Exploring a 1984-like scenario
A blog post I have long thought of how to word, still seems too complex for me. The whole thing seems nutty to me; why waste people's lives and effort. But, the news is full of goofy things people do instead of being a helpful influence to civilization. So here is an effort at it anyway.
What if somehow it gets proven that various security and law enforcement activities have been tricked into doing some of the dirty work instigated by some special interest group; does the special interest group then have to pay for all the time, salaries, resources used by those law enforcement agencies personnel?
Recalling the old adage that the average person breaks some law an average of three times a day, it ought to be quite easy to nail most anybody, given enough snooping and maybe some falsifying of evidence, and doing misinterpretations about the investigated persons.
While it seems highly unlikely that such a thing ever can get sufficiently proven, since the law enforcement folks themselves will not want to admit to doing such things lest they be thought as not doing their proper jobs, this still seems a worthy question. And maybe way down the line, someone will act to fix the problem.
As a hypothetical example, lets say that Chaos Corporation (am apparently thinking back to "Get Smart" TV show days for names) thinks it needs to defend its business territory from new innovators who might think of a new product that would obsolete the product of Chaos Corporation; and now someone, who is not directly legally controllable by Chaos Corporation, has thought up an idea for a product that would - unintentionally - obsolete Chaos Corporation's bread-and-butter product. Or another example, someone happens to walk in and witness a major deliberate wrongdoing participation by someone else who is part of Chaos Corporation; and now Chaos Corporation needs to discredit the witness lest he ever happens to disclose the odd bit of information he accidentally acquired by walking in at the wrong time and seeing something odd going on. Whatever the reason, the need is to ruin a target person who is perceived as being able to upset some plan of Chaos Corporation.
So Chaos Corporation embarks on a quiet character assassination program to monsterize their target person. And to Chaos Corporation, the target person is a villain, since he is a perceived threat to Chaos Corporation's thriving. And, it all must be done in a way so that it cannot later be traced to Chaos Corporation's doings. So getting the rumor mill to churning away about nasties that the target person is suspected of doing, they pick the things that really push peoples buttons, as well as being very hard to disprove. For right-wing-extremists, he is gossiped to be a left winger. To left-wing-extremists, he is rumored to be a right-winger. To husbands uncertain about their wives, the target is rumored to be a wife-stealer. To moms he is rumored to be a child abuser. To dateable women, he is rumored to be a dangerous person who uses a knife to harm women.
While this is all rumor-churning in the minds of potential onlookers, have a tipster say the target person is growing marijuana in his room, so the drug enforcers bash the target person's door down while he is away at work, and finding no marijuana - just houseplants - they leave silently, leaving the broken-into room unprotected for pilfering by the public. The target person is unwelcome there so has to move; his next rented room has small holes driled into ceiling for an investigator to peer in at the target to see what evil he is up to, but the noise the attic crawler is making is obvious so the target person covers up the drilled ceiling holes, so the owner then posts an eviction notice on his door. The next rented apartment soon is found broken into, but the manager of the building is honest and tells the target that the police and plainclothesmen were investigating a report of the target person harboring a Mexican woman wanted for questioning. From then on, any "plainclothesman" going into the target person's apartment while he is away at work, is assumed by the neighbors and manager, to be going in there to look for drugs or whatever, and to not get involved. But in reality the intruders are just expertly sifting through the target person's files, removing all records of his correspondence with people about the target's innovative technical concepts for new products, as well as grabbing all the new ideas the target person is exploring, so the "investigators" can sell them on the side to aspiring businesses. The target victim cannot make friends with neighbors, as they all are thinking he is a bad person and do not want to get accused of being an accomplice to the "evil person" wrongdoings being investigated by so many people. And through it all, law enforcement begins to believe that "where there is smoke there is fire" and investigative reports pile up, and the bigger the pile, the more likely it is that it must be true. So the effort is to imply great reward to any who would get some mud to stick on the target person; the reward might even be to put a huge amount of money behind some particular political candidate for high office, once the mud looks like it is on the target person.
Now such an effort is not likely to fail, due to the sheer volume of effort that has maligned the target person. And all the target person's innovative ideas have been stolen, so he has no way of getting paid for his creative technological achievements, so he lives close to poverty and his options in life are very few, not even able to get a girlfriend - a girlfriend might become a witness later who would refute much of the plethora of false accusations against the target victim, so it is quite a game to block any desirable women from discovering the target man, thus preventing that possible witness as well as making the target man live in even more misery of matelessness.
