by Stephen Soukup
The bureaucratic protocols dictating police behavior are merely the amoral tools used to enforce the will and the values of government and the ruling class as a whole.
Seventeen years ago, ten-year-old Jordan Lyon drowned in a pond in Wigan, Lancashire (England) while trying to save his eight-year-old sister. According to witness testimony, two police community support officers stood by and watched, as they did not have orders to enter the water and provide assistance.
Nine years ago, 17-year-old Jack Susianta drowned in a 6-foot-deep canal in Clapton, East London. Again, police officers stood by, unable or unwilling to help. Additionally, they stopped onlookers from helping, for fear that they too might find themselves in danger.
Not quite three years ago, Sir David Amess, a conservative member of Parliament for nearly 40 years, was brutally murdered by a homegrown radical Islamist in Essex County, England. Within minutes, Father Jeffrey Woolnough, a Roman Catholic priest, arrived on the scene. Sir David was a well-known devout Catholic, and Fr. Woolnough pleaded to give him last rights. He was refused by the police officers on the scene. The police later issued a statement in which they insisted that it “is of the ‘utmost importance’ that officers preserve the integrity of a crime scene and allow emergency services to tend to people in need.” Given that Sir David was the only person “in need” and that he might have “needed” last rites and perhaps an Apostolic Blessing/Pardon, one wonders whom or what, exactly, the police were trying to protect.
As fate would have it, all three of these incidents had something in common. In each case, the police were motivated (or not motivated, as the case may be) by the same impetuses. Regardless of their superficial motivations (cowardice, overcautiousness, and callous disregard for faith) in all three episodes, police actions were ultimately driven by hyper-bureaucratization and, as such, by the application of values that contravene both common sense and conventional common beliefs.
Today, British police spend their time hunting down grannies who share “unacceptable” memes and hardened criminals who have the unmitigated gall to retweet potential “misinformation” in broad daylight. Meanwhile, sex grooming gangs operate more or less openly throughout the country and potential terrorists brazenly threaten native Britons and their institutions, unmolested by law enforcement. This too is the result of the hype-bureaucratization of government and its consequent descent into value-driven despotic ridiculousness. As the streets around them collapse into chaos, government agencies are obsessed not with fixing problems or redressing grievances, but with following the rules – rules that are intended to convey specific moral messages.
Among the most biting critiques of bureaucracy/management is that offered by the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, mostly in his 1984 magnum opus After Virtue. Broadly, MacIntyre’s critique is that bureaucracy/management is emotive in practice. Because management is concerned exclusively with process, with means, and not with ends, it is, almost by definition, an amoral scheme. It has no inherent moral foundation. Bureaucracy is purportedly rational, but rationality only applies to means. Therefore, the ends of government management become the purview of the manager/administrator who substitutes his or her personal preferences for genuine moral positions:
Questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent, conflict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. Instead, one must simply choose – between parties, classes, nations, causes, ideals …
[N]o type of authority can appeal to rational criteria to vindicate itself except that type of bureaucratic authority which appeals precisely to its own effectiveness. And what this appeal reveals is that bureaucratic authority is nothing other than successful power.
MacIntyre further argues that this bureaucratic effectiveness—or managerial competence—is itself a myth, which is to say that this successful application of power is just one more example of society’s attempts to manipulate and dominate people, not to deliver goods or services more effectively.
In short, then, the bureaucratic protocols dictating police behavior—demonstrated in infuriating detail these past few weeks throughout Britain and in the incidents detailed above—are merely the amoral tools used to enforce the will and the values of government and the ruling class as a whole. The British ruling class (like all Western ruling classes) values overcaution and “safteyism.” It supports “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” It disdains traditional religious practice—or, at least, traditional Judeo-Christian religious practice. It detests Western Civilization, “bourgeois” culture, and white privilege. The British ruling class loathes itself and everything associated with it. To be blunt, it hates “Britishness.”
As a result, its bureaucratic agencies—including law enforcement—also favor safteyism and diversity while detesting traditional Britishness.
This is not to say that police behavior has always been animated by those values or even that it must be animated by them going forward. It is merely to say that these are the values that dominate that behavior right now and will be, as long as they are the values of the ruling class.
In the end, each of the incidents noted above and each of the discrete arrests made and sentences issued for spreading misinformation is trivial—to all except those involved—and so it will be forgotten immediately. That’s unfortunate. Collectively, they demonstrate that there is a problem in contemporary Western societies. Those who claim managerial competence are automatically given deference to exercise power to promote their personal preferences as moral dogma. And as we have seen throughout the West over the last several years on a variety of matters—from the economy to COVID to “gender” issues in education and “sustainability” in investing—this involves both the application of often peculiar moral imperatives as well as the failure of those imperatives to deliver the moral stability they promise.
Over the long run, this will produce both moral and practical disaster.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/17/whats-wrong-with-britains-police/
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