The Red, The White, and The Blue

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Dom Rottman

23 April 2026

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A high school religion teacher I had once showed us a documentary about Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment. He was fascinated that ordinary, well-meaning people could be moved to acts of violence simply because “the man in the lab coat told them to.” Being a libertarian (this was the early 2010s, when it was still cool to be a libertarian) he had more than a few quibbles with authority, especially when that authority was the state. The following week, the sermon for that week’s school worship service involved a discussion of systemic racism (this, I suppose, was done before it was cool) with a grisly story of a young black man who was beaten ruthlessly after being caught jaywalking.¹ Flustered and aghast, my teacher spent a good portion of class that day on a tirade about the misleading nature of liberal rhetoric before concluding that “maybe it’s not about this black on white shit, but that someone was beaten half to death for jaywalking!”²

He was, in usual libertarian fashion, half right. It is about someone being beaten half to death for jaywalking. That’s how racism works. And had he linked this extraordinary display of authority to his awe at the authority of the man in the lab coat, he would have understood that. It is not just authority, but the violence behind it that makes the noble complicit and otherwise kind people hateful, sometimes to the point that they become violent themselves. Direct violence, the real presence of visible human harm, is the best explanation for inequality both today and historically.

This thesis is difficult because it is almost too simplistic. In the realm of the vita contemplativa, be that academia or the popular imagination, violence always seems to need explanation. Why would somebody shoot a gun, swing a sword, or carpet bomb a foreign country? Sadism is extraordinarily rare, so a violent person must have some reason for being so—perhaps they had a Machiavellian rationale, perhaps they were inspired by some “violent” culture, ideology, or belief, or perhaps they had a violent misinterpretation of such things. While entertaining, this question is rather bizarre–violence is one of the few things that doesn’t require explanation. Shooting someone, hacking at their limbs, or launching hellfire missiles at a Yemeni convoy have determinate and rather obvious results if successful: human harm, and potentially death. What we are often after when we try to “explain” violence is rather what justifies violence from the perspective of the perpetrator—morals, society, ideology, disorder, WMDs, the alleged presence of terrorists, chemtrails, or anything else from the wide index offered by behavioral psychology, philosophy, religion, conspiracy, etc. Since the violent actor isn’t obligated to give an answer—certainly, no one is going to press him on the matter—justifying violence is condemned to be a discussion for the ages—and it’s one I want to put the brakes on having (despite recently participating in it myself), because I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The muteness of violence is part of why it’s so hard to think about. It is, as David Graeber says, an imaginary “dead zone.” Again, saying that violence explains structural inequality seems almost too banal. Sure, acts of direct violence perpetuate antiblack racism, insofar as such acts are visibly dehumanizing; likewise, the historical effects of slavery have all but trapped black Americans into a lower socioeconomic class. Still, that might not resonate with everyone—and not just because they aren’t black. Are we truly responsible for the violent inequalities of the powers that surround us and those that came before? The answer, soberingly, is yes.

This isn’t a moral claim per se, nor is it a call to enforce “white guilt” or whatever. What I mean by responsible is that authority causes us, even dupes us, to act and behave in ways we otherwise wouldn’t. These actions are sometimes violent themselves, like the subject in Milgram’s experiment. Historically, slaveholders in the United States were not only large plantation owners but also owners of smallholding and subsistence farms—farms that, without the cheapness of slave labor, would not have been able to survive. There is never any excuse to “own” another human being and treat them as property—but people are willing to do lots of things when faced with starvation. This moral critique—that structural violence turns us into unethical, violent actors—is important but, again, slips into a justification for violence. It is an extreme example of how violence is shaping our behavior and actions. The question we want to ask is simply, “what are we doing?”—because, if we’re creating a world that nobody seems to like, I don’t believe we’re taking the question seriously.

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A debate recently circulated across the internet about whether one would rather run into a bear or a man while alone in the woods. It didn’t take long for this to be asked in bad faith: the punchline was that women would much rather choose the bear,³ triggering the usual defensive scripts among men: white-knighting, “not all men,” statistical analysis of being raped vs mauled by a bear, misogyny thinly veiled as sympathy, incel discourse, etc. This thought experiment—which is the philosophical term for a glorified hypothetical—is the highest quality ragebait in years because it’s impossible for men to “get it.” The variance in responses not only between men and women but also within both groups are explained by the same reason: context is nowhere to be seen or heard. However, just because the context is invisible and unspoken doesn’t mean there isn’t any. Of course there’s context. There’s always context—that’s why these hypotheticals are so fucking infuriating in the first place. The reason a woman might prefer the bear is because of the tremendous mental energy required to extricate oneself from the historical context of millennia of being on the receiving end of male violence, violence that is visible to the slight, precise degree that maintains its structural power while suppressing a majority of it from the public, not out of shame, but as is necessary to maintain its authority.

Here’s another way to think about it: Would you rather leave your daughter alone in the woods with a man or a bear? This version of the dilemma is more of a hypothetical outright, but I think it’s one that others—especially men—might answer differently, because I think all parents of daughters have faced a version of this. How many would-be actresses have had their dreams deferred because of men like Harvey Weinstein, not because they dealt with him directly, but out of fear that they might meet such a person? How many parents worry themselves sick over their daughters’ career choices, supporting her dreams through gritted teeth, secretly hoping she might go down a better path, because there are such vile men out there? How many times have they stayed up all night during a sleepover, or clenched their jaw leaving their daughter in the care of a teacher, camp counsellor, or unfamiliar chaperone? My mother was more cautious than average when it came to my involvement with strangers—I can only imagine she would have been like if I was a girl. It’s easy for a child to see her parents as overbearing because encountering a sexual predator will rarely, if ever, happen—and 99 times out of 100 it won’t. But the 100th time is when she meets Jeffrey Epstein, and that’s the fear that haunts every parent on the planet. How could parents have taken this fear seriously if these horrible things did not actually happen?

