Kill The Cop In Your Head.

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The original concept of this "There is a Policeman inside all our heads; he must be destroyed" is that you should free yourself from the corporate and societal boundaries that are put on you to make you the way you are, this concept was later overtaken by corporate america. The concept i am instead talking about here is the more recent (commonly) anarchist theory that you have become a tool of the state to help punish people and to help state surveillance.

Super quick tangent

I personally hate the term leftist, but i use it cause its quick and easy. This isnt to say leftist is a bad term, or that we need to make a new word for the general idea of the left. I just think that the term has become so muddied that i hear progressives use it even though their literally still center right.

Also, im an anarchist. I dont believe a state will save us, that includes a left-wing authoritarian state.

back to it

There is a cop in your head. Its not your fault that he is there. He was put there by corporations and the state. It is however your job to get rid of him.

The cop in your head wants you to police yourself. He also wants you to police others. And it works. He gets off on the punishment of those around you, he gets off on the punishment of yourself.

We Enjoy Punishing People.

We all do. We enjoy the sensation of people being punished for actions that we see as wrong. Why though?

Lets say, for sake of an argument. There a writer who uses social media to talk about their books they write. They like to share reviews of these book. Unbeknownst to them, one reviewer had reviewed a book once, which was written by an outward bigot. Praised the book and the person behind it.

We already do not like this reviewer, and to be clear you don't have too. They sided with a bigot, you not watching them is not punishment its just your prerogative. Well the writer shares the review of their book by said reviewer. People go to point it out, and while they apologize they also admits to not understanding the issue of sharing a single review by the person to thank them for a good review.

This misunderstanding of the issue at hand turns into something bigger, suddenly a mob of people are just attacking and berating this writer for this. It has gone from a productive conversation on the support of someone to an all out attack on this person who doesn't understand what exactly they did wrong, and they aren't getting any new information either. They are just getting attacks left and right. This culminates until they leave the platform, and people cheer that they berated them enough to leave.

Why would you be happy for that? What productive conversation happened here? No instead of allowing this person the room to grow and understand and do better in the long run, we have created a barrier for this person to us. We have locked them out of learning and growing for a self righteous witch hunt.

We have now inflicted a punishment for what accounts to a miss-step.

This is an obvious example of a small issue, its also an actual example of something that genuinely happened. Why do people enjoy this? I would say a couple reasons

1. it lets people feel powerful.

There are few things in life that let us feel like we have power over things in our lives. Siding with the collective mob and inflicting punishment on a person for a wrong doing is one of them.

The feeling of being able to police another person, and in turn get them to be ostracized, is a feeling of power that people don't get to feel that often.

In a world where we are consistently loosing power over our own lives. Consistently being stripped of our own rights. With little to do on an individual level of how to stop it. The feeling one gets from being able to punish someone for a wrong doing, helps us to cling to that power.

2. We have been taught to enjoy it.

We live in a surveillance state, and the best way to keep that surveillance state is to have the people do it for the state. How do you have people do it for you? You teach them.

You make the person realize that authority can be used against them at any time, and they can use it against others just as easily. You reward people for helping the surveillance state. It works really well. So well it is ingrained into all of us.

Punishments Don't Work

Get ready for me to talk about gentle parenting and prison abolition, its inevitable lmao.

Most studies on punishment are on children, during development. Which is fair, most studies on adults in this sense are more on prisons working instead of punishment as a whole.

Punishment in child development

It is scientifically proven that punishment doesn't stop kids from doing the thing again.

Discipline vs Punishment

This is a concept in children's development where you should use disciplinary action instead of punishment.

Punishment in this is a verbal or physical action that is to hurt or put down the child for what they did. It is quick but ineffective as it doesn't teach the child what is the right thing to do, and it doesn't actually help in the development.

Discipline is the act of teaching your child what they did wrong, and what is right to do, and how to avoid harm in the future. It is a slower process but it is far better in that it teaches your kids how to do the right thing in the future

Punishment only teaches a kid to lie to avoid further punishments in the future.

Prisons

This is an introductory talk to the idea of prisons and prison abolition. Likely, knowing me, I will make another post actually about prison abolition.

Rehabilitation vs Punishment

Time behind bars are a punishment which takes someone out of society to try to "fix" the behaviour through further punishment. If you do something bad in prison your time is increased, and if you do something good your time is decreased if your lucky.

There are a number of accounts from long time prisoners that talk about they would constantly see the same people in and out of prison. Prison time in-fact has been shown to more often than not promote reoffenders as prison time makes it far harder for some to get back into society easily.

