George Floyd, making justice with our own hands.

in politics in the social sciences and
in our personal lives the most dangerous abstractions are the ones that we do not ourselves or guard as abstract the most dangerous beliefs are the ones that were not aware that we ever chose selected that we ever began to carry with us they're the most difficult to put down teachers in Japan very often have the experience of asking children to draw a fish and Japanese schoolchildren will take out a red pencil crayon and draw a cube their idea of a fish is a little red cube served them at a restaurant served them in the form of sushi or maybe even prepared for them by their their parents this way all right what is the meaning of the word home what does it mean to be a home owner you don't think it's abstract but it really is and the type of abstraction in both of these cases is the abstraction of being a passive recipient of reality as prefabricated for you as prepared by the hands of others rather than thinking of reality as something you create with your own hands and something you have to define with your own mind when I lived in Laos and Cambodia I was surrounded by people who had no high school education very often no primary school education very often illiterate or barely literate but they knew what the word home meant in a way that you and I do not I've been around people who not just once in their lives but many times again and again have walked out into the forest and gathered bamboo with their hands and have sat on the ground with a machete and chopped that bamboo into thin strips and they've built a whole home they built a house out of bamboo things change 50 years ago wood was cheap wood was abundant so it was wood and bamboo believe it or not materials like wood and rattan were becoming more scarce and more expensive so you saw more and more use of concrete more more use of sheet metal as cheaper substitutes but still bamboo bamboo was most of what everything got cut made out of believe it or not the sense of home as something you make with your hands right very different from thinking of a house as a white cube that's been made for you that exists on the open market to be bought and sold being a home owner even being a home maker that's not so different from the Japanese school child who's asked to draw a picture of a fish and gives you a little pinkish red cube the whole discourse in the United States of America concerning justice concerning the role of the police serving what kind of reaction the left wing of the right wing or moderate people in the center should have after the brutal killing of George Floyd it is of this nature it's people struggling to make use of abstractions struggling to propel their beliefs and of course they fumble with them to no great effect as they themselves don't understand what it is they believe in they don't understand how far removed these abstractions are from the real things we can lay our hands on that we must lay our hands on in order to make a difference in this sort of case in this context what is justice what is it that's wrong with the police system you need to have a very hands-on empirical understanding of this and instead what you see both on the left and the right is a ratcheting upward of rhetoric to go from one abstraction to another more Hallowed more vaunted abstraction impart a more highly esteemed a more awesome of abstraction of trying to make this into more of a religious sounding discourse what we need is to move down the other way and really think about policing really think about real things and not to think about abstract principles at all when the Constitution of the United States of America was written the word police did not exist in the English language the concept of a permanent professional police force and the questions that arise from the ethical relationship between that police force and the population their policing did not exist in the English language and this is linked to the vision of a society in which every man carries a gun and which any two gentlemen have the right to resolve their disputes by fighting a duel to the death that was the society the framers of the Constitution Libman they had a very different notion of what it was to do justice that included the right of any gentleman to murder another gentleman over a point of Honor that was doing justice to them those are the men who wrote the Constitution that it says murder how could you possibly have a well-functioning working judicial system police system on the basis of that Constitution on the basis of that law there were many profound questions they did debate they did think about they thought a great deal about the relationship between the military and the house of Congress they made it completely illegal to have a permanent army such as you now have in the form of the National Guard by the way that's completely unconstitutional country Constitution from memory it was her in 1956 you passed the laws that actually created the National Guard in the form you have no it was post-world War two well they they debated and it philosophized a great deal about that and how Congress would control the budget for the military they didn't want to have a permanent standing army they were very concerned but very concerned about the potential for the military to take over the government for a military dictatorship replaced there were many things that are floated on there's a link in the description this video to an earlier video made that very very few people saw only about five hundred people seen it today which is called on the mediocrity of the American Constitution and encourage you to click on that Lincoln and hear what I had to say even though it was in a very different context that really is the same fundamental message that I that I have to deliver to you now the question of who or what is a police officer how should you organize society to deliver justice or data this permanent role police officer whose whose ideal was it that someone should do this job 12 months a year 365 days a year it's a brutalizing depressing job isn't it in the United States of America as being a police officer a prestigious job is it a high paying job the police officer who murdered George Floyd had something in common with him they both had served as a bouncer they both