Why Do We Admire Mobsters?
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Smaller organizations lack the propaganda reach and expertise to sanitize their actions and so they are classified as criminals. Larger ones have hordes of academics, journalists, philosophers, etc., proclaiming the moral righteousness of their use of lethal force and intimidation (see the "Bush Doctrine").
There is no such thing as politics without force, and force requires intimidation, killing, extortion, etc. Just like the shopkeeper who grudgingly but willingly pays the mafia for "protection", we pay taxes on threat of jail time for "infrastructure" and "education", etc. For all but the elite, education is just daycare and training for serfdom.
It's amazing how humans love the strong leader (Trump is capitalizing on this) and how we love to take sides against and enemy or other (sports, etc.) These are animal tendencies that we still embrace and that still have tremendous impact on us in spite of our large primate brains.
In the third world, politicians travel around with a few dozen soldiers carrying machine guns. Our leaders travel in a motorcade with limousines, to hide the raw projection of power from public view. But to an adversary it's a formidable show of force.
The rest pays for things that are far less transparent and far more corrupt(able), not to mention blatant wealth transfers to influential interest groups.
They're spending money training on it, storing it, operating it, and organizing operations around it so that they can justify receiving and keeping it, as well as in personnel costs associated with the staff time devoted to doing the research, applications, etc., to be awarded it.
They may not be purchasing it, but its not appearing and hanging around without expenditure of department resources.
The conservative strategy works shockingly well: defund government, appoint administrators who are actvely opposed to the existence of the programs they run, then sit back and claim that government can't do anything right.
Not sure whose comment you are referring to. My comment was intended to illustrate some properties institutions built by primates with guns.
Obviously, governments (and criminal organizations) provide some valuable services to society (employment, structure, resource allocation, etc.)
The current status quo society and government provides lots of opportunity to some, and virtually no opportunity to others. "Criminality" provides a different distribution of opportunity. Drawing a firm distinction between legitimate and criminal pursuits is a profoundly conservative worldview.
And it seems you're conflating your economic system with our government; the society we have is because our government is toothless and unable to take real action, we are subject to the brutal whims of capitalism. Every time someone suggests we wield the power of our government to better our society it's decried as "socialist" and fails. So with effective government effectively banned by conservatives, we are left with ineffective government. Which gives conservatives more ammunition to ban any remaining government.
And you seem to wholly omit the consent of the governed; perhaps you reject it as a principle, and perhaps you simply don't wish to acknowledge its existence. In the first case, you should be aware your position is an extremist ideological one and shared by almost no-one outside of academic philosophy. In the second, this is a serious omission since it is the obvious counterpoint to your entire argument above.
Your criminality point is not meaningful; the initial point was about the societal effects of actions. Governments and government officials also go against their own laws all the time.
A person who believed that stuff might say people implicitly consent to the status quo when they don't fight against it. You might dislike the two-party system, but could you get 5% of the population to dash off a quick e-mail to their representative? Could you get 10% of the population to choose who to vote for with that as the deciding issue? Could you get 20% of the population to donate $2,000 to a PAC campaigning on the issue? Could you get 40% of the population to buy a rifle and fight in a revolutionary war? If you can't do any of these things, doesn't that mean people are happy with things as they are?
Personally I've always been a bit sceptical about that argument, due to the obvious status quo bias.
For society to function we need a government, and all people benefit from society functioning and therefore government and so we agree to give certain people power to make decisions and do things no private individual would ever be allowed to do. In exchange the government is responsible to the people, through elections, referendums, protests, general dissatisfaction, and generally tries to take actions which are fair and in the best interest of society and the people.
Of course sometimes the government isn't responsible enough to the people, and sometimes the government doesn't quite take actions that are fair and in the best interest of society; no system is perfect, but that's the principle upon which our government and all modern democratic governments are based. We can discuss all day whether or not it's currently working but that's not what you asked about.
You can vote out a bad government official who wields power unfairly. If it's a bad CEO, well, you can sit back and pray to Ayn Rand that our lord and savior "the market" punishes him for his choices one day though you know chances are he'll be rewarded.
In a country with advanced propaganda techniques and several extremely well-funded intelligence organizations (foreign ops and domestic secret police), consent is an interesting word.
I think the more relevant thing to measure is dissent. It's missing.
