To the Contingency Congress and the Cabinet:
The present war, as we see it, is less a war of defense than a war of proof. We are tasked with proving our territorial integrity and of showing the error of those who see no violation in crossing boundaries simply because they deny them. Our basis for our unity rests in no small degree in our shared physical existence. Yet we fall into our own errors in trying to assure it.
A strict adherence to territory has proved more difficult to manage concretely. No matter how precisely we section ourselves off from the former nation that now wants to reabsorb us, we cannot in turn section off the hearts of every citizen we claim.
Pockets of our republic are beset by a malady that we will call “yearning” for a simpler time before our imposition of ongoing uncertainty. We say “pockets” but that does not mean it should be approached lightly. Whether it extends from sentiment, habit, or exhaustion, this kind of ingrained dissension can impress upon the wider population with little effort and to great disadvantage to their governors if we do nothing. This, in effect, opens a domestic front to which we must prove our integrity with as equal vehemence as we do the external enemy, albeit with entirely different methods.
That this is so may not seem immediately apparent. Internal disorder is not foreign to us; we have not hesitated from using an impressive variety of hands-on corrective methods in trying to still it. Some branches of our law enforcement are sure to have come across these elements and understand the shortcomings of the typical approach.
Our reliance on expediency is a major enabler of this problem. Expediency is always the sensible, and seemingly most respectful, course of action when the action needed is quite ugly. But expediency of action works best when the loyalty of those acted upon is taken basically as granted. A majority of citizens we punish have never questioned their citizenry. It is not because they necessarily accept the rules they have broken but because they have developed an intuition of the importance we place upon those rules. You see it in the horror with which they greet their punishment, and the reverence by which they receive it. Ideally they exit back into society as a reminder that disobeying the rules does not dispute their tangibility.
Civic loyalty exists on a gray scale—but it exists. What concerns us is someone whose loyalty is colorless. It is difficult to conceive of because you are not likely to have encountered them. You don’t encounter them because they are not prone to complain. Why air grievances to an entity you don’t want to talk to and who has nothing valuable to say to you in return? Try to punish them and they will receive the punishment with the coldest detachment, as if they are visiting the dentist. Why fear punishment if you don’t care about the rules?
Expediency, whether in war strategy or in internal policing, is purely physical. It is the coating of Kaopectate on an upset stomach. It has little effect on the more corrosive factors that exist in the character and the psyche. The individual conscience is as contested a ground of territorial control as the physical space in which the possessor of the conscience dwells. This condition is more tragic than threatening. Lying beneath the yearning cohabitant may be a dutiful citizen awaiting their cultivation. In relying upon the present, physical methods of enforcement we may be subjecting punishment upon the least deserving.
We aren’t worried about the spread of their fearlessness into the loyal population. Such fearlessness is rare to conjure and requires unfathomable fortitude to replicate. The impression it will make on them—that is, its power to sow mass doubt—is another matter. The mute eloquence of that doubt can become so ingrained that it will shift the moral locus away from those tasked with governing and upon this otherwise indifferent but easily romanticized vanguard. We highly doubt they would welcome the heroism, but heroes are seldom appointed out of the wiling applicants.
Bringing about a better version of citizenship among those who have not matured in theirs at the regular pace was something avoided as much out of a sense of rightness as out of expediency. Holding individuals to even a slightly rigid standard seemed like the very thing we were leaving behind. We realize now the hazards of that avoidance. How much physical exertion could we have preserved by doing otherwise? How much more esteem could we have lavished upon our subjects if we were unwary to expect more of them? Our reluctance to impose upon them may well lie at the heart of their discontent with us.
Cultivating citizenship and assuring it is dutiful is done most successfully by offering a positive vision, stoked as much in zeal as in realism, that their new caretaker offers. And if we can’t offer any such vision at the present time, a process of negative comparison must suffice. We must instill in them the reality that the nation for which they pine has little resemblance to the conception they’ve concocted of it in their minds. The benevolent protector, the bastion of cultural excellence, the fountain from which freedom and security spout perfectly synchronized streams is in truth malicious, vulgar, and irregular. It never had their best interest at heart if they could not sacrifice for its capricious desires. Theirs was a toxic citizenship.
And if that works we are better able to give them reason to sacrifice for us, and gladly at that. First because our needs far outstrip our desires, and second because their idealistic tendencies will be applied in the other direction. We have many gaps in our potential relative to the more complete and powerful behemoth pounding at our door. If we cannot stop them from daydreaming we can put that daydreaming to proper use. It is immoral, after all, to disappoint without offering a glimmer of possibility, however tenuous it may be in reality. Their dreams will be the soothing coat for our own persistent bouts of social indigestion.
Something to consider when you have time.
[Tiberius] and [Brutus]