To Interior Secretary [Agrippina] and all relevant parties,
I don’t think it a good idea that a head of government should assume the role of a kind of national teacher. First, it intrudes upon more urgent managerial duties (which I know are less glamorous but once you set them aside it is hard to pick them back up); second, it speaks lowly of citizens to see them as students. The trouble is that this totally reasonable ideal is more feasible the less troubled the state is and the more contented its citizens are to educate themselves as their pedagogical needs demand. We are a great distance from that condition, but even so I still refuse to be a professor to the people. So I find a dismal medium: not teaching but clarifying, and only on this one important part: torture.
But what a teachable moment torture is! Physical fear, moral disgust, and a reluctance to disturb people about technical matters of politics make it difficult to talk about, but I see no way around it other than through head-on confrontation and in the most candid possible terms. As a besieged “startup” republic we are especially susceptible to the practice irrespective of our stated mores on the subject. Ignoring it altogether is a costly exercise.
My clarification will be delivered in two parts. First is clarifying what torture is and why a state tortures.
Torture may be physical or psychological in method. It may be applied against external combatants or internal enemies of the state. A torturer will be inclined to hesitate less in carrying out the rigors of their vocation with the former rather than with the latter. But the desired outcome of dominating the tortured does not alter between the two.
Torture is an extension of battle, not its aftermath. It is finalizing rather than echoing, like the period completing a paragraph. The torturer engages in an intense, individualized, protracted fight with the tortured. Why and how the tortured fell into that position is not important outside of the tortured’s own conscience. What is generally called “viable intelligence” is merely the lyrical concessions of surrender.
That is pretty simple compared to the second clarification of how torture comes to function in our situation. For as we know, attraction is harder to explain than sex.
Torture is generally understood as one of the unbreakable taboos of the Human Rights era. After devastating wars, correctives from the victors were handed down to all nations on how they were to behave with each other and within themselves. Nations that went against these correctives were seen as being struck by a malignant morality. After the Cold War, when the Human Rights era reached the peak of its influence, this became the conventional status. This did not stop atrocities from taking place, but any nation caught in the throes of an atrocious tantrum was subjected to a global-scale stigma. Not even mandated reconciliation could entirely wash a nation of this stain.
But a weakness of the Human Rights era and its liberal thinking was its over-reliance on generalizations, and the assumption that they could be broadly enforced. Such principles could overcome the inconveniences of local contexts, histories, and personalities, went the assumption, even if the local personalities found some of the human rights being granted to them unintelligible.
A regime that seeks to uphold concepts so vast, across any situation, no matter how idiosyncratic, is bound to exhaust its mandate and appear less reliable. Because we presently exist in the twilight of Human Rights, we are fortunate to have more latitude with our conduct. We are now free to face our territorially specific adversities with the severity of containment relative to their urgency; and are the adversities ever urgent.
Allegations that may appear in conversation, media reports, and official correspondence can be acknowledged for what they are: the functions of a state in adolescence. We know adolescents to be extreme, and to be crude in that extremity, but we tend not to know them as evil.
Of course governing beyond the valley of good and evil increases rather than absolves you of your responsibilities. We are compelled to be meticulous even in carrying out a torture regimen. That is our most urgent problem, for our torture practice is indicative of our heavily franchised internal policing. One unfortunate suspect may find themselves in the Arby’s precinct with one menu of crimes and penalties while another may end up in the Chick-fil-A precinct that offers a wholly different menu and is closed on Sundays. And one can get switched off into the other for any number of incidental hiccups. It is clear that we cannot get rid of these gruesome practices at this point. Certainly not while the surrounding chaos is still in play. But we must take ownership of it—we must centralize pain.
Trust between the citizen and the state is maintained as much by the plausibility of action as by action itself. Bureaucratized torture must be consistent in proportion to its quality. A code of standards as to the delivery of pain, the intensity of pain, and the desired outcome therefrom must be observed and practiced by a special class of servant. A greater degree of discipline is required of the nationalized [despair agent] compared to the compartmentalized mercenary. It is not simply a matter of separating sense of purpose from the pursuit of pleasure, but of balancing judgment, intellect, self-control, and detachment. Screening for no more and no less than these qualities will assure us a reliable system and, quite naturally from there, fill the vacuum of moral authority. Moral authority is established by never exceeding expectations; it is accepted by never falling short of them.
That this program takes us further afield from the textbook conception of justice only makes it more suitable. What is just is what is least offensive to the greatest number of the community. A justice introduced from outside the community is unjust if it does not cohere with that community’s self-conception, however much it cuts against the transnational grain. An injustice that coheres with the community is more just than justice that subverts it. The [despair agents] are not officers of justice but its facilitators. They make the proper arrangements that allow for a truly personal and cognizant social order to exist and endure. This starts by a simple enough gesture of sending the [despair agents], once they are found, to impose upon the franchisers what they imposed upon the people. A new moral example must be set but torturing the torturers.
[Tiberius]