Everyone has been saying nothing matters anymore, that rules and guidelines are meaningless, that enforcement is arbitrary, that laws are for suckers, and even the president has said he wouldn’t comply with fair elections because (putting on my reading glasses, squinting) he didn’t want to.
So, inspired by all this, I decided that, from here on, I do what I want.
Got it, Chicago?
I’ve decided to live my best lawless life. I once paid attention to the social contract but then one day I decided, nah. I would simply act as I wished. I will eat your lunch out of the communal employee refrigerator — and I don’t mean that metaphorically. I will move through the world like a shark or an elected official, switching standards with each dorsal flip. Did you know if you type the words “When it is OK to …” into Google, the auto-complete function offers “When is it OK to break the law” alongside “When is it OK to pop a pimple” and “When is it OK to say I love you”? Sounds like a lot of you are planning to break the law. And who can blame you? If you live in Chicago, in the eyes of rest of the country, you already reside in a kind of forever state of anarchy and corruption.
Take advantage.
You with me? First, counterintuitive as it sounds, we plan. We make certain we know what we’re doing: We consider the angles, understand the philosophy and identify our allies.
There should be plenty.
Depending where you live, wearing a mask during a pandemic is a mandate, a strong suggestion or just a joke; if you refuse, the chance of you receiving any kind of fine or punishment is low. Returning from a state that’s on a do-not-travel list? Quarantine for 14 days. Or better yet, do whatever you feel like doing. It’s not like anyone is going to know. Restaurants are instructed to close for indoor dining — but some decide not to. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot may have restricted your Thanksgiving meal to 10 people, but there’s little chance of authorities showing up to kick out that 11th or 12th cousin.
Also, say you lost the presidency but really liked the job.
Just keep showing up at work! (Some lawmakers will even support you.)
When I was growing up, my grandfather had a word for this ability to sidestep around guidelines — furbizia. Back in the spring, when Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte asked Italians to take their lockdown seriously and “not try and be clever,” that was a wink-wink recognition of furbizia. Which is, loosely defined, a supposed instinctual trait, a kind of talent for finding a way past rules and bureaucracy. Furbizia says that restrictions are speed bumps, that there is always a way around a hurdle. It is a characteristic linked to Italy’s history of enduring one leadership change after another. One must look out for one’s self because authority is mutable but family is not.
We are in a golden age of furbizia.
Or as we say here, a workaround.
Because of the pandemic, DePaul University, among other universities across the country, has allowed students to switch from letter grades to a baggier pass/fail system. (An undergraduate council at Harvard University even proposed more flexible grading, claiming the alternative would be “morally irresponsible” during a pandemic.) You know how Illinois marijuana laws require consumption inside a home or regulated business? The now-routinely skunked streets and sidewalks say otherwise. Hate experts? Say they don’t know anything. Hate facts? Make your own.
In fact, depending where you stand politically, there’s a decent chance you think of half the country as essentially lawless — or at best, applying lawlessness to their self-interests. Conservatives complained about selective enforcement and criminal prosecution during the looting last summer; meanwhile, liberals complained when Republicans in Congress contradicted their own rule about not filling a Supreme Court vacancy during a presidential election year.
Rules, you see, are arbitrary.
We are living through “an epidemic of distrust,” said Vineet Arora, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and leading advocate for Illinois healthcare workers. “We can always make more PPE but we have failed to stockpile trust in this country. For any vaccine program to work, we will need people to trust medical professionals. Yet again, we have an epidemic of distrust, one that is being perpetrated by this nation’s leaders.”
There was once an ideal called the common good.
It was a mythic social pact, and like all ideals, intangible. Which means, good news, invisible. If you’d like to break the social pact, no one agrees now on what a common good looks like anyway.
The bad news is this inconvenient thing called morality.
