UNDERSTANDING WHY COPS WILL NEVER STOP LYING (For Hannah Cox and Libertarians)

A month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 15,000 Russians soldiers had been killed, more in less time than any war in living memory. Russia had lost a substantial amount of military hardware, the lives of consumers had been damaged by economic sanctions, and they had achieved none of their military objectives or any permanent gains of any kind. Before the war 71% of Russians approved of President Putin, according to polls. After a month of lives spent with no gains, that number went up to 83%.

A recent Ann Coulter column has the headline “Dem Nightmare: What If the War Ends Before November?” It is generally accepted in American politics, that a President’s approval rating will go up during a war. All a President has to do is point to some country on the map with “evildoers”, bomb them, and his approval rating will go up. But this is not restricted to military conflict. People love to watch football and soccer, to attach themselves to teams as fans, and even to stage gang fights outside the stadium, with zero tangible benefit except the conflict itself.

One of the defining features of football, is how the fans of every team are filled with optimism during the offseason. The fans click on articles about how great a new player is, or how the players are buying into the coach’s new scheme that is sure to win. It is said Russia has fooled its citizens with censorship and propaganda. But every season, the fans of every football team overestimate their chances of winning the championship. There is no need for propaganda to agitate fans into a desire for war between teams, or for censorship to give them a false optimism for victory. It is the natural state of man.

Why are men programmed to enjoy mindless conflict, and to overestimate their prospects for success? Man is designed for the original state in which he lived, when like an animal, his survival was dependent on land resources. They say without predators, the population of deer will expand until they begin to starve. With no other predators, this same role is fulfilled for men, by other men. Men did not need to win a war, they only needed to kill a member of a competing tribe to increase their own survival chances. Death itself was victory. You can’t lose, when you are going to starve either way.

Every member of a tribe was capable of producing more children than the land could feed. War therefore had no net cost since without war population would be limited in the same way by starvation. The only difference would be in the percentage from each tribe. If there were no predators and deer were going to starve, those same deer would be better off dying to eliminate a competing gene pool. Since the excess population will die anyway, then even some small injury to a competing tribe or gene pool has a benefit. You might as well try to kill a competitor, and open up a spot for a member of your own tribe, if you are going to die anyway from starvation.

Culling is no longer necessary or inevitable, based on new economics which I won’t cover here (innovation, trade, productivity, etc.). But the innate desire for culling is still there, and is as strong as the demand for any other product, food, leisure, housing, or entertainment. James Madison imagined that diversity of factions would dilute tyranny of the majority. But there seems to be one thing they all agree on. They are all strangers to each other, and they all know what to do with strangers.

Police and newspapers will lie and say a stranger appeared to be a drug user. People who object to the illegal treatment of the prisoner, or witnesses who don’t lie will then be scolded “Why do you care what happens to a drug person? She deserves what she gets.” The lies will be used to discourage in advance as immoral, anyone who objects to laws being bent and broken, and rights being suspended, to cull a stranger.

Not just football and politics, but the criminal justice system fulfills this culling impulse for people in the United States. Ordinary middle class suburbanites literally have an innate desire for cops to go out and kill and torture their neighbors. People perceive the death and torture of strangers as a benefit, the same as the loss of a competing football team. The power of this impulse is so strong like an addiction, it will overwhelm any competing values such as for truth or law or even political success. People will pursue it to the point of economic destruction and war.

So in Florida we have a system where almost every arrest affidavit contains false statements. And those false statements are further embellished by newspapers, into propaganda to dehumanize and turn the community against the suspect, as a primitive mob is incited for a human sacrifice. The law is in fact designed to immunize this activity as the most legally bulletproof of all government functions. Anyone who says to cops or their supporters “Do you care about the truth, do you like cops lying to you, is perjury a crime? Do you even care for a moment about the ideal of a a system of laws?” is missing the plot. The preference of men is to substitute popular feelings for laws, and then hack the law with fake justifications and evade the courts with lies to achieve the desired outcome.

So cops will never stop lying, because it is demanded by the majority of citizens to make constant sacrifices of their neighbors. And nor will anti-cop protesters burning down the businesses of cop supporters discourage it. The lying cop people will be really excited by such conflict, and will want cops to lie even more. The equilibrium in human history is something more tribal and with even less rule of law than the United States currently has, something more like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Americans are willing and eager to abandon our system of Constitutional law and rights, and are well on the way.