There is a constant fray on cable news on which actors make ideological pronouncements about everything from moral issues to the dresses worn by the first lady. They stay strongly in character and gather followings of people who find such content entertaining.
Then there is the serious news in which the overriding theme is the legitimacy of government institutions and the subtle bashing of other nations and foreign institutions and foreign ways of life.
Barely half of Americans vote, and nearly half pay no income tax whatsoever.
Such apathy and lack of dissent is a remarkable accomplishment. Many Americans think it doesn't matter which of the two parties they vote for, and they are right.
As it turns out of course as in every case consent is a slippery concept to grasp but the point we are getting at here is that it simply isn't that bad yet. The government is functional and generally it does what it's supposed to do. People have normal lives. Egypt had well-funded intelligence organizations and domestic secret police. The egyptians were perfectly capable of expressing the fact that they did not consent to be governed. They rioted.
People generally care about their daily lives. As long as their daily lives aren't interrupted and they can live happily and get most of the things they need they might complain about stuff but they won't REALLY refuse to be governed. But they could, of course. Americans just choose not to.
Partially that's I think a change in the American character: we are economically driven now, not driven by principles. We don't riot and kill people because of a tax. We're pretty far away from Bastille day. We care about buying a TV and getting a job to get out of debt and putting food on the table. Until those things are threatened we will consent to be governed; all of the threats are abstract and for all intents and purposes don't really exist in a tangible way for most people.
I'm not sure if it's sad or not but it's the state of things; we consent to be governed by not rioting and burning down government buildings.
In what way is healthcare woefully underfunded?
Also: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/bridges...
Healthcare is too subject to devolve in political argument for me, someone else has to put up some data on that one.
Growing up in a strong religious culture (though not a cult) that I later became disillusioned with, it almost hurt noticing the same trends in so many other areas of life that one would think immune from it. From sports to academics to social movements.
There is something inside of humans that has for centuries made religion very popular. Even now that many have been able to leave religion behind, what ever that is deep inside of use still exists and it is influencing the new social groups we form, creating systems of beliefs and rituals.
People expect leaders that are:
* strong * fair * capable * intelligent * loyal * available * caring * personal * decisive * on top of things * courageous
People who believe in God see that as a list only God himself could check off. That means we have an innate desire for a leader with the qualities of God himself. To the extent that people try to find perfect leadership in imperfect men and ideas, they will be disappointed. Pick literally any names: Bush, Obama, Trump, Jobs, Gates, Musk -- even Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dr. King and Thomas Jefferson. So we become disappointed and move on to other people and concepts. Or we find God as He is, not just as we would imagine Him, and find peace in belonging to Him.
In a more personal take, I tend to be hard on my bosses and organizations; at times I have to remind myself to have reasonable expectations for human leaders.
(Or maybe you forget "real" in you list of leadership qualities?)
Anyway, on the off chance that you (or someone else) want a real answer:
* I decided to give God a shot and He proved himself. It's surprising the number of people that presume God doesn't exist without actually asking Him if He's there and if He cares.
* Christian theology makes a lot of sense. It provides for dignity and equality of all people. It provides for mercy and reconciliation and harmony. It provides for justice and protection of the downtrodden and wronged. It provides meaning for everyone regardless of ability or circumstances. It's simultaneously simple enough for anyone to grasp and deep enough to challenge our greatest minds.
Maybe that's not useful to you... here's a good talk Tim Keller gave at Google that can talk to it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
I'm curious. What does this response look like? I can't say I've ever seen anything which would seem to match this, and it's definitely a question I've wondered about when I was a kid falling out of a sense of faith.
That being said, the Bible does say that if a son asks for bread, his father would not give him stones. So if someone asks God to make it clear that He exists and cares, God could literally start talking out loud if He felt that was best. But that's not typically my experience. Personally, I've heard God speak through feelings of conscience, relevant scriptures, wise words from godly people, a change in my heart over the course of a prayer, or serendipitous circumstances.
I'll be honest, it takes a certain level of trust in God for any of it to make sense. If someone approaches God with a sneer, I wouldn't count on God responding. If your child or SO spitefully challenged you to prove yourself, what would you do? That being said, God has a habit of going above and beyond for me.
