hands well out in front of him, daring Louis to come within slashing distance. Louis halted and watched him, apparently relaxed.
“So this is your idea of a high old time, eh, asshole?” Louis’s voice was soft. The darkness concealed his face. “Wait till some defenseless girl wanders by, take her down, rape her a few times, then gut her like a deer? Not much to take home from it, though. Not like a Grand Avenue mugging or a good B and E.”
The young tough snarled. “What do you know about B and E?”
Louis’s eyebrows rose. “Isn’t that how you make your living?” He gestured at Follett’s crotch. “I mean, that thing dangling from your fly isn’t big enough for you to make it as a gigolo.”
Upon being reminded that his dick was still hanging out of his jeans, Follett looked down at his crotch.
Louis whirled and kicked again. His toe caught the elbow of Follett’s knife arm. The elbow cracked and bent the wrong way, and the knife flew from the hand that held it. The young thug spun and dropped to the pavement with a piercing shriek, clawing at the rough asphalt.
Louis stepped forward to stand over his victim. Stray rays from the headlights of a car on a connecting street revealed his expression. It was that perfection of rage that resembles perfect calm.
“Well, so much for the muggings and B and Es. Think you can make a living as a rapist? I mean, you’re going to need a new helper and all. Maybe two or three. Big nut to carry.”
He straddled Follett’s body and lowered himself to a squat, all but sitting on the thug’s belly.
“Who the fuck are you, man? You got no business here!” Follett’s voice was an agonized hiss.
Louis pursed his lips. “Business? No. I was just out for a walk, and it went on a little longer and farther than I intended. I don’t get into the city much. It’s not my favorite place. But here I am, and here you are, and thereby hangs a tale.”
He sighed. “I knew you were going to kill that girl when you were done with her. If I hadn’t been sure of that, maybe I would have handled it another way. Or maybe not. Not that it matters now. May God have mercy on your worthless soul.”
Follett’s pain had not displaced all his fear and hatred. He surged in a last attempt to throw his assailant off him as he scrabbled for his knife.
Louis’s right hand arrowed at Follett’s face. The heel of that hand crashed into the bridge of Follett’s nose, driving the bone into his forebrain with the impact of a well-thrown spear. The rapist’s body spasmed once and was still.
And in a subsequent tale:
“Louis could be in a great deal of trouble.”
“With you?”
“Ah, no. With the civil authorities.”
She sneered. “You mean the police? The hell with them. Where were they when the shit hit the fan?”
“Christine!”
“Knock it off, Father. Louis got used to it. You can, too.” She rose and paced the room for a few seconds. “You’re not going to tell them, are you?”
The baldness of the question stopped Schliemann’s mental processes dead. The idea hadn’t occurred to him until she asked about it.
I have a duty, don’t I?
To whom? The so-called justice authorities of this extremely corrupt county, who’ve done nothing for your parishioners but tax half of them out of their houses and harass the rest for parking on the streets around the church?
But murder!
Louis Redmond is not a murderer. If he killed two men, it was because it was right and necessary. You know it, Schliemann.
Still, he took the law into his own hands.
The law is always in someone’s hands. Why not Louis Redmond’s? Whose hands are more trustworthy than those?
There are procedures…
What procedure would have intervened to save their lives if Louis hadn’t acted as he did? What procedure would have intervened to save this lovely young woman from being forced back into the hell she risked her life to escape?
I can’t just keep silent over this!
Yes, you can. You must.
That is the proper application of negative feedback.
Intelligent men other than myself differ with me on this. I doubt that any of them have applied engineering principles to the matter. Here’s one:
And even then, some of these fake priests find themselves facing their deserved end regardless of laws that I am sure we all agree with, and are designed to not allow vigilantism. Luckily, the people that had initially been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of the pedophile priest, were later found to be completely innocent of the crime on appeal. [Emphasis added by FWP.]
Don’t be so sure, buddy. “When the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”) Vigilantism is the necessary and inevitable corrective for “law enforcement” gone wrong. If it doesn’t kick in under the appropriate conditions, the tyrants rule unopposed, ably assisted by the predators – and all too often, “tyrants” and “predators” are impossible to distinguish.
I could go on about this, but I’ve bored you enough for the nonce. Remember this, always: Institutions are intended to serve people, not the other way around. Governments and “law enforcement” are not exceptions. The feedback mechanism intended to ensure that condition is guaranteed to us by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The American Revolution demonstrated its importance. That some milquetoasts “deplore violence” or condemn private action in defense of civilized order as “vigilantism” does not set aside the laws of Nature.
It’s strikingly appropriate that this should be on my mind today, when extraordinary malfeasance among “public officials” has led to billions of dollars in property destruction and the deaths of dozens of Californians. If the remedy is not applied harshly and with vigor, Californians can only expect the situation to get worse.