Ritu wrote:
You don't have to be fan of SF to appreciate what he was trying to
say.
According to my observations, the more lethal the members of a society
are, the more emphasis the social norms lay on politeness. As John
explained to me in Korea, when a stare is taken as an invitation for
verbal abuse, and the wrong tone of voice or wrong body language can
spark of fight with black-belts, people learn to be scrupulously
polite.
First, with respect to the idea behind the Heinlein quote, it is
generally true that (reasonable) people are scrupulously polite in
the face of deadly force. Most hostages treat their captors with
strenuous courtesy, even if they would rather rip their intestines
out and feed 'em to them. In my high school, we had fairly high
racial tensions. It was generally known that not showing respect to
certain kids would result in a beat-down, so those kids were accorded
undue politeness and deference.
An armed society is a society in which everyone is capable of dealing
death. I will not live in fear. I do not want to live in a society
where "politeness" is enforced by the fact that if I do not suck up
to someone appropriately, they'll give me hot lead brain surgery.
The whole argument smells way too much like "Well, at least the
trains ran on time." for my liking. I don't want to live in a
"distributed dictatorship", which is what the libertarian utopia of
an armed society looks like to me.
Dave
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