To you, perhaps. It's pretty patronizing and narrow-minded to write off the views of billions of people as "archaic". In fact, theism is so common that you'd have to be in some kind of bubble to not have any friends, colleagues, or acquaintances that are theists. I'm sure they'd be disappointed (if not offended) to hear you refer to their beliefs like that.
If you want people to keep their religion to themselves, you should really treat their beliefs with a modicum of respect. Otherwise, you're just being abusive.
But your main point is well taken; infighting, irrationality, hypocrisy, and other bad behavior are certainly not unique to religious groups. Humanity is a much more common factor than theism.
As well all know, deprecated does not necessarily mean obsoleted. That is deprecated can eternal lie, and with odd futures even faith may fly.
Yes.
More like millenia. When your little neo-human tribe could be coerced as a group into attacking the nearby human tribe to take their women and eliminate them as competitors for resources, the chances that your genes would survive went up. Religion and general leader following were great tools for group coordinated action. Any mutations in the brain that benefited those group coordinated actions tended to survive and spread.
Religious propensity was a survival trait.
As long as you recognize that absence of evidence cuts both ways. Assuming physiological predisposition towards religion and strong leaders, it's also possible that the disposition developed because God actually exists.
What came first, religion or God? Can you prove that scientifically? I'm not sure you can.
In short, regardless of what any individual believes, to science itself, God does not exist (unless He ever made Himself testable in some form).
If you suppose the absence of supernatural factors, of course you cannot conclusively prove the supernatural. Any why does science assume there are not supernatural factors? Well, there are valid reasons, but to a theist that's merely a model of reality for the purpose of discovery and pedagogy.
But to take the premise as the conclusion is a logical fallacy. And on top of that, the underlying premise (assume only the physical and measurable exist) is a metaphysical premise and outside the purview of science.
Of course, my hours of simulation are playing chess, Risk, Warcraft, and numerous other games -- but there's a reason those concepts are so often the core of games: they parallel real life and our desire to win at life.
Even modern psychology is fairly light on things that are proven. Insisting on proof to discuss psychological origins that we can't really test on real proto-humans before we even discuss it is just an attempt to shut down unpleasant ideas, like the idea that most religious beliefs are myths.
Governance in modern societies is implemented by a party which holds power over the state. The mafia have a business model which is similar, but largely limits itself to a few select types of business strategies and markets, much like many other businesses. Their use of a threat of force is unique in terms of business models, sure, but the mafia has nothing to do with governance in general.
The key similarities are use of force and intimidation, taxation, hierarchy, and propaganda.
Once a criminal organization gets powerful enough, it becomes able to whitewash its own image and branch into legitimate/legal economic pursuits. Also, with sufficient growth and power, the very laws themselves can be bent to legitimize past and current actions.
Criminal organizations also utilize principles of decentralization as a scaling strategy. There are elaborate transfer of power rituals, some resembling democratic processes and others not.
The goal of any criminal organization is to become larger and more powerful, but there are extra spoils due to premium prices for black market endeavors. Criminal organizations seize opportunities where laws exist but are poorly enforced... or in other words, where there is no de facto prohibition against black/gray market activity (such as the tens of thousands of asian massage brothels in the US).
With additional revenue comes better propaganda and the freedom to clean up the organization's image. There is also a turning point when the group benefits more from harnessing moral indignation against certain behavior, and the wise populist criminal group will not let this go to waste.
China will make sure you go to school. China will make sure you have rice to eat. The mafia will make sure they get a piece of your rice and the school's lunch money. They're a selfish organization concerned with profit and not social issues, whereas the government's position is that the people matter.
If you want to compare government and organized crime, the Yakuza are probably the closest to a formal government. For example, they have some legitimate business interests and different tactics for gaining influence in multiple markets, they're more transparent than the mafia, and they're often altruistic.
However I'd argue that a stable, two-party corporatist government is essentially the same as a one party government.
Note that Hillary and Trump and Jeb are running pretty much the identical platform when you consider the substantive parts.
This is very much missing the point of there being any state at all. The notion of a single group having the monopoly on violence in a society is very important for that society to be able to function. To say it's the same because both government and mafia use force to get people to pay money is missing the point completely. Having only one source of violent coercion is vital for a society to function properly (see Syria for examples of what happens when you have many sources).
