(78) Azzurro

I said that policemen who drag hippies from their holes do not, contrary to the protests from the long-haired ones, “get off” on it. “You’re just on a power trip, man. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? You’re sick you are.” Policemen “get off” on task completion, not humiliation—it is the neurotic hippy who is fascinated by humiliation, especially inverted power relations (and he would humiliate someone if he could, being driven by social status).

At my school, the school bully became a policeman and the school athlete became a marine—and this illustrates the difference. Although policemen—for the most part, there are exceptions—do not “get off” on power over other people, they are basically bullies. How so? They like to have a power asymmetry over other people, and this is why you really—you know you do if you think about it—esteem soldiers but not policemen. Soldiers fight “mano o mano”, they fight people with whom they enjoy a symmetrical power relation—both sides have guns, both sides have a fighting chance (to various degrees, technology allowing). This is honourable and masculine—a fair fight.

Policemen, by contrast, even in desperate shoot outs, always enjoy the advantage: they have the law behind them, the state behind them, their colleagues behind them—even the best organised gangster is not as well equipped as a policeman. Who would seek out this situation? A bully. The bully is a coward who picks on people weaker than himself; the policeman always, almost by definition, picks on someone weaker than himself. This is unmanly—ultimately, nobody likes the police and it would be better if they were replaced with openly carried firearms, sheriffs, and posses. Even though it is currently necessary, isn’t there something repulsive and impotent about the idea you have to “call the police” for a problem? So the police aren’t sadists into humiliation, they are petty task-completers, bureaucrats, who are cowardly—if they exercise power, they have to be safely dominant.