Prohibition

I've written before about discipline, and how it's a two part process of making rules for yourself, and sticking to those rules, and how people tend to focus too much on the latter, while not being thoughtful enough about the former. Discipline is a plan, and good planning accounts for contingencies. Not being able to muster a ton of willpower is basically the most common contingency there is. Any plan that depends on it is doomed to failure.

If you make rules that you can't stick to, then you've already failed, before you even start the attempt to stick to them.

People who are disciplined have cultivated it by starting small, until following the rules is just habit, and then gradually altering the rules to get them closer to their ideals. They're not constantly fighting themselves to do the right thing, at least not hard. Most of it is automatic. Successful discipline is about rules you can live with.

Legislation is like discipline for societies. Laws should represent our ideals, but if they reach too far as aspirations, rather than rules we can realistically hope to follow, then we've failed to legislate.

The issue is that once you've put someone on the wrong side of the law, penalties and incentives can start to blur. Crystal told me a story about her dad riding around as a kid with a friend of his, and it was at a time when penalties for possession of a certain amount of weed were either greater than or comparable to penalties for killing cops. Naturally, people who were motivated to have a lot of weed just started killing cops, because at least then they had a chance of getting away. So Crystal's dad was in the car with his friend, and they got pulled over, and the cop smelled the weed and told them not to do anything bad, and then ran away.

Who does law like that serve? How many people were getting hurt by weed, versus how many people were getting hurt by the fact that it was illegal? i.e. If you let people use it, grow it, sell it, with some minimal consumer protection oversight controls, how much violence could you avoid, when people don't have to hide what they were going to do anyway, and move money around illegally?

I don't use drugs. I've never even tried weed. But I've been around people who enjoy it often, and have never been bothered by it besides not being particularly fond of the smell. I find the people who use it to be infinitely more tolerable than people who are drunk. I never had my roommate get really high and then piss all over my desk in college because he was too drunk to operate the door lock, Brian Wood.

You can apply what I feel about that to illegal immigration, and a lot of other stuff. If we just accept that people want to come here, and just made it easy to do the paperwork, so they can live normal lives and not have to worry about being ripped out of their homes, away from their families, unless they do something really bad, how much more productive could these people be without all of that stress? How much could we save on trying to enforce laws that are divorced from the reality of what we can do?

Every incarcerated person is a person whose behavior you failed to change because you tried to transform instead of nudge. Incarceration rate is a metric of overaspiration. They're the pounds we failed to lose or gained after we fell off of our diet that was only going to be broccoli and kale, after 3 days.

We have 4.4% of the world's population, but 22% of the world's incarcerated. That's not even a serious attempt at discipline.

Pro life? Want to stop abortion? Consider supporting organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide family planning services and contraception, which is actually proven to reduce the need for abortions, rather than abstinence only sex ed, which is broccoli and kale diet bullshit.

Daily dependable application of effort is how you make real progress.