If you can have democratic constraints on how that violence get's used, then all the better.
There is some truth to this from a top-down, social organization perspective.
But governments don't just have a monopoly on violence, they actively use propaganda to hide the use of violence from the public, through an ongoing process of whitewashing and image management that is incompatible with democracy.
Violence is ugly. If our government does it, it ought to own up to every gory detail so that the public can honestly assess its appetite for more.
Now, that model also relies on the ability to trust that those chosen to make the hard decisions are doing so competently and in the best interests of the society at large. It also bakes in the assumption that everyone will have to make compromises.
In the immortal words of Calvin and Hobbes "A good compromise leaves everyone mad".
In a representative democracy like America yes, (a democratic republic actually) yet a pure democracy seeks majority compromise.
Actually that's not "part of the point" at all. The point of a democratic society is to elect representatives to act on the majority's will, not to take "decisions on your behalf" and not because they are "ideally best equipped to handle it".
No, that's the point of representative government (which can be part of democratic society -- hence, representative democracy -- but is not essential to it.)
The point of democratic society is that society -- and government in particular -- should be responsive to the will of the people. One of the things the people frequently want, however, is not to spend all of their time dealing with issues of governance, so they often choose representative democracy as a mechanism for achieving that goal.
In revolutionary France, as part of the purge of the old monarchy and replacement with a republic, there was a need for a more efficient way of killing people. See, the people wanted to kill all the old royals, but the old method was hanging, drawing and quartering, which besides being labor-intensive and incredibly painful, often used a stand-in in place of a rich nobleman. They wanted something more humane, more egalitarian, and of course, more efficient, since they had a lot of people to kill. The guillotine was introduced, and from Wikipedia:
"Its operation became a popular entertainment that attracted great crowds of spectators. Vendors sold programs listing the names of those scheduled to die. Many people came day after day and vied for the best locations from which to observe the proceedings; knitting women (tricoteuses) formed a cadre of hardcore regulars, inciting the crowd. Parents often brought their children. By the end of the Terror, the crowds had thinned drastically. Repetition had staled even this most grisly of entertainments, and audiences grew bored."
During both the Russian and Chinese revolutions, death tolls of those executed as traitors or proponents of the old empire were published widely by the state. After World War II, traitors were again executed in great numbers, and even during the war a "blocking detachment" might stay behind the lines to execute any deserters.
America has also had public execution pretty much since day one. Hanging was our preferred method before the electric chair, and then lethal injection. We make sure that both the families of the victims can witness these deaths, as well as other witnesses, and they're widely covered in the news media. We are still the only Western nation left that practices capital punishment, mainly because people here love it so much that they can't seem to pass a law banning it or follow the UN resolutions that ban it.
Now, there's plenty of abuse doled out by oppressive regimes against their people. But this abuse is still not necessarily propagandized or even hidden. A state may use secrecy and intimidation to continue their abuse, but propaganda is used more often to bolster some case the state is trying to make. Anyway, in modern times it's far more common for corporations to use propaganda to defend themselves from democracy than for the state to use it against its people.
Let's make this abundantly clear: the United States of America categorically does not execute criminals because "people here love it so much." Nothing about that idea is even slightly correct. Capital punishment is not used at all in several of the states, and in the ones where it's a valid sentence (or on the federal level,) your likelihood of ever actually being executed is excessively low. Since 1950, the Federal government executed 26 people. The entire country executed 35 people over the whole of 2014. Those 35 were in just five states. What a truly bloodthirsty culture.
As for executions being "public," there haven't been any of those since 1936. There is certainly room to argue that subsequent events stretched the definition of the word "private," but the day has long since passed where you could just show up at the town square on the scheduled day in your commemorative "I <3 watching people die" hoodie and watch the Man give someone the needle. The reason witnesses are present to view modern "private" executions is because having the government kill convicted criminals where nobody is allowed to see it happen is an absolutely terrible idea that defies common sense. Like, duh.
If Americans love watching their public executions so much, why do they never get around to actually doing it, and why aren't citizens allowed to just show up and take pictures?
I can only conclude that the people continuing to compare mafia and democratic governments are ideologically handicapped. Or maybe it's a steady procession of innocents believing the world has never considered their insight. Probably a bit of both.
