Punishing the 98% to Control the 2% Always Ends Badly
DATELINE: March 1994
Room 203 was always a bit out of control as a classroom. Their forty-five minutes of music class occurred every Friday at 1 p.m. (just after lunch and two hours before school ended for the weekend) and I often dreaded their raucous entrance each week.
Sure, it was the end of the week and I was tired and they were amped up and the message sent from their homeroom teachers was that music class was fuck around time. The factors were set for disaster.
The problem wasn’t with the majority of the thirty-two eighth graders. The problem was with Tony and Rick. A couple of hulkish, hormonally charged young men who had no interest in school except in regards to the social capital gained from disruption and aggression.
Most teachers dealt with this circumstance by employing classroom rules for everyone that clamped down on the entire population in order to control Tony and Rick. Lining up single file before entering the room often took up a solid five minutes of the forty-five minutes of potential instruction time. Fealty to assigned seating took another five. Another five wasted getting Tony and Rick to quiet down with repeated requests for silence.
When one-third of instructional time is drained simply to gain control of the environment with the caveat that most days these methods were ineffective and that at least another ten collective minutes were used reprimanding and negotiating with the two students who couldn’t care less at the expense of the rest, the result was less teaching, less allowance of creative curiosity, less learning.
One could argue that the purpose of school is learning. The argument could suggest that anything getting in the way of learning is counterproductive.
There is learning happening. Tony and Rick learned that their desires to break the system were more important than the needs of the majority and the rest of the kids learned that control is more important than their time.
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DATELINE: December 2019
The casino culture is one of constant surveillance and distrust. The constant presence of cameras breeds an unease in the room (which is why most are inconspicuous). This tool is in place less to ensure gamblers don’t cheat and more to ensure employees don’t steal.
Surveillance is monitoring the staff as much if not more than the gamblers and drinkers. Did that bartender give too many comped drinks? Is that porter cleaning the casino floor thoroughly? Did that sports writer cash out his own bet?
A refrain from fellow managers is that the staff is lazy, that they don’t think for themselves, that they need to be told what to do constantly or they cease doing anything. My observation is that when an hourly employee is practically guaranteed that something they do at work will be seen and reported, they cease making decisions to avoid getting written up.
It’s likely that this circumstance was put in place because a slim minority of staff was taking advantage of the host of temptations working in a gambling and drinking environment. Catch and fire the bad apples in the smokey barrel and all that. The long term result is a staff unwilling to take chances, be creative, or make mistakes.
Humans crave freedom and yet also demand security. These two impulses co-exist contention-free most of the time, but friction builds up over time and we almost always reduce our freedom for security. And then we hire five hundred additional police to make sure everyone pays for the New York subway or imprison people for carrying an illegal drug the size of a Tic Tac.
Thus, when a small percentage of people break the rules, it becomes an epidemic. It requires all of our attention to deal with this epidemic and we lose focus on the macro view. We inflate the problems caused by the few at the expense of the many and the many suffer.
Of the fifty million immigrants to the U.S., only a tiny fraction are, as a Trumpian would call them, “bad hombres” yet billions are spent that punish the vast majority of immigrants in order to keep that fraction out.
Of the nine hundred thousand police employed in the U.S., less than 2 percent murder innocent people for traffic violations or carrying a burrito, yet the push to punish all police has created a wholesale animosity toward cops that just fuels more fear and consequent authoritarianism.
Of all the allegations of sexual assault, the number of women who falsely accuse men of it is so minuscule as to almost write them off, yet these cases are routinely used to discredit the entire campaign to punish sexual assault resulting in multiple doubling downs and a resulting expansion of the very list of grievances on display.
The #NotAll hashtag movements are responses that, in some cases are used to silence those with grievances, are wholly and empirically correct. #NotAllMen are scumbags despite the misandrist campaign to paint us as such. #NotAllBathrooms are discriminatory. #NotAllPolice are racist thugs. #NotAllChristians are white supremacists or homophobes.
The molehills are not mountains and rigging our rules to pretend they are is self-defeating and counterproductive.
I’d rather the thirty kids in music class actually learn about music than waste their time watching me bend over backwards to control Tony and Rick. Anything less and the bad actors win the day at the expense of everyone else.
I’d rather empower my casino staff to be creative and make a few mistakes now and then than assume they’re all looking to slack off and steal. It makes the job for all of us more fun and productive.
In the struggle between freedom and security, my vote goes to freedom most of the time.
