A Nation of Meddlers

"There are also a growing number of meddlers, professional and otherwise, who engage in education and public awareness programs. Health promotion experts who regale against the horroRs of obesity, alcohol, fat, fabric. There is little doubt, for example, that smoking, drinking, and unsafe sex may be bad for people's bodies. But it is an arrogant act of meddlesome faith to then claim that such indulgence is necessarily bad for their minds, selves, psyches, and souls. Meddlers are true believers who confuse the frequent validity of their particularistically derived views with a proprietary right to impose their generalizations full bloom on others. In a nation of puritanical meddlers, SHOULD is the predominant word, and the consequences of those things that one "should not do" are regularly generalized far beyond any reasonable evidentiary standard."

"Meddlers seldom see acts as discrete, but view them instead as slippery slopes. Certain bad behaviours lead ineluctably to other worse behaviours. Smoking leads to drinking. Drinking leads to alcoholism. Alcoholism leads to child abuse, broken marriages, codependency, violence, and highway carnage. Better to nip it in the bud. Meddlers are quintessential bud-nippers. Life is viewed by the meddler as a series of progressive or regressive diseases for which early intervention is the only antidote."

"In a nation in which selfhood is becoming more and more defined by what people DON'T do than by what they do, defending oneself becomes a matter of attacking and controlling what others do.

The meddler's own self-denial becomes the justification for denying others the opportunity to do whatever it is that the meddler is not doing. In this sense, people meddle because their very self is threatened. Deviance, from whatever standard is asserted or presumed, challenges the life of the meddler, not by threatening to sweep him into the abyss of inequity implicit in the meddlee's dissolute behaviour but by its very existence."

"These days, however, people are not only known by what they don't do, but also by what they don't TOLERATE: 'I don't drink, smoke, use drugs or eat the wrong foods' is not enough. Now self is preserved by adding emphatically: 'and I don't tolerate those who do! If the meddlee seems to be happy, interesting, fun-loving, and perhaps even healthy, satisfied, and fulfilled, this only increases the grim-faced challenge offered the meddler. A colleague of ours recently acceded to the nagging of family and friends and made an appointment at the university's 'Wellness' Centre to have a complete physical work-up. After passing all the physical tests with flying colours, he was instructed to fill out a questionnaire about his life. He confessed that he drinks quite a bit, smokes cigarettes, doesn't exercise, and eats unapproved foods. Because of his excellent physical condition, they at first accused him of lying, and when he convinced them he had been truthful, they insisted that he was of a rare type that dies suddenly with no warning even though in perfectly good health. Such responses are increasingly common among meddlers who don't get their way."

"Since meddlers perceive meddlees as engaged in actions the meddler regards as negative, dangerous, unhealthy, and the like, meddlers are indomitable peddlers of antithemes. The negative theme is ostensibly more powerful than its positive counterpart.... We meddle out of a self-righteous certainty with which the meddlee can hardly argue...To oppose MADD is to somehow condone highway carnage 'caused' by alcohol.... Failure to denounce smokers at every opportunity is translated into an endorsement of cancer. The threat ostensibly posed by passive smoke become a grim symbol of our times--innocent people being done in by the seemingly innocuous habits of others. The ubiquitous signs, warnings, and notices prohibiting something or other have become a commonplace feature of the American landscape. One of the authors, in the hundred feet between the outside door and the elevator to his office, last counted ten different signs forbidding certain forms of noxious conduct. These antithemes have come to permeate our society....the world has become a war zone for meddlers armed with a special anti-interest and a totalitarian vision of a world made safe by stamping out those who differ. Everyone seems to have an antitheme. In fact, assembling, associating, and organizing to not do something, while seemingly illogical, has become quite fashionable these days. Yet, ironically a language of freedom is increasingly being used by meddlers to cloak their anti-ideology. Adjectives such as SMOKE-FREE, ALCOHOL-FREE, RADON-FREE, PRAYER-FREE, and FRAGRANCE-FREE are proudly touted as identifying settings in which certain behaviours or substances are disallowed. This post-modern freedom for people not to do something that they were never required to do in the first place replaces the more classical freedom to do what one wishes. Bumper stickers abound with the international 'no' symbol--a red-slashed circle, the perfect icon for an age in which people are coming to be known more by what they aren't than what they are."

"Vocational meddlers...meddle for money, and this simple fact alters considerably the relationship between the meddler and the meddlee, moving it--no matter how much its honestly motivated and sincere incumbents would wish otherwise--from a relational to a cash nexus. Vocational meddlers include a vast and growing array of personnel ranging from social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists to lawyers, administrators, and government bureaucrats. The latter, operating on the belief that the presence of rules and regulations produces safety, security, and assurance, attempt to extend their own sphere of influence while claiming the noble justification of protecting the innocent. Despite the loftiness of motive, however, the primary task of all vocational meddlers is staying in business. Offices must be kept running, positions must be kept filled, budgets must be increased, promotions and raises must go on a pace. The first concern of the meddling trades is steady work, and meddling is perhaps the closest thing there is to a recession-proof business.

The only thing that could conceivably depress the economic forecast for professional meddlers would be an outbreak of health, harmony, and happiness. Unfortunately, these virtues have been so narrowly redefined by these same professionals that they are now more utopian abstractions than achievable realities."

"The meddling professions thus constitute a kind of industry that interferes with some in the name of protecting others. In the process, they inevitably develop a vested interest in conflicts and difficulties between the rest of us".

"This has not always been a nation of meddlers. Indeed, America was founded by some of the most virulent anti-meddlers ever assembled....'Leave people alone' was the byword. The first coin minted in the United States, the Fugio Cent in 1778, carried the phrase 'mind your own business.'

Designed by Benjamin Franklin, the sentiment on the coin made it clear that this was to be a nation of limited government for a nation of people involved in their own self-directed activities."

"The anti-meddling sentiment of the founding fathers has been displaced by a wide variety of interventions foisted on us from a host of sources. Aversion to risk, for example, has become a national obsession and has made meddling in the name of health and safety a virtually unchallengeable argument as well as a growth industry for those who would protect us. The regulatory environment of the government bureaucracy, coupled with tort legislation, has turned injury and accidents into a national lottery in which too many citizens hope to transform their tragedies into jackpots. Such a deplorable situation has been allowed and encouraged by growing numbers in the citizenry who wish to be protected from nearly every imaginable risk to which human lives are subject. Accidents no longer exist, it seems, for everything is seen by the legal profession as 'preventable.' Tort law in this society has thus become unparalleled in its meddlesome consequences. As Peter Huber points out in THE LEGAL REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: 'No other country in the world administers anything like it. Tort law was set and more grew rich in selling their services to enforce the rights they themselves invented.' Huber observes that claims that other people's wrong-doings are responsible for life's difficulties generates, in effect, a 'tort tax' on goods and services that amount to a $300 billion levy on the American economy. It accounts, says Huber, for '30 percent of the price of a step-ladder and 95 percent of the price of childhood vaccines.' All in the name of health and safety."