This post is about what does Chaos Corporation have to pay as penalty, if somehow this all gets exposed. What would be the appropriate fine imposed, for each document stolen from the target person, for each break-in of his residences, how much fine for each false accusation that gets apartment managers to let people into the target person's rented room or apartment, how much fine for each school bus driver who angrily watches the reported child abuser under investigation, how much fine for each husband who has done something to keep the target person from stealing the wife, how much fine for causing each mom who grabs their children glaring accusingly at the supposed child molester, how much fine for getting store security operations to stalk and record and pester the target person while he shops for food and other things in stores. And how much fine for the real wrongdoings salted into situations, mischief done specifically in a way that it points at the target person as the wrongdoer? How much fine to pay for sparking a juicy gossip item about the target person? And how much fine for every repeated utterance of that gossip item as it spreads throughout the neighborhood, the community, getting just about everybody who is in the gossip or security loop to assume the target person is evil and the observer could be a hero by catching the target person doing something wrong - it is not of interest that he is not doing anything wrong, that is no fun to watch. The target person suspects that he is getting paranoid, all this impossible weird stuff that sometimes cannot be fully ignored; Chaos Corporation would suddenly win the game if the target person gets pronounced paranoid, too. But more and more people come to believe that the target person is evil, thus to not become friends with him or else risk being assumed to be an accomplice. So how much fine would need to be levied for each of these instances of character assassination events?
Probably the bigger question is, would Chaos Corporation even worry about having to ever pay for such an accumulated collection of fines, even if it were all traced back to the source; a paltry sum compared to the wealth and power of Chaos Corporation; it has achieved its aim even then, since there remains no way for the target person to get his innovative concepts into practice that might rival the products of Chaos Corporation, and his word is discredited, so he could not be a credible witness about the evil done by Chaos Corporation. Besides, people with bully urges enjoy the sport of it all, stalking and harassing a person, without ever risking retribution; great sport for the bully mentality, as well as limits the girl's options for mates to not include the target person, thus has to marry one of the bullies instead.
Re-reading the above, I wonder if it ought instead be just made into one of my fiction novels. But the whole thing is so ugly that it would better be just flushed down the toilet like where such things are supposed to go. But how to do that in the real world, seems impossible. Bullies bully; theirs is the huge people-game world, too.
And what a waste of mankind's constructive potential - but I have said that in a lot of blog posts about "what people do do."
What if somehow it gets proven that various security and law enforcement activities have been tricked into doing some of the dirty work instigated by some special interest group; does the special interest group then have to pay for all the time, salaries, resources used by those law enforcement agencies personnel?
Recalling the old adage that the average person breaks some law an average of three times a day, it ought to be quite easy to nail most anybody, given enough snooping and maybe some falsifying of evidence, and doing misinterpretations about the investigated persons.
While it seems highly unlikely that such a thing ever can get sufficiently proven, since the law enforcement folks themselves will not want to admit to doing such things lest they be thought as not doing their proper jobs, this still seems a worthy question. And maybe way down the line, someone will act to fix the problem.
As a hypothetical example, lets say that Chaos Corporation (am apparently thinking back to "Get Smart" TV show days for names) thinks it needs to defend its business territory from new innovators who might think of a new product that would obsolete the product of Chaos Corporation; and now someone, who is not directly legally controllable by Chaos Corporation, has thought up an idea for a product that would - unintentionally - obsolete Chaos Corporation's bread-and-butter product. Or another example, someone happens to walk in and witness a major deliberate wrongdoing participation by someone else who is part of Chaos Corporation; and now Chaos Corporation needs to discredit the witness lest he ever happens to disclose the odd bit of information he accidentally acquired by walking in at the wrong time and seeing something odd going on. Whatever the reason, the need is to ruin a target person who is perceived as being able to upset some plan of Chaos Corporation.
So Chaos Corporation embarks on a quiet character assassination program to monsterize their target person. And to Chaos Corporation, the target person is a villain, since he is a perceived threat to Chaos Corporation's thriving. And, it all must be done in a way so that it cannot later be traced to Chaos Corporation's doings. So getting the rumor mill to churning away about nasties that the target person is suspected of doing, they pick the things that really push peoples buttons, as well as being very hard to disprove. For right-wing-extremists, he is gossiped to be a left winger. To left-wing-extremists, he is rumored to be a right-winger. To husbands uncertain about their wives, the target is rumored to be a wife-stealer. To moms he is rumored to be a child abuser. To dateable women, he is rumored to be a dangerous person who uses a knife to harm women.
