What's wrong with you anyway? Were you dropped on your head as a child, or what?
My reflexive mistrust of officialdom.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
“What's wrong with you anyway? Were you dropped on your head as a child, or what?”
Well, as it happens, the answer to this latter flippant cliche is an unfortunate and quite literal, 'Yes.'
Owing probably to a playground head injury on my sixth birthday, in what would today be described as a shockingly backward and criminally negligent school district in Wilson County, Tennessee (just outside Nashville),
...where high school boys competed in their shop classes in an annual contest to have their wooden paddles be accepted as the one the principal of an ancient twelve-grade schoolhouse would use next year for punishing offenders with various numbers of whacks to their behinds,
...where fights breaking out or beatings by bullies on the schoolbus during a fifteen-mile ride were a near-daily routine utterly ignored by their drivers,
...and where a little white boy falling on his head out of a swing on an asphalt surface in the autumn of 1966 was met mostly with relief by school officials, since this did not represent any potential civil-rights investigation by the commie-sympathizing liberals in Washington just two years after southern schools had been ordered to integrate racially by the federal government....
...I have lived with a peculiar set of anxieties about anything or anyone representing official powers, ever since I was indeed dropped on my head as a child.
It seems I have no capacity to trust or respect or obey anyone who presents themselves as acting in any kind of official role, regardless of how mundane or justifiable their demands upon me might seem to them, and quite irrespective of how everyday and ordinary these demands might be regarded as by others.
It has been this way for me for as long as I can remember.
When I hear jokes like "How do you know a politician is lying? Their lips are moving...", I don't find anything funny about them.
I see such logic as a vividly accurate and thoroughly instructive portrayal of human reality: those who present themselves as 'only doing my job' while carrying out actions on others which no one with any kind of personal conscience regarding neighborly conduct would find tolerable to have aimed at themselves at an interpersonal level, have always been in my eyes the most dangerous and unreliable people of all. It is all but impossible for me to relent on the question of what makes it anyone's business to demand that I identify myself, for any reason, or that I accept as obligatory any form of paperwork or any other disclosure of personal information about myself upon demand by officials.
Naturally, these emergent traits of my personality, which have only expanded and become even more defining of what I will or will not accept as conditions placed on my life, as I have grown to adulthood and spent decades now trying to coexist with that overrated and mostly mythical institution, have been the cause of much alienation from others throughout my life.
It is apparently no small thing to pursue a way of life or maintain a household with someone who experiences anxiety attacks (usually accompanied by rage episodes) every single time a form under official letterhead comes to stand between him and the pursuit of his goals.
To put it mildly....
As can well be imagined, 'tax season', which for others might be regarded as an odious but apparently unavoidable chore, for every one of the twenty-odd years I managed to at least try to jump through those particular hoops for no good reason I could ever see, was for me a nightmare of irrepressible outrage over what I could not but regard as the most invasive violation of my essential personhood imaginable. For me to not only eschew this idiotic surrender of my own dignity and autonomy annually, but also to become over time incapable of seeing anyone who complied with it as nothing more than 'collaborators', is apparently more than most folks can be bothered to learn to live with about me.
Jumping ahead to the more recent past, when the first self-contradicting, uncorroborated, opportunistic rumors about some mythical superbug known colloquially as 'covid' began to emerge some two years back, I saw immediately in them an entirely different sort of threat than most people seem to have recognized. I was never for a second fearful of becoming ill or dying from this thing; what I saw as a looming human catastrophe right away was how the rapidly-expanded powers of officialdom to demand both information and compliance were met with the same limp-wristed spirit of capitulation in ordinary people as the one I had long despised and feared regarding 'income tax.'
"If they'll lock themselves in and deny themselves their own liberty over manufactured fears of a goddamn chest cold, what else will they do just because someone on government payroll ordered them to?", was what went through my mind. And still does, of course.
Emergencies, or at least the popular perceptions of them propagated by officials, have long provided the only rationale needed for governments to elevate their own lust for improvised and unchecked powers into permanent ones, and have for just as long throughout history been met by the general public mostly with perhaps exasperated but essentially unresisting compliance.
(We invaded Ukraine because there's Nazis there, or something; just shut the fuck up and do what you're told, or else you will be dealt with accordingly...)
The most difficult thing for me about living with this reflexive mistrust of officialdom has always been that...
I am not wrong.
Yes, I have a peculiarly magnified set of responses to the ineptitude and bland indifference of those who hide behind this sorry rationale of 'just doing my job.'
Which is to say, it is simply a matter of routine for me to reply with a casual but utterly sincere 'fuck this shit' when any sort of institutional power is aimed at me. I do have my reasons, and in my most rational and logical state, I cannot find myself as being in the wrong about them.
I experienced what was almost certainly a traumatic brain injury as a very young person, and the officials on hand did nothing to assist me or even to evaluate what harm may have come to me, more concerned about what taking my injury seriously might come to cost them.
And in my eyes, the machinations I have encountered from anyone representing anyone but their own selves have been along those same lines of ass-covering and potentially calamitous neglect, ever since.
Throughout my life, dealing with anyone from a roadside police officer to a minor bureaucrat in a community college, or anyone else whose job is just to do their jobs and set aside all considerations of how people truly ought to interact with one another (as neighbors, pure and simple, when all else is dangerous, contemptuous, hypocritical artifice) has presented me with a challenge: to mind my manners as best I can, to try and forgive them for having made whatever Faustian bargain in their lives had brought them to hold powers over me they have no right before all creation to exercise, and to see past their scripted bullshit and find only a fellow human being standing there, childishly pretending to their own enhanced importance in the scheme of things....
I don't always succeed at it either.
Because I am not wrong: I know to the depths of my mortal being that power aimed at others is the very core of human evil, I find no tolerable exceptions worthy of anything from me other than strained etiquette while scanning for the exits back to my own freedom and away from such lost souls, and it has proven all but impossible for me to 'play the part' and allow myself to be treated as a thing rather than a person, by anyone, over anything.
It has been a painful and lifelong odyssey having to accept that what others might judge in me as a bad attitude is for me simply a matter of instinct.
It took me a long time to learn to live with myself without the guilt and dread I had been instructed must accompany having the wrong idea about things, and recognize instead that this thing is as much blessing as curse for me, once I had fully embraced it as simply who I am.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
This is 100% how I feel.