Informal social control is becoming the new fad

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I say informal; I don't mean it entirelly literally but close enough. Social control is ever present. It is the rules we are all expected to abide by. OK, so what's the big deal? Well, I just am a little unsettled at a new development. I notice that increasingly peer pressure is influencing how people behave more than I have ever noticed it doing in my life.

Almost everywhere I look in the past few days in the United Kingdom I'm seeing new signs that have appeared. In a bar in a small town near a canal reads a sign: "Anyone who jumps in or swims in the canal will be barred indefinitely from this bar." The message is on a sign and therefore basically formal and yet there is no threat of arrest nor prosecution, merely a promise of isolation, of exile."

This is a move towards a more informal form of social control. I've observed in the past few days also that police are behaving differently than how they have to my knowledge for years. Since I live in a large city with plenty of poverty problems are always visible so I've picked up how the system of crime and punishment works. For a long time a bureaucratic, lengthy and somewhat brutal process of filling in forms and arresting people had been observed.

But now I see the police behaving like patricharchal fathers or matriarchal mothers. The tactic used now isn't blunt force or the threat of it but manipulation and humiliation. People deemed to be a nuisance by the powers that be, for example homeless people, alcoholics, drug addicts, rebellious teenagers are being smothered by "benevolent concern". They are boring people out of a life of "crime" by simply repeatedly following them and questioning them incessantly about why they're doing what they're doing. I've witnessed people drinking in public (a crime here in the UK) and who would have a few weeks ago been arrested unceromoniously in these new days being simply guided towards a bin and looked at with all-knowing pity. More police are being hired but less arrests and force is being used. It's part of a strategy to humiliate and outnumber, a far more effective technique than a smaller force using violence.

I wonder why I don't feel so happy about these developments. Maybe it's because I have Asperger's syndrome and I'm weary of people lecturing and bugging people self righteously in a "social" manner. Isn't a bit of anti-social behaviour mandatory sometimes? Must everything around us that is vaguely discomforting be brushed under a carpet?

I worry that we're heading towards a situation where people will rarely break a rule. The reason is simple. In the past people were widely put in prison for breaking rules. If that now ends as I suspect it is doing then miscarriages of justice will no longer seem such a big deal. If Nelson Mandela had been given a 30-week community service order telling him to sweep the streets would his cause of ending racism in South Africa ever have really got anywhere?

It's strange but I think we're heading into an era when anyone who breaks a law or rule will be perceived as simply stupid or foolish. I predict for a while we will live in a period in which you are either "with us" or "without us" and if you are "without us" you won't matter. You won't be suffering terribly. Not rotting in a jail cell, being given the death penalty, assaulted or tortured. You'll get a community service sentence maybe, a small fine, an order banning you from an area. Nothing serious. And if you break it if you end up being evicted or having your bank account closed, oh yes, well that's understandable! The person wasn't just breaking a law. They were actually being "anti-social". And if when that person becomes homeless they get deported or simply get moved every time they try to draw attention to their side of their story, oh never mind, it's only a homeless person and we all know they have no status, no dignity, no honour.

A law was recently introduced here to allow psychiatrists to force treatment on people deemed a danger to themselves or the public within the community. So now, if there's anyone the powers that be don't care for, there's another easy option. Label them insane, throw them in a mental hospital. No more than a couple of days will be necessary to diagnose them. Force medication on them that sedates them and shortens their life span. Throw them out and whenever they draw too much attention to themselves just call a police officer or community psychiatric nurse onto the scene, explain to the people it's an insane person, and hence someone without honour or status, up their dosage or place a 48 hour or so exile-from-the-town-limits-order and watch calm be restored as people know all is right in the world again.

Thanks for posting the images. They are in many public places in the United Kingdom at the moment. More of the new era of police and the general public acting in harmony, forming a relationship of dignity and honour, rooting out the outlaws of society!

i think when the boss alien created us we were not supose to be given cosmetics, farming equipment, or tools. and now look at diseases like aids and cancer. and heartache along with all the other sociatys ills, most of this is sociatys fault and its only going to get worse

I thought the world was getting more and more social.....

As for the trash, I look in other people's anyway to see what waste they've thrown.

If that is the trend then it is a trend back to how things used to be.

For good or for ill.

Perambulator, I couldn't agree more.

