Mr. Smith, Michael Gallagher and the Power of Consequence

Where do we go for Justice when "there ain't no one to see"?

One of the immutable laws of society is that people respond to incentives. They also respond to disincentives… which are also known as consequences.

As our society has evolved over the last three hundred years, it has trended in the direction of shielding people more-and-more from the consequences of their actions. And over the decades, the movies we’ve watched have chronicled that evolution.

On the high end of the consequence continuum is the Hollywood Western, where consequences were harsh and immediate. In the Old West, the incentive structure worked a little like this… mind your own business, keep your hands to yourself, defend yourself with violence only when necessary, and you’ll be fine.

In THE SHOOTIST, John Wayne’s final western, he described the ethos of the West this way:

The problem with this philosphy is that while it makes for a clear moral universe in which Western characters can live out their dramas for us to enjoy in darkened theaters, out in the real world it produces a society where might makes right… where the strongest, fastest gunfighters can do and say what they want, while everyone else is forced to live at the will of those with the fastest guns and the itchiest trigger fingers. In the Old West, woe be to those who ran up against men who were not only a fast gun, but completely amoral.

Conservatives like to say that “an armed society is a polite society”, and while this is true, it only goes so far. Sometimes what looks like “politeness” is really just fear, and no one wants to live in a society where the wrong look given to the wrong man at the wrong place and time can get you killed. That’s a world where the consequences of bad behavior, or even misunderstood behavior, are too severe and too immediate and too constant.

On the other end of the spectrum exists our modern world where regular folks, who would never dream of doing so in a face-to-face circumstance, will run to social media to tell people they’ve never met that they are a “f*cking idiot” or even threaten to kill them with no fear of any consequence. In the Old West such behavior would get you killed… these days, it probably won’t even get you a temporary suspension on Twitter.

Slowly but surely, this online behavior is retraining our brains, and Americans are beginning to act in real life the same way they do on Social Media. They’re behaving this way because they’ve learned from their experience on the internet that there are zero personal consequences for anti-social behavior. But even more than that, they’ve learned that in the strange ecosystem that is Social Media, this kind of highly anti-social behavior can win you followers… which you can then monetize.

In other words, the same behavior that could get you killed in the Old West, now has the potential to make you rich.

That feels like an incentive structure in need of radical re-calibration.

There has to be a middle ground between a world where the fastest gun gets to take whatever he wants, and a world where Americans verbally (and sometimes physically) assault their fellow Americans in public, post the video to Faceboook or Twitter, and then monetize the clicks without fear of repercussions.

The middle ground between those two worlds might look something like MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, a film that exists in America as it was in 1939… roughly 50 years from the end of the “Wild West”, and 70 years before the appearance of “antisocial media.”

Almost everyone knows the story of Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Smith”, a naive but well-meaning regular American who gets himself elected to the Senate in hopes of changing things in America for the better, only to find himself ground down by the institutionalized corruption of a City and a Government that have no interest in allowing things to change for the better, because the status quo is making them rich and powerful.

But few remember what Mr. Smith does in the film when the Press decides to lie, and slime him as a rube and an incompetent who has no business being in D.C. in the first place…

That’s right… he tracks every one of them down and punches them right in the face.

Imagine what would have happened in a world where, instead of suing CNN and the Washington Post, Covington Kid Nick Sandmann had tracked down the reporters who unfairly maligned him as a racist and punched them in the nose? Reporters might decide to be more careful about the accusations they throw around in a world like that, don’t you think?

But that’s not the world we live in here in 2022. In our world, if you punch someone in the face because they libelled you online, you’re the one who’s going to wind up in prison. Similarly, high profile reporters are shielded from the consequences of their behavior by corporate legal departments, who will defend them in court, and pay the fine if they lose the case. In the real world, these reporters face almost no personal consequences for their behavior, no matter how reckless, and so they have no incentive to be better.

Maybe we don’t want to live in a world where people track reporters down and punch their lights out… after all, not everyone is Mr. Smith… sadly, some people are more like James Hodgkinson, the Bernie Bro who shot up the Republican Softball team after inhaling a steady diet of the Left Wing Media’s anti-GOP coverage for years… but it’s hard to argue that people like Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, Brian Stelter and yes, even Sean Hannity wouldn’t be on their best behavior in an America that operated more like the one in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON.

And on some level… our Media Elites know it, too. Decades before the Media decided to jump all the way in on the game of personal destruction for both fun and profit, you could see Hollywood beginnning to raise the alarm on what we all should have recognized as the beginning of a disturbing trend towards increasingly reckless and dangerous behavior… behavior both incentivized and encouraged by our current low consequence environment.

In Sydney Pollack’s 1981 film ABSENCE OF MALICE, a whole host of Elite Institutions, from Government to the News Media to Trade Unions, Corporate Lawyers and the local P.D. conspire to destroy the life of “Michael Gallagher” (Paul Newman) just because they can. In the end, Newman surives the ordeal, but not before his close friend, who is emotionally fragile in the wake of a traumatic episode, commits suicide.

In the climactic final scene, Newman asks a question that has since been asked by hundreds if not thousands of real Americans including Justine Sacco, The Obama Rodeo Clown, The CNN Trump wrestling meme guy, Nick Sandmann, Kyle Rittenhouse, Douglass Mackey, Michael Flynn and countless others, all of whom were powerless in the face of Elite Insitutitions intent on destroying them, simply because they could.

“Everybody in this room is smart.” he says… “Everybody’s just doing their job. And Teresa Perone’s dead… who do I see about that?”

The terrifying reality is revealed by Wilford Brimleys’ answer. “Ain’t nobody to see… I wish there was.”

Exactly right… there’s no one to see. The more corrupt and or incompetent our institutions become, the more they insulate themselves from the consequences of their behavior. My kids are forced to mask up in their Los Angeles Catholic School every day and we just have to take it. There is no one to appeal to. The Headmaster will tell me it’s the Diocese forcing them to mask up… the Diocese will say it’s the County… the County will tell me it’s the Governor… and His Hairness the Governor (assuming he believes he owes me any kind of explanation at all) will tell me it’s the CDC or Dr. Fauci. So if my kids develop health or development issues by virtue of having their faces covered by wet dirty masks all day… who do I see about that?

The answer is, as Wilford Brimley said… “Ain’t nobody to see…”

It’s easy to understand why some Americans might want to live in the world of THE SHOOTIST, where a man who suffered a fate like that of Michael Gallagher, could find those responsible and shoot them down in the street. Or even the world of Mr. Smith, where a man unfairly maligned by the Brian Stelters and Jim Acostas of the world, could track them down in a bar and punch their lights out. There’s something satisfying about that. And there’s an argument to be made that this version of street justice represents a kind of catharsis… a blowing off of the steam that endless frustrations with society’s indignities is causing to build up in the American psyche. With nowhere to go, no way to release the pressure, no one to “see”, someday all that pressure could blow. And who knows where we’ll all wind up, then. The events at the Capitol on January 6th, whatever you think about them good, bad, or indifferent, might have been something of a preview. Which is, perhaps, why our Elites are still so worked up about it a year later.

All “Michael Gallagher” did was embarrass everyone… he could have just as easily decided to do something far more destructive.

I worry that if we don’t find a way to radically re-calibrate the incentive structure for anti-social behavior in America, towards something more like MR. SMITH and away from this dystopian free-for-all we are currently living in, we could be in for some very dark days ahead.