EcoTrain QoTW: Who are more culpable for inequality and injustice, the people who make rules and laws or the people who follow and enforce them?
I believe this question is not about the unquestionably corrupted lawmakers and law enforcement agents that no one disagrees on their culpability. So, my answer is about those whose culpability is debatable.
If I were a law-enforcement agent I would have thought about the laws I serve. What are they really for, what is their actual purpose and what do they protect?
Are they protecting rights like privacy, safety, and ownership or protecting certain ideologies, dogmas, or philosophies perceived by lawmakers as the absolute truth that shall be both enforced upon people and protected from them.
Are they protecting freedom, and if so, do they equally protect freedom of everyone not only those who are in authority or who belong to certain race, religion or sex while compromising the freedom of others?
Are the concepts upon which these laws are based accepted by the whole social spectrum? Meaning, if a certain action is claimed illegal by the law, is it already considered wrong by different social groups?
If these laws were concerned with individual or social health, are they backed by science, (I mean real unbiased scientific research, not the one directed and manipulated by business or religious entities), or they are based on dogmatic scriptures written hundreds or thousands of years ago?
I would have asked also what and who identifies what is right and what is wrong, and if there were a human or a group of humans who are righteous enough to set what is wrong aside from what is right and decide on the proper punishment of those who commit wrongdoings. Letting alone demonizing certain wrongdoers and perceiving many of them deserve killing.
Is there even exist absolute righteousness?
What are the long-term consequences of applying such laws on the society? In other terms. How society would look like after many years of successful enforcement of these laws?
When we look upon the spectrum of law enforcement agents. We would find some of them in complete coherence with the laws and the concepts behind them. They are not only doing their jobs but also promoting and enforcing the same concepts adopted by lawmakers, encouraging and pushing their colleagues to do the same. In my opinion, regarding culpability, they belong to the same category with lawmakers.
Another category of law-enforcement agents includes those who are indifferent to how just laws are. Law enforcement for them is nothing but a career and means to earn their living.
Those who disagree with the laws yet keep enforcing them comprise the third category. Disobedience of orders for them has consequences that might be losing their jobs, facing jail, or getting themselves killed if they work with more fascistic regimes.
I believe that only direct physical threat frees the law-enforcement agent of culpability.
Lawmakers were mostly elected by people which puts them in a higher position than enforcement agents. They are the ones who were assigned the task of legislation which makes them the upper hand with respect to the law. This makes lawmakers more culpable than enforcement agents. This doesn’t free the agents from culpability, neither does it make lawmakers the most culpable.
Lawmakers write and approve laws that put their convictions into effect. Where did these convictions come from in the first place? is the question that would take us to the root cause of injustice and inequality.
Hitler had been a national figure in Germany and people had willfully elected him. He had been a manifestation of their convictions. Hitler along with his fellow Nazis believed they had to protect the purity of the Aryan race which was believed by its majority to be the purest of all human races. Putting the Aryan race on top of others and considering them a threat to its purity started almost one century before the Nazi party was even founded. Burning others in gas chambers had been looked upon as a noble act and a necessity for all humanity. I bet Nazis were expecting to be acknowledged for ridding the humanity of the alleged impurity of the most inferior races.
In religious wars, soldiers are accompanied by preachers whose task is to remind them of the sacredness of fighting enemies of God. Whenever the soldiers will start to faint, the preachers remind them of the bliss awaiting them in the afterlife.
Throughout human history, most crimes of injustice and inequality have been committed as noble acts, services to God, or national greater good.
The most culpable of all are those who set and preach the standards and rules upon which people judge each other, whose teachings create hatred, separation and prejudice.
Those who influence people culture; create mindsets of discrimination and hatred. Who program the minds on separation and promote the concepts that end up as laws. Who create versions of reality where some people are worthwhile while others are worthless. Who engineer the convictions that are being looked upon as the ultimate truth.
Those who convince their folks of their ethnic superiority to others, creating separation, distance, and boundaries. Promoting prejudice and hatred that the tiniest of conflicts become the spark that ignites the fire of war.
Those who promote exclusive religious righteousness and demonizing not only the other religions but also the different faiths within the same religion. All religious wars started in the name of God. Preachers from each party promote their righteousness, encourage people to kill the alleged enemies of God; those who want to spread disbelief and indulge in atrocities.
Those who set the standards by which they are the pure goodness, the enlightened and the divine while those who are different are the misguided who live in darkness.
Those who convince their audience of being conspired against and of being victims to those would never hesitate to hurt them; and who call for escalation whenever a minor misunderstanding occurs.
The evilest of all are those who keep such teachings alive by seeding them into the minds of children.