One of the other sides of this is rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is commonly still a form of punishment when it comes to some places as their prisons do rehabilitation as apart of their work. However a prisons primary function is not rehabilitation.

Rehabilitation works in actually trying to work on the issue at hand and they work on the behavior and the root cause in the person for what caused them to do what they did.

The Surveillance State and You

The state can't actually do mass surveillance to the degree it needs to keep you inline. The people in charge understand this, so instead they want to use the people against each other.

To do this they indoctrinate everyone into the ideas that uphold the state. Things like morality = law, or punishment working, or authority being an ultimate need. Anti-government, anti-law, anti-state sentiments will not be taught to you, instead they teach you to be a patriot/nationalist/authoritarian.

Authoritarian, and nationalist governments rely on the people to become traitors to their fellow humans. They rely on you to either report crimes done, or to punish the person yourself for said crime. They also rely on you to be too scared to break the law, wether that law be actually needed, or it be a small nothing law that nobody cares about. All laws to the state are a moral question of good vs evil. Breaking a law to them, makes you evil. So breaking a law to the cop in your head, makes you evil.

Evangelism

Christianity and Evangelist in today's age talk about the "prefect christian" which if you actually read the bible you would understand it doesn't exist. We can't ask Christians to read the bible, then they would have to actually understand what their reading.

The perfect christian is a christian who follows Jesus's teachings to a Tee. This isn't possible, but its a prevalent belief that you must try to be a perfect christian and with that any deviation is a sin. That sin needs to be called out and punished.

Punishment in christianist is extremely literal as well clearly. Hell is the punishment, but before that the belief of punishment is also a way to get back into gods light. This belief especially in america, but can be found in other extremely christian nations, causes major issues as it has created a belief that punishment is the only option.

The Cop In Your Head and Leftism

This cop, is made for the state. So why is it an issue when you are no longer tied to the state?

There is no such thing as a perfect person. We all have a journey to make in life, and through that journey we make wrong decision and do bad shit.

A perfect leftist doesn't exist. We are born into a society that teaches us bigotry from the day we are born. A society that indoctrinates you into the status-quo and right wing ideology.

There is no chance that any leftist in 2025, doesn't have a past that isn't painted in the mistakes they have made. Does this suddenly exclude them from being on the left? If so then no one is on the left.

There is no leftist in history that was perfect. We can only grow and learn to be better people. Apart of the human experience is the mistakes we make, and growing from them.

Kill Him.

You have to confront this within yourself. Easier said than done, it has to be done though. Its apart of our growth as leftist to break our chains from the state.

The cop in your head is one of those chains, this chain holds you back, and makes you dangerous to other leftist.

Growth.

People, can grow. Even the worst person you know, if given time to learn, can become a better person.

Now yes I know some people can seem pretty far gone. As well some people, we don't feel like should. Its a valid feeling, if Trump suddenly turned around into a pro-trans, anti-border, leftist. I wouldn't welcome him with open arms, I am not stupid, thinking that our current beliefs wash away actions of the past.

That doesn't mean that growth isn't possible. It takes time, and effort for someone to grow.

Forgiveness

You should, but you don't have to forgive people. The issue becomes when you think your forgiveness needs to align with understanding people change. You need to accept that someone can grow into a better person without believing that means you forgive them for what they may have done.

Forgiveness comes on a personal level. Your forgiveness doesn't change if someone else has done the work. In turn them doing the work doesn't mean you have to forgive them. At least not till your ready, and when you find they have made the correct changes to let you forgive them.

Change is Good

We should promote change in people. It can be hard to help people change, so im not saying you have to take your time help someone. If you can you should give them resources and talk to them. Just talking with people like a human, having a normal conversation, can help people change.

Punishing someone for a wrong doing doesn't promote those changes, it only causes them to feel ostracized. Giving them the room and help to change or fix what happened allows them to feel like that can open up to this.

The Writer from earlier.

If the conversation stayed helpful, it could have been great. They where clearly coming to the side of people pointing out that the reviewer was bad, they where listening to feedback. Only once it became hostile did it become a moment of them being ostracized and pushed from the platform.

Its Gonna Be Tough

Doing the work is hard. Unlearning things ingrained into our brains from a young age is not an easy thing to do. Never will be, and even when we think we are done we realize we arent.

These are life long ventures that we do, and get better at. Its something I work on, its something people I know work on, Its something you need to work on.

You need to kill the cop in your head.