Ads like that have also been on the radio since...somtime last year, I think. The minute I'd heard one in the car, I turned to my husband and said 'You do realize we now live in a police state, don't you?' He's a photographer, is the thing, and the photographic community has been struggling for the past few years with the idea becoming current that anyone carrying a camera, especially a nice, expensvie camera such as you tend to use if you're trying to break into pro photography, is inherently suspicious. (Absurd, given that anyone who wants to take photos and remain inconsicuous is not going to use a big expensive camera - they're almost certainly going to use a mobile phone.) It's gotten so that photo magazines have printed cards they've given out that photographers can flash at anyone who asks, just to clarify what the law is about taking photos in public places. It's actually a lot more liberal than a lot of people think. But those 'mickey mouse' community coppers we now have are usually ignorant of the law, and like to make out they can arrest you, which legally they can't.

It doesn't just breed paranoia in the terrorism context, either. We went out over the Easter weekend to a rare breeds farm. Spring weather, cute baby animals - great photography! However...also swarms of small humans, for obvious reasons. We were virtually the only childfree people there, and hubby admitted afterwards that he was walking round terrified that some paranoid mother would raise the cry of 'Paedo!' just because he had a camera in his hand - never mind that he was more interested in the pygmy goats than in anyone's little darlings.

You've probably also witnessed the whole 'nanny state' thing here with regard to health. I don't smoke, and I don't like being around smoke, but I know that there are people who do, and if they want to go someplace and ruin their lungs, that's absolutely fine by me. And I can see no reason why there shouldn't be certain bars in which people are allowed to smoke, and others which are smoke-free. The total ban shoves people out to hang around on street corners as if they're doing something illegal.

That's right now, but I strongly suspect that the next thing will be a crackdown on food. Just recently it's calorie counts on certain menus. Now, apparently, they're going to train up special 'snoops' to randomly spot people who are 'unhealthy' in the community - say, if they happen to sit next to a person they judge to be fat around their workplace, say, eating something they judge to be 'unhealthy', it will be OK and medically sanctioned for them to say 'Excuse me, do you think it's wise for you to be eating that?' and to offer them unsolicited health 'advice'. It's already, of course, socially sanctioned for anyone to go up to a fat person and scream bile in their ear simply because they're fat. Ask any fat person. Also ask them how useful shame has actually been in making them thin, because they've probably been getting it since they were five years old.

(Sorry to go on about this, but I'm a member of the fat acceptance movement, which has a lot more clout in the US, and this is a pet hate of mine. Your mental health aspect of things is also relevant in this context, BTW, for a rather shocking reason. It's apparently recently been 'discovered' that as many as two-thirds or so of the 'obese' may have undiagnosed ADHD making them 'eat too much'. The question of whether or not any of them happen to have any other ADHD symptoms is, of course, irrelevant. It could actually end up compulsory for you to take Ritalin or the like if you're not as thin as the powers that be would like you to be to meet their BMI targets. Which have been moving steadily in a downwards direction since the 90s. If that ever starts to happen, I'm off this jacked-up little island. Grr.)

Note the repeated used of that word 'community' in this context. No doubt it's supposed to give us a nice cosy feeling of belonging to something...but of course it's 'belonging' with conditions attached. I grew up in small towns, and I know what that kind of 'community' can be like for anyone who doesn't or won't fit in.

Red Haired Grrl, your message is reassuring in at least one sense. It's proof I'm not the only one noticing what's happening. I'm not sure what to do but at least one thing that gives me hope is the knowledge nothing lasts forever and so this hysteria will one day come to an end, somehow.

A relevant article in yesterday's Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5149210/Britons-living-in-fear-as-record-numbers-suffer-from-anxiety.html

monty, that was a fine post but you made one oversight. I think you misunderstood that this new law isn't about allowing doctors to institutionalise someone who is deemed dangerous to themselves or others. It's also about allowing doctors to force medication and other psychiatric treatment on people deemed dangerous to themselves or others outside of a hospital.

So if you are deemed mentally ill you could be put in a hospital, forced on medication, released, and then if you do something deemed mentally ill while, say, you are working in your office or in your English class in college a psychiatrist or nurse could come in class and forcibly inject you with medication. They can now do that without taking you to hospital or a police station.

Ok, I guess I missed that point ... it is an expansion of medication powers.

Ok, I guess I missed that point ... it is an expansion of medication powers.

I've noticed this in the US too, mostly since 9/11. Stuff like the looping annoucements on trains and buses (please report suspicious behavior....don't litter...don't smoke...we are watching...). It's especially noticable in DC, though nowhere here has it reached the creepy levels it has in the UK. In some ways it's a return to the pre-1960s order, though back then the informal social control was imposed by families, neighborhoods, local communities and churches; now it's all legal, police, medical and governmental.

One factor behind this is an aging population. Old people prefer security to freedom, and as the baby-boomers age they are having second thoughts about the relaxation of social restrictions they pioneered.