“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”
Documentary filmmaker and psychologist Albert Maysles said that. For all my searching, I couldn’t get a firm story on the context, but he lived through McCarthyism and traveled behind the Iron Curtain during the heyday of the Soviet Union, so he had no lack of potential inspiration.
Generally speaking, the political right wing is focused on maintaining the status quo. It’s big-picture oriented rather than detail-oriented. Don’t rock the boat; it’s still floating.
Generally speaking, the political left wing is focused on improving the status quo. It’s all about the details: which ones work and which ones don’t. You have to risk rocking the boat if you want to patch the holes in it.
As a rule, tyranny is right-wing. Most people are conservative by nature. That’s because most change is bad. There are a few dozen ways that things could get better, but there are millions and millions of ways that things could get worse. Because of that evolutionary truth, it’s easier to enforce stagnation on people than to enforce change. And when you’re focused entirely on the big picture, it’s easy to lose critical nuance.
But what happens when we’ve established a status quo of changing and improving faster than we can even keep track of? The conservative mindset starts trying to conserve progressivism for its own sake.
A new kind of tyranny has emerged, a left-wing tyranny. And it’s fascinating.
The purpose of a political left wing is to continually force nuance into the conversation. So how does nuance become tyrannical? With the deliberate removal of the big picture. It’s not something I would have been able to predict before I started to notice it.
Black Lives Matter is the ultimate example of this. Brittany King cited the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile as the inspiration for starting her chapter of Black Lives Matter in 2016. If you, like me, are immediately suspicious of claims that black men are being murdered by cops, the case of Philando Castile is very clarifying.
He was an upstanding citizen with a good career and a legal firearm that he was neither holding nor reaching for who was pulled over for a bad tail light and shot 7 times in front of his 4-year-old daughter even though he was complying with all the officer’s orders.
It was all captured on the police dashcam. Castile was not fighting. He was not arguing. He was doing everything that conservatives say you’re supposed to do when you’re pulled over, including calmly notifying the officer that a legal firearm was in the vehicle. And that made the officer so nervous that he pulled his own weapon and killed him. And that officer was found not guilty of all charges, even unsafe discharge of a firearm.
That is the nuance. This is the big picture:
According to the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 61.5 million police interactions two years later in 2018, and 10.3 million arrests. The Washington Post’s Fatal Force Database listed 990 police killings, 228 of whom were black, and 22 of those were unarmed.
Almost all police interactions are peaceful.
Almost all police uses of force are non-lethal.
The vast majority of police uses of lethal force are against armed, violent suspects.
The majority of police uses of lethal force against unarmed suspects are against white suspects.
The idea that racist cops murdering black people is a problem worthy of the average citizen’s attention is ridiculous.
The rule is that anytime there is an altercation between a police officer and a citizen, the police officer is the good guy and the citizen is the bad guy. Any time a black police officer is in an altercation with a white suspect, the black police officer is the good guy and the white suspect is the bad guy. Any time a white police officer is in an altercation with a black suspect, the white police officer is the good guy and the black suspect is the bad guy.
There are exceptions. With 350 million people and 61.5 million police interactions, there are a large number of exceptions. And it is the job of good journalists and left-leaning heroes to bring awareness to every single exception, to bring public attention to hold bad police officers (and good police officers who make catastrophic mistakes) accountable for their actions. But the rule is accurate in 99.99% of altercations. Individuals are capable of understanding nuance, but mobs are not. As a society, we must act as though 99.99% = 100% because the alternative, as it has played out over the last several years, is to act as though 0.01% = 100%.
If tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance, then what do we call the deliberate removal of reality?
