A Culture that Can't Say No

The calamitous consequences of 'being kind'.

If you don’t pay your taxes the government will shoot you.

This is an oversimplification.

If you don’t pay your taxes, the government will send you a strongly worded letter and begin adding interest to what you owe them. If you continue to not pay, they will start to impose fines. If you don’t pay the fines, they will issue you a court order. If you continue to ignore the court they may prosecute you. If you ignore that, they can send the police to arrest you. And if you hole up in your house with a gun, resisting arrest by force, they will shoot you.¹

One mark of a civilised society is that most people pay their taxes without getting involved in regular gun battles with the authorities.² Even Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion.

But the reason this works is because the escalation ladder is clearly understood - indeed, it is embedded at such a deep level we almost never think about it. If HMRC doesn’t check whether people have filed their tax returns, if fines were ignored, if criminals knew the police would give up if you resisted arrest - then the whole system begins to break down. Not everyone, not all at once - but as soon as some people see that others can get away without consequences, then others will begin to think that they are suckers for paying, and the rot spreads.

Lately, in Britain, we’ve been forgetting that, without consequences, systems collapse. That without the temporary harshness of saying ‘no’, the long-term consequences will be far worse. That the consequences of being ‘kind’ to everyone, all the time, will result in kindness to no-one.

Take the case of shop lifting, where organised criminals have realised that security guards are forbidden from intervening³ - either because of concerns that they might get hurt, or that they might injure the thief. Yes, such interventions cannot be made entirely without risk - but if the thieves know the guards are ordered to do nothing, they can carry out their crimes with impunity.

Or the way in which fare-jumping on the Underground has become commonplace, and frequently tolerated by TFL staff. Public transport is an important common good, but falling revenues from failure to enforce payment against cheats is not ‘compassionate’. It will lead to the deterioration of the whole system - something which will hurt poorer people more.⁴

There was the recent situation of Wetherspoons, which bans dogs except for assistance dogs, and began asking for documentation to prove this. The response by some organisations was that the policy might be acceptable, but that asking for documentation was not acceptable - in other words, that they might have the policy, but could not enforce it. Yet an unenforceable policy is no policy at all.