Reform or Destroy?
When problems arise, we have two options. One is to fix them. The other is to blow them up.
If you have an internet connection — and a pulse — there’s a roughly 99.999% chance you came across that “hero cat” video last week. It’s a classic viral-bait video that, if you don’t have the time to watch it, can be easily summed up in five incomplete sentences. Cute kid plays on bike. Evil dog sneaks up on kid and bites his leg. Family cat head-butts dog and chases him away. Family tapes event on home surveillance system. Video of event gets an insane number of views on Youtube.
Fast forward two days, which in internet time is like two decades, and the family is overwhelmed with interview requests from reporters from Hong Kong to Ireland. Though they’re not exactly happy with their fifteen minutes of fame, it certainly doesn’t bother them that their cat has been granted superhero status. And the valiant fuzzball seemed to love the limelight. It was even tapped to throw the first pitch at a local minor league baseball game, which ended up being extremely awkward; with the cat’s header capabilities, it would probably have been better served at a soccer match.
But every hero needs a villain to boo and hiss at, or in this case, just hiss at. What about the vile, toddler assaulting dog in this story? As you might have expected, not only was the pernicious pooch passed over on the short list of furry friends to throw out honorary pitches, his owners didn’t want to touch him with a ten foot pole. They unceremoniously dumped him at a local pound. Then, according to a Los Angeles Times article, a local sheriff added that “The dog will be quarantined for 10 days before it’s put down, noting that ‘it’s not adoptable, for obvious reasons.’ In other words, the wayward canine just got himself a one way ticket to doggy death row.
What we’re witnessing here, friends, is not merely another bit of attention-grabbing internet distractage (which might later serve as fodder for me to write cantankerous anti-meme Medium articles). It’s a window into the very core of how we deal when faced with soul shredding moral dilemmas. Did the “hero cat” story have to end this way? Sure, what this dog did was nasty, but does he really deserve death? Might it have been possible to convert him from a kid killer to a friendly family pet instead of giving him the gas chamber?
When faced with problems — anything from a mangy neighbor’s dog taking a bite out of a toddler to entrenched structural poverty in a society — we have two options. One is to reform: to work to keep as much of the current structures in place, identifying negative elements and trying to convert them to positives. The other is to destroy: to identify negative elements and obliterate them and anything connected to them.
To get a better idea how these problem solving methods work in practice, let’s take a look at a couple of examples, starting with a nice juicy example of the “destruction” method. When we think of destruction, there are many things we think of that are much scarier than dogs on the prowl for innocent kids. One of those is the guillotine. With just a passing glance at a guillotine, it’s pretty clear that its purpose is to do some serious, gory damage. Its design is simple in a brutal sort of way: it’s essentially a neck vice nailed to a giant overhead meat cleaver, an instant recipe for the destruction of whoever ends up in one.
The guillotine would play a starring role in the overthrow of the French monarchy in the late 1700s. You may be familiar with how this played out, especially if you’ve just Netflixed Les Miserables, but if not, let me give you a quick recap — a recapitulation of decapitation, if you will.
Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, the French monarchy was a model for how to live a lavish lifestyle, and how not to do democracy. Kings like Louis XIV were so rich, the only way they could be more opulent would be to serve food on top of a pile of gold bars and keep miniature giraffes as pets, like this guy. Meanwhile, average French citizens lived in miserable poverty. The government’s idea of “democratic” participation was to occasionally meet with the two other “estates”: the church and the feudal lords, about what to do next. Usually they ended up deciding to build more mansions for themselves and buy more powdered wigs.
By 1789, the French people had had enough. They threw out the old monarchy, and when then-king Louis XVI tried to escape, they killed him and his wife Marie Antoinette, using the aforementioned guillotine. Clearly, the French populace had opted for the “destroy” option for problem solving in this case.
Destruction has its ups and downs. It’s often the simplest problem solving strategy, and it even feels good in a Neanderthal sort of way. Especially when the problem in question is not an object or concept but a human being, there’s a certain perverse mentality that gets a buzz off of labeling those problem people as “evildoers” and snuffing them out. Just think of how common the death penalty was before and during the French Revolution (and if you live in Texas, or Oklahoma, how common it still is). But the death penalty, and other destructive solutions, start to look a lot different when you’re on the receiving end; a painful lesson that the French were about to learn.
The revolution had hoped to produce a better, more democratic government based on the ideals of the enlightenment. Instead, it created something called the “Reign of Terror”, in which roughly 40,000 people got the guillotine (or as the French called it, “the people’s razor”, which I believe today is the name of a product by Gillette). The official reason for these executions was “opposing the revolution”. But ultimately, offenses so minor that they amounted to little more than he-said-she-said were rewarded with a shave and a head-cut with “the people’s razor”After the reign of terror ended, the French ended up being ruled by Napoleon, who crowned himself king — exactly what the French had been trying to avoid in the first place. France wouldn’t get a really stable democracy until after World War 2.