The United States has recently uncovered historical evidence of this phenomenon occurring in real and historic time. It is no longer a conspiracy, but an empirically verifiable fact that authority and modern inequality rests on raping little girls. This phenomenon is not historically new. The Roman paterfamilias, who had absolute, dictatorial authority in his private life, to rape his wife, beat his children, own and command slaves, maintained inequalities and the exclusion of undesired groups. This is the patriarchy in action. It is not an ideology. It is not reducible to misogyny. It is a structure of literal, physical violence that institutes inequality and shapes everyone’s behavior.

The idiom that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” therefore describes not just the perils of inaction or Machiavellian consequentialism, but also the distortion of innocuous or even benevolent behavior into that which serves an order of domination and inequality. Parents who discourage their daughters from certain career choices—to keep with our example—are effectively maintaining inequality insofar as this contributes to their exclusion from areas of life otherwise available to all. Such complicity of parents in maintaining gender inequality does not, however, come from an inherent belief in or fear of patriarchy. Quite the contrary—it comes out of love for their daughters. So cruel is violence, then, that it can manipulate the most noble and virtuous intentions and deeds into serving the world that they would otherwise try to resist.

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Far be it from me to tell parents how to raise their children—or tell anybody to do anything. If it really was as simple as just changing our behavior, theories of systemic inequalities—racism, the patriarchy, class stratification, etc.—wouldn’t be sticking around for so long. As sophisticated and helpful these theories may be, it’s only the second most important part of inequality. Acts of direct violence turn whatever it supports into stupid ideas. It’s why police brutality is the defining trait of law enforcement rather than, you know, any of the actual good things they do. There’s nothing wrong with upholding the law per se, but there is something wrong with beating the shit out of someone for jaywalking. Authority so established, at the point where fist meets flesh, reinforced by the state and law (“well, what did you expect?”), is an undispellable disservice to those who we are constantly told serve and uphold our communities, as if we might—with very good reason—begin to think otherwise. Sure, “not all cops.” There are likely very few, even including those we don’t know about. But the law has let enough of them off the hook that the exception has become the rule. If the government can give a pass to police brutality, it’s reasonable to believe that any given instance thereof could get one also, and, by extension, that any given cop is capable of it. Law enforcement is therefore shaped, rightly or not, into hostile, violent antagonists. Needless to say that people would be more hesitant to report crime, much less ask for help. If anything, the most reasonable response is to resist—which, as an observer might know, is usually the best way to provoke a violent response.

In other words, the police are viewed differently because of their authority to exercise extreme violence, which has rippling social and material effects. A community that doesn’t care to interact with law enforcement is going to have a crime problem (whether the crimes are legitimate or bullshit), and as more police are mobilized, a disproportionate amount of crime continues or increases—because more are caught—which means more violence (excessive or no; what matters is that it is legitimized by the state), reinforcing an antagonistic relationship between certain communities and law/enforcement, reinforcing law enforcement’s perception of those communities… You get the picture. It’s normal for groups of people to recognize each other in different ways, of course. But when one of those groups beats another into submission, the relationship becomes unequal. And when everyone else is watching, they’re going to think very differently of them also. Sure, you might not think anything less of the victims; they might even be the kindest people you’ve ever met. But you also might have good reason to not associate with the group that gets beaten with wooden sticks and shot to death every now and then. And if they resist, you are likely to lose any inclination to do so yourself. And when this keeps happening—“well, what did you expect?”

Such is the spiral of violence, not that violence begets violence from other parties—although it sometimes does that—but that violence establishes inequalities which makes further violence even easier, and paves the way for the legitimation of authority and the inequalities it upholds. Why there isn’t mass civil disobedience today in conditions which have historically called for it is rather simple: we don’t want the shit beaten out of us. The best we can seem to muster is a protest brunch that acquiesces to the authority it claims to be against. Change from within aims at cracks in the dome and bores through to a world beyond. Action which does not do this is as good as action of reckless defiance—along with acquiescence, both legitimize the violence behind authority, however well intended. It is indeed about people getting beaten to death for everything from the mischievous to the innocuous and even the truly criminal. It’s why we’re doing what we’re doing without thinking about it, making it difficult to determine what we could—much less should—be doing. It’s what’s behind economic, racial, gender, and all kinds of inequalities, and it’s what’s behind men—because it’s almost always men—in suits, uniforms, and lab coats. The subjects in Milgram’s experiment could have walked out at any time unscathed, despite the forceful insistence of the man in the lab coat. In this sense the experiment was both real and unreal. It is real in the sense that, 99 times out of 100, an encounter with an authority figure will be ordinary and without violence. It is unreal, however, in that defiance in a relationship of inequality guarantees that the 100th time ends in violent subjugation. While the subject may recognize that this immunity is an anomaly, as far as she knows, there is still violence involved. She administers the shocks because she knows that she could just as easily be at the other end.

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