If a government utilizes extensive propaganda against its citizens, can it really be called a democratic government? I'd argue that it cannot.
Large organisations might have better propaganda but the nature of the organisation might be a bigger factor in the equation.
That or they believe the Roman model of private armies vying for control of a state was a great idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Autho...
[1] http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf
[2] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/03/04/michael-huemer/proble...
So we'll have "protection agencies" who have military arms and logistics arms to manage the necessary affairs of the agency. Those agencies will somehow provide equipment to their military, or else they'll be inferior to the other agencies, meaning they will not be giving protection free of charge, instead they will run capitalist markets within their domain and somehow extract a profit (either by taxing transactions, or charging individuals). How exactly is that different from the current nation-state paradigm?
Huemer's anarchy is very different from the current state; it is not 'the same with one or two changes'.
Seriously? There is a huge advantage to being the biggest, baddest agency. If you're substantially larger than the competition you just go to them and say "hi there, give me all your stuff or we kill all of you and your clients".
> It is unlikely that the agencies will fight with one another, as they have strong disincentives
You're completely leaving out the incredibly strong incentive of "Give me your stuff or I kill you". It's infinite profit!
There are two ways history has proven to prevent "Hobbesian War" as he calls it: One incredibly powerful military hegemony, or a delicate balance of multiple exactly equally powerful military hegemonies. Anytime neither of those exist in an area, you get war because it's a lot easier to take someone else's stuff than it is to make your own. To think otherwise is hilariously naiive.
It will be very difficult for you to come up with off-the-cuff arguments which will best a book written by an experienced philosopher over more than a year, and you are unlikely to win over anyone who agrees with Huemer in this forum for exactly that reason. If you wish to discredit him, I suggest you find an academic who has written a thoughtful critique of "The Problem of Political Authority", or that you write a book or paper on its flaws. Anything short of that is most likely to be self-satisfying but ineffective rhetoric.
If my characterization is incorrect, please describe a viewpoint-neutral algorithm capable of determining whether the anarcho-socialist group has a claim to the goods they do not possess. If no such algorithm exists, the socialist protection agency is indistinguishable from a group of theives.
It should also be noted that Huemer explicitly states that socialist groups would likely exist in the anarchy he describes. They would, however, not be able to coerce non-members.
Do you have any idea just how much property in a capitalist economy is possessed by someone other than the owner? What happens if I'm renting a house from you and you try to evict me? Now it's your protection agency--not mine--trying to take something that other people possess.
In fact, capitalist economies also have shades of legal ownership, i.e. lienholding--so I might even be the legal owner of a Camaro, but if I don't pay the car payment the repo man is legally entitled to take something I not only possess, but actually have some legal title to! And this only works because there's an unambiguous and authoritative legal framework in which these kinds of actions are permissible within bounds of regulation. OK, so if your anarcho-capitalist protection agency tries to repossess my Camaro and my anarcho-capitalist protection agency doesn't think your protection agency followed enough due process, where do we go from there?
The entire point of having a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force is that these kinds of disputes are inevitably going to come up, competing sides are going to be unable to come to a settled agreement, and in the absence of a state, these disagreements will escalate to violence. This isn't a theory, it's the observed history of humanity.
There are a number[1] of anthropological investigations into this (outside the scope of anarchist theory to which this tenant is integral) although they're fairly diffuse.
This is similar to the idea that a a voting majority is the only reasonable way to make egalitarian decisions. As anarchist[2] and non-heirarchical organizations (whether we're talking Kobanê or Valve) are illustrating, governing by consensus is a rarely discussed but viable alternative.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=society%20without%20ch... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities
I know a number of communists and anarchists who seem to believe they can just wish away aspects of primate psychology.
And I don't think even such a temporary arrangement can scale much above Dunbar's number.
Having only one source of violent coercion is
vital for a society to function properly
I mean, is it a problem if the French and German governments disagree, or if boxers hit each other, or if America decides to use drones to bomb some terrorist training camps in Pakistan, or if the tax authorities pursue offences the drug authorities are indifferent towards?
Do you see that as "legitimate"?
It plays well for the Democrats too:
http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/
""Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors," said Clinton."
The name of that little difference is legitimacy.
So the difference between the mafia and government is the use of laws? Which are rules that governments abide by? Sounds very circular indeed.
