Imagine a group of experts who have identified a pathology that will kill thousands of Americans by year’s end.
These experts have studied the crimes committed over the past ten years, and they can confidently claim they found a particular race, or ethnicity, or sex (there are fifty now, don’t forget) that has been responsible for some discrete number of murders, rapes, and severe injuries in the past. That race, sex, or group has perpetrated these outrages at a relatively steady rate over the last decade, and the experts can extrapolate the level of rape, murder, and maiming to expect in the coming year.
In a certain sense, the experts are for once correct: their models, based upon consistent, reliable, historical data, can be back-tested the way a financier checks his assumptions about a portfolio against its previous performance, and the experts can with a strikingly narrow confidence window attest to their predictions. Some particular group of people, the group the experts have singled out, will indeed be responsible for something close to the projected number of crimes.
The experts continue. Unfortunately, their models can’t show which members of this particular group will commit the crime. Any member could, potentially, be an asymptomatic carrier of pathological aggression. We have no choice but to distance the entire group from the rest of society. To allow this group to live as free men would of course be ideal, and our laws demand it, but public health has its own, more pressing demands.
The group must remain at home. After all, if it saves even one life, it’s worth it.
Now, having just come off house arrest ourselves, we make a feeble objection: this pathology of aggression is neither contagious nor multiplicative; maybe a quarantine is not the solution. The experts reply, and in this they are uncharacteristically correct again, that the assumptions about the communicability of the first disease were simply descriptions about the means by which the first disease achieved its ultimate death count.
But the death count is the thing. Whether it’s the Chinese Flu or this new social disease of aggression, the ultimate conclusion is the same: freedom means death. And our mathematics has arrived at an expected value for just how much. Quantifiable death. Assured death. If we refuse to force the group in question to stay at home, people will die who, but for our selfish fetish for liberty, would have lived.
So you shake your head, and pity the poor folk that must submit to house arrest. You’ve been there. Still, of course, you understand that it is done for the common good.
Unfortunately, the experts come on television the next afternoon (they have a habit of doing this). They have bad news (another of their impertinent habits). Upon further consideration, their analysis really applies to every American. You see, while the first group selected for imprisonment would account for 8,000 crimes, you are a member of a group that would account for 5,000, and of another group that would account for 1,500.
In fact, it appears the entire country must live under house arrest, because any man’s freedom is a threat. After all, any one of us might be a murderer or a rapist, though not yet showing symptoms of the pathology.
Once the experts have spoken, the politicians come to soothe us: yes, you all must stay home, but no need to panic, because only non-essential businesses (read: the one you built by years of struggle and risk; the one that feeds your family; the one you meant to leave to your children) will close. Essential businesses (read: whiskey and abortions) will remain.
If you’re particularly lucky, you’re in Michigan, where a woman who appears to have been grown in a test-tube with the spliced DNA of Nurse Ratched and Mommie Dearest will hunt you down if you try to grow winter vegetables.
Take heart. I’m told we’ll find a cure for risk, crime, and death within the year. Until then, maybe you should hide the wire hangers.