had served as a security guard at the same nightclub you know why because they were both poor you can see photographs of that nightclub not saying this to insult anybody I would not work as a security guard that I have unless I really needed them unless that was really poor all right the police officer killed George Floyd was poor George Floyd himself was poor they were both in the category of men who would work an occasional job as a bouncer as a security guard at a very shabby very humble little nightclub to earn extra money if being a police officer paid as well as being a university professor in the United States Murray do you think that cop would have in his spare time been a bouncer been a security guard at the same nightclub as the man he murdered on the sidewalk that day it tells me something tell you that's wrong with the whole organization that society the whole definition of that career of that job the relation between the public and the police I'm going to tell you about another job that's really denigrating that really emotionally exhausting taking care of children in a daycare center or in a school 12 months a year 365 days a year imagine if you had a society where police officers would work as police for three months and then work as schoolteachers for three months or in a daycare center if maybe they don't have the education or maybe they're gradually in their part-time getting all the education they need to be a schoolteacher maybe they have a transitional period and then three months as a cop and then three months taking children again imagine what a different society we live in if all of the children here you know in the winter my teacher who's teaching grade three goes back to being a cop oh yeah that's someone I can trust that someone I can talk to that someone I know that someone I can really do and what if police just had the opportunity to switch from one type of denigrating employment to another where they were fundamentally black playing a caring role right having a relationship with children and their parents and the community their beliefs that way wouldn't that be a very different world we live in if being a cop or a part-time job alternating back and forth with being a schoolteacher and it would require that those police be more highly educated that certainly that they'd be sober and upstanding all the time and would require that they'd be more highly paid and it would create a whole community of having greater respect for both police officers and schoolteachers and people who work in daycare centers right how about taking care of the elderly and retirement homes what's the main requirement to do that job that you're honest that you're sober that you're not stealing from these people that you're not stealing their medication it's the biggest problem right people who work in old folks homes and steal the painkillers you know this this kind of thing right that you're caring that you're patient that you're tolerant you can tolerate a lot of physical pain yourself you know being caring for the elderly no folks no more a lot of those people are slowly going crazy and they mistreat the nurses you take care of them what if you work for three months as a cop three months in office right boredom is part of what corrupts police officers arrogance is part of what corrupts police officers it's a corrupting role even without the issue of poverty grinding these people down I heard an interview with a cop once he was basically going on a book tour talking about all the things that are corrupt and awful and wrong with policing in America and he would be asked heard more than wanted to be with him he would be asking these interviews have you considered yourself becoming chief of police or trying to make these reforms you talked about in your book this way and his answer every time was I would not get paid enough he said that when he was a cop he couldn't afford to live in the same city that he policed he was paid so little that he had to drive as car I think two and a half hours each way every day or something his daughter a child lived out in the middle of the redneck woods in the middle of nowhere where he could afford a home and he led a very very difficult life because he fundamentally was not paid a living wage the American Constitution is bad and the American people take a salutary pride in imagining they have the greatest constitution in the world in the greatest country in the world they lull themselves into a strange sense of self-confidence a strange sense of fatuous arrogance that makes them blind it keeps them blind both to what their problems are and to what the solution to their problems are because they are burdened with a political system that was bad to begin with and today more than 200 years later frankly it's the laughingstock of the modern Western world but who among us has the self-confidence to laugh out loud who among us can see that the emperor has no clothes who among us can let go of these inculcated beliefs these beliefs we carry with us we don't even know were carrying it's the people who can set aside these abstract assumptions and think in a hands-on way about reality who can think about what is the problem with policing procedurally tangibly with a human face not in terms of the towering abstractions that the left-wing Hughes's nor the towering abstractions that the right-wing uses how would we actually organize the police and how would we have a better society you need to shift not just from abstract reasoning to empirical reasoning but you need to shift from the fundamentally childlike passivity of thinking of the world in terms of notions and norms that were prefabricated for you and handed to you the same way that you think of being a homeowner as really just being inheriting someone else's home even if you paid money for it even if you bought in the open mind we think of a home and a house as a white cube that exists on a map as a white square or the triangular roof on it that exists on a page right as opposed to thinking through what would it really mean for me with my own hands to make a home what does it mean when you buy a home you're just buying the work of someone else's hands who among us in that same sense as the hands-on experience with what it is to make a society with what it is to make justice with our own hands