David McElroy

Super Bowl Sunday has become something of a national holiday in the U.S. According to surveys, somewhere around 75 percent of Americans say they’ll watch at least part of the game.

Here’s the thing, though. The vast majority of those people don’t really care who wins the game, so why are they watching?

Some say it’s for the ads. Some have other excuses. For most, though, it’s simply because that’s what everyone else is doing. It’s become expected. Many people will turn the game on — for at least part of it — and many of those people will be watching at “Super Bowl parties.” Why? Because that’s what they’re expected to do.

I honestly don’t care whether you watch this game or not. I don’t care whether you want to see the ads or not. (The ads mostly seem terrible to me these days, but that’s another issue.) I’m concerned about something else.

I’m terrified that such a huge percentage of people are on social auto-pilot — simply doing something because their culture dictates that it has become “normal.”

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I was feeling pretty self-righteous. Someone had just informed me that he was breaking a contract he had signed. It made me angry, because it was going to embarrass me with other people involved in the deal.

Even worse — from my point of view — is that it was going to cost me thousands of dollars. I had worked to bring about this agreement and now one of the parties was walking away from what he had firmly agreed to do.

“Why would someone agree to do something and then suddenly announce he wasn’t going to keep his word?” I complained to myself.

For a few hours, I burned with self-righteous anger. I was a victim. This other person was terrible. I would never do something like this.

And then it hit me. I really would do something like this. In fact, I had already done something far worse about 15 years ago. I was forced to confront my ridiculous double-standards.

I was being a hypocrite. Again.

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I’m appalled at pictures of protesters lately holding up signs proclaiming that they’re part of a “Resistance” movement. These left-wing progressives are sincere in opposing Trump’s version of government oppression, but they want their own version of oppression as a replacement.

If you resist oppression by one jackbooted thug — but not oppression by another — you’re just a partisan political hack, not someone standing for genuine freedom. I can’t take your “resistance” seriously unless you oppose oppression from all sides and stand for the natural rights of every individual to make his or her own voluntary choices — whether you agree with that person or not.

For centuries, hardly anybody questioned the notion that everyone had a duty to obey whatever king or other thug had seized control of a territory. That was accepted as obvious, even though it seems ludicrous to us now.

Today, hardly anybody questions the idea that all individuals must rightly obey the will of a majority of people around them. If you ever look honestly at the moral reasoning behind this idea, you will find it’s no more reasonable or moral than forcing people to obey a king.

If you truly want to resist government — which is simply organized oppression — you need to do it all the time, not just when you’re angry about losing an election and having “the other side” ruling over you. If you really want to resist government coercion, those of us who support a voluntary system will welcome you.

But that’s not what you want. You like coercion — when your team is in charge and it’s other people being forced to obey.

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