When the state turns you into a criminal, friends become enemies

By David McElroy · May 10, 2012

Cleaning out the notebook….

In the last couple of days, it’s become widely know among certain libertarians and anarchists that someone they knew and trusted in Philadelphia was arrested for drug sales and coerced to become a government informant. A lot of people are very angry with her for betraying them in order to cut a better deal for herself. I’m surprised that anybody is surprised.

If you’re curious about the situation, you can read more here, but I’m not really interested in getting into the details and the blame. The bottom line is that police arrested a young woman and then released her after they blackmailed her into worked for them. (Oh, wait. It’s not supposed to be blackmail when the state does it, I guess.) She was set loose to inform on her friends about their drug purchases and to set up people selling drugs.

When police had enough evidence, they arrested a bunch of people and they eventually found out that the friend they had trusted was the one who set them up. They’re angry and hurt. She’s trying to justify what she did.

All I can say is that when someone holds a gun — metaphorical or otherwise — to your head, you’re probably going to do what the people with the gun ask you to do. This woman betrayed her friends to save her own skin, but I have trouble getting too upset about it and I certainly can’t act surprised about it. That’s what almost everyone does in the same situation. It’s easy from the safety of our homes to pontificate, but it’s a very different thing when you’re sitting in a jail cell facing the prospects of losing everything. Self-interest almost always kicks in. Right or not, that’s just reality.

The important lesson here is simple. If you decide you want to do something illegal, don’t let anybody know. The people you’re sure you can trust today can be the ones who lead to police knocking your door down tomorrow. I think people should be able to use and sell whatever drugs they want, but the reality is that if you do it in this country today, you have a very good chance of bad things happening to you — especially if you’re selling.

I’m fortunate that I have no interest in recreational drugs. (I don’t even use alcohol, which I consider the most dangerous of the recreational drugs — and it’s the legal one.) I think you’re smarter to stay away from them, but if you choose to, remember that the current legal and political culture means that every friend or associate who knows what you’re doing has the potential of destroying your life. Is it worth that risk? I don’t think so, but your answer might be different from mine.

If you hold anarchist or libertarian views, do you give up the moral right to use current law in disputes with others? On this week’s EconTalk podcast — which I’m going to write about soon if I find the time — I heard an interesting story about libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. He’s the author of the 1974 book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.”

He was renting an apartment in New York City from author Richard Bach (who wrote “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”). Bach had been raising the rent each year, but Nozick found out that the apartment was supposed to be covered by rent control — so Bach wasn’t legally entitled to raise the rent.

Nozick went to Bach and pointed this out, but Bach waved a copy of “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” at him, saying that his libertarian ideas had waived his right to claim anything under the rent-control law. Nozick disagreed and sued him. Bach lost and had to pay the money back.

So the question is this. We don’t believe that it’s moral or pragmatic for the state to control rent (or set other prices). Is it reasonable for someone to insist on what current law allows him? Or is he morally required to give up an advantage written into unjust law?

It’s a tough moral question, in my view. I can see a valid argument for both positions. On the one hand, you can say that if you’re required to live under rules that take away from you in some areas, you have to compensate by getting what you can where the law allows. On the other hand, you can simply say that you’re not going to hold anyone to anything he wouldn’t be held by in a completely free world. I think you have to decide this one on a case-by-case basis, but it’s messy. Do you have any thoughts about it?

If someone is routinely identified in newspaper stories as a “community activist,” odds are pretty high that the person is nothing but a troublemaker. There’s a guy like that who’s a hanger-on in Birmingham city politics. He’s the political equivalent of an ambulance chaser — always looking for a controversy that will allow him to get in front of a TV camera demanding answers. I just wonder how these gadflies manage to support themselves.

You know how the U.S. Postal Service keeps saying that it’s going to shut down some of the little-used rural post offices that are costing so much money? Because there’s always political pressure, the USPS caves in and leave them open — and that’s happened again. A cost-saving plan that was expected to shut down some tiny and costly offices will close exactly zero post offices, but reduce the hours that many of them are open. Isn’t it time to just sell off the behemoth and let private companies operate whatever it’s profitable to operate — and kill the rest?

I have one last story to tell about Thomas, who died Monday. He used to sleep on the bed with me at night sometimes, but then (years ago) he started staying downstairs with a couple of the other cats at night. Since he started going downhill in January, he started sleeping in the office with Lucy and the “office cats.” He hasn’t slept with me in the bedroom for years.

But for some reason, he wanted to stay on the bed Sunday night. He started out at the foot of the bed, but when I woke up not long after going to sleep, he was up next to me as close as he could get. This surprised me considering how weak and lifeless he had been, but I was glad to have him sleep next to me for the first time in a long time.

After he died Monday afternoon, it hit me that it’s amazing he slept right next to me on his last night alive. It’s almost as if he knew he was dying — and wanted to be close to me again. I’m probably superimposing human thought and emotion on him, but it somehow feels right. I like believing it, whether it was true or not.

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After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

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