While this is all rumor-churning in the minds of potential onlookers, have a tipster say the target person is growing marijuana in his room, so the drug enforcers bash the target person's door down while he is away at work, and finding no marijuana - just houseplants - they leave silently, leaving the broken-into room unprotected for pilfering by the public. The target person is unwelcome there so has to move; his next rented room has small holes driled into ceiling for an investigator to peer in at the target to see what evil he is up to, but the noise the attic crawler is making is obvious so the target person covers up the drilled ceiling holes, so the owner then posts an eviction notice on his door. The next rented apartment soon is found broken into, but the manager of the building is honest and tells the target that the police and plainclothesmen were investigating a report of the target person harboring a Mexican woman wanted for questioning. From then on, any "plainclothesman" going into the target person's apartment while he is away at work, is assumed by the neighbors and manager, to be going in there to look for drugs or whatever, and to not get involved. But in reality the intruders are just expertly sifting through the target person's files, removing all records of his correspondence with people about the target's innovative technical concepts for new products, as well as grabbing all the new ideas the target person is exploring, so the "investigators" can sell them on the side to aspiring businesses. The target victim cannot make friends with neighbors, as they all are thinking he is a bad person and do not want to get accused of being an accomplice to the "evil person" wrongdoings being investigated by so many people. And through it all, law enforcement begins to believe that "where there is smoke there is fire" and investigative reports pile up, and the bigger the pile, the more likely it is that it must be true. So the effort is to imply great reward to any who would get some mud to stick on the target person; the reward might even be to put a huge amount of money behind some particular political candidate for high office, once the mud looks like it is on the target person.
Now such an effort is not likely to fail, due to the sheer volume of effort that has maligned the target person. And all the target person's innovative ideas have been stolen, so he has no way of getting paid for his creative technological achievements, so he lives close to poverty and his options in life are very few, not even able to get a girlfriend - a girlfriend might become a witness later who would refute much of the plethora of false accusations against the target victim, so it is quite a game to block any desirable women from discovering the target man, thus preventing that possible witness as well as making the target man live in even more misery of matelessness.
This post is about what does Chaos Corporation have to pay as penalty, if somehow this all gets exposed. What would be the appropriate fine imposed, for each document stolen from the target person, for each break-in of his residences, how much fine for each false accusation that gets apartment managers to let people into the target person's rented room or apartment, how much fine for each school bus driver who angrily watches the reported child abuser under investigation, how much fine for each husband who has done something to keep the target person from stealing the wife, how much fine for causing each mom who grabs their children glaring accusingly at the supposed child molester, how much fine for getting store security operations to stalk and record and pester the target person while he shops for food and other things in stores. And how much fine for the real wrongdoings salted into situations, mischief done specifically in a way that it points at the target person as the wrongdoer? How much fine to pay for sparking a juicy gossip item about the target person? And how much fine for every repeated utterance of that gossip item as it spreads throughout the neighborhood, the community, getting just about everybody who is in the gossip or security loop to assume the target person is evil and the observer could be a hero by catching the target person doing something wrong - it is not of interest that he is not doing anything wrong, that is no fun to watch. The target person suspects that he is getting paranoid, all this impossible weird stuff that sometimes cannot be fully ignored; Chaos Corporation would suddenly win the game if the target person gets pronounced paranoid, too. But more and more people come to believe that the target person is evil, thus to not become friends with him or else risk being assumed to be an accomplice. So how much fine would need to be levied for each of these instances of character assassination events?
Probably the bigger question is, would Chaos Corporation even worry about having to ever pay for such an accumulated collection of fines, even if it were all traced back to the source; a paltry sum compared to the wealth and power of Chaos Corporation; it has achieved its aim even then, since there remains no way for the target person to get his innovative concepts into practice that might rival the products of Chaos Corporation, and his word is discredited, so he could not be a credible witness about the evil done by Chaos Corporation. Besides, people with bully urges enjoy the sport of it all, stalking and harassing a person, without ever risking retribution; great sport for the bully mentality, as well as limits the girl's options for mates to not include the target person, thus has to marry one of the bullies instead.
Re-reading the above, I wonder if it ought instead be just made into one of my fiction novels. But the whole thing is so ugly that it would better be just flushed down the toilet like where such things are supposed to go. But how to do that in the real world, seems impossible. Bullies bully; theirs is the huge people-game world, too.
And what a waste of mankind's constructive potential - but I have said that in a lot of blog posts about "what people do do."
posted by Unknown at
08:09
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