What about reform? For an example of that, I look to the good old US-of-A, with an example that’s probably going to turn you off if you’re a Ron Paul type, but that I stand by nonetheless. You probably sense where this is going: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
The US, after having much better luck with its revolution than France and weathering a bloody civil war, developed an economic system based on the idea that taking risks on investment would ultimately benefit all levels of society. By the 1920s, people were making increasingly risky investments, including bets on investments at places called “bucket shops”. This was all well and good, until a little thing called Black Friday happened in 1929. Millions lost their jobs, and the financial sector was shown to be utterly incapable of what it was supposedly there to do.
The US had a couple of options. One was to tear everything down, in a way similar to what had recently been done in Russia. And this proved surprisingly popular; the US Communist Party reached its peak in the 30s (later allowing windbag Senator Joe McCarthy to point to scads of “known communists” without technically lying). But the US government, under the helm of FDR, chose the path of reform, creating regulatory agencies that still allowed for investment but that was regulated by agencies such as the SEC and FDIC. Say what you will about regulation, how it “stifles creativity” and is the product of big government meanies, no one can argue that the post-regulation stock market didn’t produce crises anywhere near as bad as 1929 — at least not until after one of FDR’s key reforms, the Glass Steagall Act, was repealed in 1999.
After looking at the horrors of the “destruction” approach taken by the French, reforming would seem like a no brainer. But really, reform is never easy, especially not when people are pissed off. The main reason reform is so difficult is that it requires placing a certain degree of trust in people who have just screwed up, sometimes maliciously. While some in the 30s wanted to see the streets run red with the blood of bankers and financiers, reformers saw that these people had a constructive role to play, as long as it was secondary to the well being of average citizens.
These are both sweeping, society-level examples, but the choice between reform or destroy is one we face on a daily, individual basis. Let’s say your roommate smokes too much of a certain substance that is illegal unless you live in Colorado or Washington, then raids your frozen burrito supply. Do you immediately kick him out and look for a new roommate? Or do you tell him, “Hey, not cool bro,” and ask that he reimburse you? Both options involve risks. Asking him to repay you obviously carries the risk that he simply won’t do it, but by kicking him out, you have to go through the hassle of finding a new roommate. Personally, I would favor an approach of suggesting that the next time he wants to pull such a maneuver, he allow you to sample the supply, perhaps while watching The Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon playing in the background.
Let’s take a more serious example. An article at The American Prospect published earlier this year chronicles the struggle of a Baltimore man trying to find work after being released from prison in 2007. You might be thinking this is the story of some poor guy who wants to be productive but is held down by a screwed up society, but in reality this guy is kind of an asshole. He has trouble holding down jobs not because of discrimination but because “shit like that gets boring”.
This guy might seem like a poster child for people who want to get rid of welfare, public education, and other programs designed to help people like this. After all, those programs cost money, which is squandered on people like this, right? That’s exactly the difficulty of reform. It requires constantly reaching out to people who don’t want it.
Maybe a destructive approach would be better for people like this. Not anything that involves killing, mind you, but simply cutting off any efforts to people like this that obviously don’t deserve it (Ron Paul folks, I’m looking at you once again). Why reform instead of destroy? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. If this particular gentleman is left without any assistance, if we as a society look at attempts to help struggling people improve their lives and collectively proclaim that “shit like that gets boring”, many people won’t notice. But we move ever so slowly toward a society on the brink, like France in the 1780s or the US in the 1930s. Maybe we’re on the brink again already.
Whether we use reform or destruction to solve our problems says a lot about who we are as people. Destruction is tempting. It gives us the feeling of getting something done quickly. It makes us feel strong, and at the same time, just. It appeals to that part of our brains that, when we were five years old, prompted us to build buildings out of Legos just so that we could play Godzilla and blow them up.
There are even a few times when a destructive approach is desirable. The hero cat in the video who performed a “destructive” act of head butting the dog did the right thing: it neutralized violent behavior, so that cooler heads might prevail.
But ultimately, if destruction-based problem solving is used all the time, it will lead us down the path of the French Revolution, and we will all find ourselves on the receiving end of a guillotine — hopefully, a metaphorical one. Destruction must only be used if some kind of reform is absolutely impossible.
By now, it’s too late for the hero cat video’s demonized dog. As the Triunfalo family’s fierce feline was throwing out fastballs — or at least pawing at them as they were held up by the family — the assailant mutt was being prepped to be sent to the big doghouse in the sky (either that, or as many would probably believe, doggy hell).
Sure, it’s easy to paint this dog as a villain, talk about his “aggressive” past behavior, and send him off to be gassed. In addition, the more bloodthirsty among us can now take comfort in the fact that now there’s no way that dog will strike again. On the other hand, if we had tried to train it to behave itself, there’s a good possibility it still may have attacked someone else.
But where does that leave us? If we mess up, even in as grave a manner as this dog who came out of nowhere to gnaw the legs of an adorable little tyke, don’t we want there to be someone there who tries to set us straight, as difficult and painful a process as that might be, instead of putting our head on the chopping block?
It’s hard to look at vicious dogs like that (or people, for that matter) and think of them as something to be reformed, changed for the better, not punished or destroyed. But we have to. Unless we like the thought of living through another “Reign of Terror”.
Special thanks to the Human Parts collection, which was kind enough to include my previous article (hey — that’s twice I’ve linked to the same piece in one post!). I’m submitting this one to them as well. Check it out!