In the end only one's own gene-survival matters.
Really? Speaking personally, if I could make a large lasting contribution to improve society, but had to give up my own gene-survival to do it, then I would do it. People value different things, there isn't one be-all and end-all.
I understand why the idea of bringing life into the world is appealing, but let's not pretend that's the main reason for living.
My own gene survival is of zero interest to me personally.
Some substantial number of people who go around thinking that they aren't just acting as machines to propagate their genes find that their independence from gene control just happens to lead them to have a nice large family because their unselfish spirits love their spouses and children.
And the genes giggle triumphantly at your independence.
Hint: There's not a whole lot "Gene survival urges" can do about 2 pellets of appropriately placed titanium and some surgical knives.
This is a compeltely meaningless statement, with no basis in fact. Genes do not consciously 'trick' you.
It's also a logically problematic. How would my developing to experience no paternal instinct actually lead me to have children? Short of me being irresponsible during sexual encounters (which I'm not) it won't happen.
> Some substantial number of people who go around thinking that they aren't just acting as machines to propagate their genes...
I never claimed otherwise and a I actually agree with that.
However the urge to have sex is very different from the urge desire to have children. You might want to look into that.
> ...find that their independence from gene control just happens to lead them to have a nice large family because their unselfish spirits love their spouses and children.
Again, no basis in fact.
This is very patronising and condescending as well. You're claiming to know my own mind better than I know it myself which is the asbsolute height of arrogance. You're also indicating people are selfish if they don't have children, which is competely contradicts what you said above about people just being machiens for genetic propagation.
I'm not even sure what to say to this other than you sound like a horribly shallow and judgemental person with a high degree of cognitive dissonance.
You might want to accept that fact that there are millions and millions of people across the globe that consciously decide to never have childre, for a variety of reasons. It may also come as a surprise to you that these people do not suddenly break down and end up with large families because their genes 'tricked' them into it.
I couldn't shake this on watching The Sopranos. Too often really disgusting behavior was made to humorous in a way that left a bad taste.
It's not that I'm squeamish. Off the top of my head the last US film I watched where I quite liked the "anti-hero" was "There will be blood". I particularly enjoyed him bludgeoning the preacher with a bowling pin.
Whenever I play GTA, there are times where I just go out causing as much mayhem as possible. It's enjoyable precisely because it's not something I would do in real life.
In a similar way, I love watching Kevin Spacey on his sociopathic power-trip, Walter White and his seat-of-the-pants improvisation, Gus Fring and his controlling-but-hidden-in-plain-sight-masterminding, Tony Soprano in his violent and erratic leadership, and so on.
It's a guilty pleasure, and knowing the damage these characters only heightens the pleasure. Whether this is good or not is another question, but the reasons seem pretty obvious to me.
The fiction and its interest is interesting, I mean by the end of The Sopranos, I found myself wanting Tony to not get killed or go to jail but also knowing full well that he was a sociopath. It probably has to do with the writing and how they humanized him. You get to view this very different world and lifestyle and then you see some human properties and some similarities to things you know. The difference is what draws you in, but I could relate in ways to Tony the father and Tony the husband. Maybe it is even more simple, I liked watching the stories and I knew if something happened to Tony, the stories would end.
I enjoyed Sopranos, Breaking Bad, all those Godfather movies and more but in no way do I endorse or encourage that lifestyle or those activities.
'The West Wing' for politics and 'Mad Men' and 'Suits' for business comes to mind.
Walter White is a smart guy who is put into a desperate situation, and overcomes that situation. In the process, he kinda turns into a monster as his problem solving outstrips his morals but not his insecurities, but still, it's impressive to watch him stand up and win.
Pablo Escobar (as portrayed in Narcos) started out with a small family smuggling business, and built it up into a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business. He did so while helping the common man, bringing revenue into the country, and generally being of the people in a nation segregated by race and wealth. Arguably, it was only when the US decided to intervene and the old guard of Colombia became threatened by political aspirations that the business became violent.
Especially in the latter case--being based on a real person--we see an individual taking a stand against a system with arbitrary rules, fighting for the success of his business, and taking care of his own people (sorta).
In contrast, we see them fighting against large bureaucratic machines, organizations without personal ties and human agendas. It's not hard to see that the human despots in gangster narratives are more sympathetic than the abstract almost-forces-of-nature they're competing against.
