A major weakness in human nature is seeking entertainment.
The powerful link between intellect and emotions is more than merely a matter of the body’s physical needs and appetites. The mind itself has an appetite, which the New Testament refers to as “Lust of the Eyes.” An obvious link would be how porn works, because it is the mind seeking sexual stimulation vicariously. I don’t think it’s possible to write a computer algorithm that emulates the vicarious element in most of our entertainment seeking.
This is why any noise about the presumed virtuous nature of government servants is not simply a lie, but an egregious intentional deception. Sure, it’s possible in the standard schizophrenia that afflicts all of us that the mouthpiece making noise about the virtues of selfless service may have convinced some element of their conscious mental functions that they really believe that crap. But give anyone a moment to reflect with more honesty and they’ll admit that out of a herd of bureaucrats, the best you can hope for is a small percentage of people who tend to act with decent motives. The rest are a broad mixture of petty self-interest and deal-making with the system. Too many are nearly sociopaths or even psychopaths.
So all this happy talk about the likes of NSA being “mostly harmless” is a blatant lie. The vast majority of NSA analysts suffer the same entertainment seeking as the rest of us. Restrict what’s possible and they’ll seek entertainment in what’s left, if they can persuade themselves to obey any of the rules. This is also part of why overworked cops beat up folks they don’t happen to like. It’s not that government employees are just like the rest of us; they most certainly are not. A cross-section of any bureaucratic office will show you people who might be fairly intelligent, but have allowed themselves to swallow a significant amount of moral conditioning. Even if they tend to keep it compartmentalized — like a cop who doesn’t wear his badge on his underwear — it’s simply not possible to disconnect that very human wiring. It’s not a question of whether they are scumbags inherently, but that they are scumbags-in-effect.
Don’t even pretend that reform will really change much. Most reformers themselves suffer too much from venal entertainment-seeking reflexes. You cannot create a system that is inherently, or even tolerably, honest. Brutality in any form is just another type of entertainment seeking. This is what chains us to moral failure. Computer algorithms have no entertainment needs; it’s just crunching numbers. People cannot do that, at least not so consistently. We care, and most of our caring is deeply infected with moral perversion of one kind or another, and usually multiple kinds. So even if I present God’s perfect prophetic evaluations of every social institution, I should never expect it to change. Part of the prophetic message assumes the world cannot possibly do what’s right. Look in the mirror and lose that pretense.
One of the safest forms of entertainment is learning to laugh at yourself, but even more, to be amused by the vast human inability to conform to even that righteousness we embrace.