Immanuel Kant “identified making an exception for one’s self — regarding one’s self as exempt from requirements that apply to others — as among our central moral vices,” said Kyla Ebels-Duggan, an associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. Of course, there are unjust, unreasonable laws. “But not all cases are hard cases, not all arguments are good arguments and not all disagreements deserve to be taken seriously. Some arguments depend on denying factual matters — like the risks posed by coronavirus or climate change — for which we have overwhelming evidence.”
Yeah, whatever.
Your freedoms don’t begin where my freedoms ends. My freedoms will walk into Subway and tell you I’m not wearing a mask because I have a “breathing condition.” Some may call me a hypocrite, but history is on my side: America talks a good game, though we all know, America is defined by liberty and freedom and the selective denial of that liberty and freedom to its own people. Worried you have too many friends coming to your house Thanksgiving? Don’t be. We’ve been ignoring the greater good since the first Thanksgiving. Workarounds are as fundamental as the greater good.
What, then, is the worth of rules we don’t enforce?
As Ebels-Duggan explained, we obey rules because, first of all, there are rules we know in our guts that we should follow. For instance, gratuitous cruelty: We know we should avoid violence toward others, even though some people do not avoid violence. “But in other cases, our reason to follow the rules depends on our being part of a community where everyone — or at least nearly everyone — can be counted on to follow (the rules). … If we see that others break the rules with impunity, and if we can get away with breaking them, this can undermine our reason to follow these rules.” Tax fraud, for example; if everyone else gets away with it always, are you still obligated to remain honest?
Luckily, as you embark on a lawless life, enforcement is a crap shoot.
You’ve probably heard someone say, “If they would just enforce the law …” then the universe would operate as intended. But there’s good reasons we don’t enforce every law always; there’s reasons I jaywalk routinely and you drive five miles per hour over a speed limit without fear. On the other hand, there’s reasons Chicagoans were upset when Mayor Lightfoot recently said the city would ticket those caught driving at least six miles per hour over the limit. Selective enforcement may be necessary for moving through life, yet the city also has a deficit it needs to close. So, hypocrisy is baked into our world. Who knew. After all, according to a study last year in The Criminologist, the journal of the American Society of Criminology, there is overlap between criminal acts and everyday behavior like littering and hoarding office supplies, yet people justify the mundane transgressions by seeing themselves “as ethical people, further normalizing such rule-breaking.”
As Arora said, “there is a running joke among Chicago health care workers that there are all these places we can’t travel to right now, but we should put ourselves on our do-not-travel list.”
She said it’s been “incredibly frustrating” that state and local governments don’t enforce their own pandemic-era playbooks, yet at the same time, she also recognizes there’s a limit to how much human behavior can be enforced. “I don’t even like calling these things rules, because, in a sense, to make it count, you have to appeal to the hearts and minds of people to just do the right thing.”
Also known as, the common good.
Jordan Klepper, the “Daily Show” correspondent and former Chicagoan, has been traveling to Trump rallies to interview the president’s supporters since the 2016 election. His segments, ubiquitous on social media this past year, are portraits of pretzeled logic. But Klepper said they are also reminders of how “it’s a very American thing to buy into your own truth then allow yourself a lot of leeway.” His subjects, confident and completely lacking self-awareness, suggest a country “blinded by our selfish wants.” During an interview from the 2020 campaign, a man tells Klepper he’s anti-abortion and wants to ensure a conservative Supreme Court; he believes in the sanctity of life.
He’s also not wearing a mask, and when Klepper points out that contradiction, the guy explains it’s “a personal choice,” that he’s not a dumb sheep — yet, if everyone wore a mask, he would too.
Which, in a twisted way, is his own take on the common good.
“I think there are things about this country that are still beautiful,” Klepper told me. “There are phrases in the preamble to the Constitution — ‘We the people,’ ‘a more perfect union’ — that speak of a collective good and I find moving. And then someone says something to me at one of these rallies and I think, yeah, no, no, wait a second, we really are that selfish — I mean, those nice words sound good on paper, but come turkey time, shouldn’t there be a few more ‘I’s’ in the Constitution?”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