One of the things that really motivates me in these stories is the morality play aspect of it. First, the core characters tend to be very honorable people, deeply committed to family, friends, and community. But they find themselves in situations where their honor is in conflict with itself, and they are forced to choose (or clever their way out of the choice).
Second, the bad guys get what's coming to them, in spectacular ways. I'm currently rewatching Sons of Anarchy, a really beautiful show. I'm on Season 3 now, and already anticipating the finale (spoiler alert). In a fantastic double murder, Opie gets to kill Stahl, the ATF agent whose lies led to his wife getting murdered by his own club. And Chibs gets to kill an incredibly powerful IRA gangster who stole his wife and daughter. It's so satisfying, to see these awful people get the punishment they so richly deserve.
In a world where justice is so rare and so corrupted, to get to see villains in black and white and getting the fate they deserve is blessed relief for us. It's a true escape from reality.
Local organized crime leaders had no more disdain for law than most policemen, prosecutors, judges or politicians. However, due to the nature of their activity, they had to maintain a reputation of honesty and reliability.
People feared them, but they were generally true to their word. If you paid the protection tax, your shop was protected. Of course, the tax could be raised without any advance notice, but more astute negotiators generally managed to delay enforcement by a few weeks. But your shop was fine.
Policemen, on the other hand, did nothing of that sort. Even when not actively assisting the crooks, there was no proactive protection of any kind. The police could only step in after your shop was devastated for the first time -- and even then, the usual process was that you'd file a complaint and, after the legally-required 30 days, the local police would send you a short letter saying they couldn't do anything due to lack of evidence. Assuming, that is, that the post office didn't lose the letter.
Law enforcement agents were seen as very unreliable partners: sometimes they'd help civilians, sometimes they'd just stay out of it, and oftentimes they'd blatantly and obviously take the side of the mobster who was paying them to look the other way.
The crooks, on the other hand, were seen as reliable. Yes, they were ruthless, but you could generally count on their help, if you were willing to pay the price.
I've travelled to this country (GDP per capita ~$1500) and stayed with this huge family. In the city I stayed in, there was one suburb where every house was part of the same family with the same last name. There must have been 500 to 1000 members, who knows. Inside one family there were policemen, shopkeepers, maids, factory owners, factory workers, businessmen, and family members with connections to mobsters (I couldn't pin down the mobsters and politicians among them exactly). In this country family is life. All members of the family generally love and respect everyone else in the same family. Their family ties are a lot strong than ties they make at their "work". The first thing we did when I arrived to stay with the family was to meet the mobster of the city so as to protect me from everyone else. One of the mobster's primary function was to act as a middleman for paying "fees" to the right politician to get bureaucratic matters resolved efficiently. (e.g. getting a visa in a few days instead of a month or two without "fee". In a way, they are lobbyists the common people can afford). The family ties cut across economic, social, and political boundaries. The fact that mobsters thrive there means they are part of the stable equilibrium. It wouldn't be possible to say "Let's get rid of the mobsters" - that's like saying "Let's get rid of the lobbyists from the US.". Politicians are good at politics, and often have little technical knowledge of the world outside their workplace. That's why they rely on lobbyists and mobsters to tell them what to do. Often, the law does not describe the entirety of the world.
It's interesting how those two types of things often go together.
I, too, absorbed a bit of the sneering disdain for patriotism that a lot of us did as children, but I've since come to understand that it is actually a serious advance in human affairs. Patriotism is a brilliant psychological hack on the built-in "family" tendency of humans that hacks it to permit building larger political/social structures by hacking the humans to see that essentially as their new "family". Seeing only when it sometimes causes excess is missing the forest for the webworm infestation.
Surely, it must be more than abstraction and omertà. Some drug organizations do not brand themselves with a public services front - see the TED talk by Rodrigo Canales http://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_canales_the_deadly_genius_o....
I only speak for myself, but I like crime movies/drama for the allure of ruthless power. It's a unique sort of power that can only be obtained illegally, and at some great moral expense. This Faustian device makes for intriguing plots.
Who else can have a mountain of cocaine? Who else can execute business with such brutality? What other line of work involves Zero Halliburton cases stuffed with Benjamins, to go with high-powered handguns and sharp suits? These are proxies for power that a pleb like myself can barely begin to comprehend.
There's a scene in the Godfather Part II that I really like, when the nervous money-grubbing landlord comes into Don Corleone's office and gives him cash so that a previously disagreeable tenant can stay in his inn. The absurdity of the scene belies Corelone's power like the tip of an iceberg, and it's visually interesting to see a normal-looking guy wield such mysterious power.
This is echoed by the common "crime lord is the manager of a pizzaria by day" trope (Breaking Bad, Drive, Road to Perdition), where a seemingly weak front has a hidden-dragon kind of vibe.
To summarize, I think that "psychological distance" theory only carries the audience halfway, in that they don't feel the revulsion towards mobsters because they don't deal with them personally. I think most of the allure comes from the forbidden power.
Oh crap, I didn't mean to invoke Godwin so quickly. It was just an easy comparison. But seriously, someone else pointed out Walter White in Breaking Bad and, as much as I loved the show I (and the friends I spoke with) had no admiration for him in the end. We admired the storytelling not the actions.
Many people mention Breaking Bad, but it's a completely different situation isn't it ? it's more a 'back against the wall' / idiotic heroism thing. He didn't go there to sustain a lifestyle, he was cornered.
None of my friends "admired" Tony Soprano, they found it fascinating, in the same way that you might find a venomous spider.
In Breaking Bad, the motivation actually changes quite a bit over the course of the series.
My meandering point is just to say that millions of people watching a show or movie does not automatically mean they condone the actions of the main characters or admire them in any way.
That's why he got started, but he started empire building in season 2.
He was certainly capable of destroying an empire. Building one? Umm, no.
Walt was never cornered by anything except his own pride; he choose to cook meth instead of accepting help from people he resented (for reasons which are, IIRC, not actually explicitly made clear.) I mean, really, its pretty much classic hubris-driven Greek tragedy in a modern setting.
Long answer: Americans REALLY hated prohibition. Mobsters fought the man when it was cool to fight the man.
Pablo Escobar actually gave money away to columbians. When you think about the columbian drug trade, it was an actual mean to take money from the US to Columbia. I don't see why columbians would fight it if it didn't cause that much violence. Of course until the government and the DEA tried to stop him, then of course people would like him less.
So it really all depend how people perceive those criminals. You could just think that criminals are just people seizing a political opportunity to improve their neighborhood or city by other means. Prohibition was creating an opportunity just like the drug war did.
When I was living in Melbourne during the gang wars, the folks were terrified in getting in the cross fire, but the city were gripped with a fascination of their life style and events. Admiration, very little.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/2989a78a-ee94-...
There seems that even though we have long since left the ape hill, the ape hill has not left us. We keep defaulting back to power politics whenever push comes to shove...
Doesn't Charles Manson famously receive love letters in jail?
Much of this is just excitement added to a boring life, or curiosity, and should not be confused with "admiration". After watching or reading about such mobsters, I find I am disgusted, and hope I never come in contact with such a lot.
ps: add a sense of family and tradition, and you have a strong recipe.
[1] morally relative of course
Many films about natural disasters have also been praised. Enjoying the film does not mean one loves the characters in it.
Plenty of teenagers want to imagine themselves being action heroes, with a "simple" life full of glorifying adventures where people die but not them - an escape from the immediate problems of their everyday existence. As they get older, most of them feel less inclined to see the world burn, and so reinterpret the same stories in a more troubled way. But in the moment, it's always about being "so badass" or whatnot. A person you could be, if you were just a little less inhibited by things like emotion and caring for others.
And that's the second part of it - that you can uphold "glorified bad guys" as part of an elaborate rationalization process to ignore your own failings, praising their every motion while distancing yourself from the idea you are also bad.
I think it's actually the opposite; what really makes gangster films successful is not our envy of the "qualities," but the fact that we can relate to their flaws, which eventually destroy them. In good films, in which the characters are not two dimensional "bad" guys but relatable people, we take empathize and take pity on them, even if we understand they have no one to blame but themselves - much like we.
(By the way, if you think all fiction makes ordinary life look muted, I suggest you look into the realism movements. I can recommend Scenes from a Marriage, which has nothing that would look out of place in an ordinary life, yet it's a masterpiece)
It is an interesting question.