Paradise Requires Violence
Furiosa and Protecting What's Yours
Furiosa is the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road that no one asked for but was actually good… and truthful.
The movie opens with Furiosa as a young girl living in a green, beautiful place, foraging for apples with another young girl when the sound of motorbikes alerts her to the presence of intruders. We know from watching Fury Road that this paradise is one small patch of plenty in a vast wasteland, one that must be kept secret.
Were the men on motor bikes to be allowed to live, they would report back to the other men about this paradise, this place of abundance. And like a swarm of locusts, they would tear through it until nothing remained.
Furiosa knows this, and so does her mother. And together, they endure horrible suffering to keep the secret.
That’s the thing about any paradise or utopia. It can only exist for a few. Let the masses in, and it will just turn into hell.
The Tyranny of “Should”
Just like the motorbike-riding marauders, our real world is full of people who see something they want and decide that means the owner or resident of that thing should then give it to them.
This unfortunately large cohort of humanity believes that “I want” is a perfect synonym for “You should.”
“I see you have a house that you only occupy for half the year. I want that house. You should give it to me.”
“I see you have money that you’ve earned through commerce. I want more money than I have. You should give me yours so I can pay off my debts.”
“I see you have large, bouncing breasts. I want to satisfy my arousal. You should hold still while I grab them, perhaps while calling you names.”
The foregone conclusion that we must all defend what is precious in order to preserve and protect it has somehow become lost. There are certain ideologies that have the flip-side of the coin when it comes to “should.” Specifically, that we “should” be able to preserve our little paradise without lifting a finger.
That other people “should” do the right thing and leave us be.
“Women should be able to walk down the street buck naked without being harassed!”
This nonsensical assertion completely ignores human nature as well as applying some weird revisions to history, insisting that in times past, men were better, more refined, and would never stoop to leering or groping (or worse).
Of course this is ridiculous. The Victorian era is often mentioned as a time when men were gentlemen.
If you’ll recall the Virgina Woolf masterpiece Orlando, when our main character inexplicably switches from being a young man to a young woman, Orlando is startled at the fact that he (now she) can’t walk anywhere alone. When Orlando attempts to do so, random gentlemen sprint to her, offering the protection of their arm.
Women did not walk alone. Not ladies anyway. It was understood they needed protection and the men were duty-bound to provide it.
Those same Victorian gentlemen carried canes as part of their attire. Or long, heavy-handled umbrellas even when it wasn’t raining.
Do you think they had a hard time walking? That there was some outbreak of polio?
No.
They carried these accessories to beat brigands about the neck and shoulders should they dare accost a lady or attempt thievery.
Duels were also a thing, first with swords, then with pistols, when a man stepped out of bounds.
It wasn’t that people were better back then; they most certainly weren’t. It’s just that there were consequences. The people knew that in order to preserve what was precious, violence would be required.
Somewhere we lost that.
Good Fences, Good Neighbors
This two-pronged “should” war has dissolved the formerly high-trust society I grew up in, and it’s not something I’ve taken to.
I rather liked living in a high-trust society, one where private property and bodily autonomy were just a given. Not everyone had that blessing in their youth, never knew what it felt like to leave your front door unlocked, as no one would ever dare enter without knocking and awaiting for an invitation.
Some women have never experienced the ability to walk outside their front door in short-shorts and a tank top, knowing that if a man stopped to talk to you, it was for a nice catch-up, an inquiry into your grades, and a request to tell your father he said hello.
The “should” people very often never experienced that, whether raised here or abroad, and they don’t think you ever deserved it in the first place. They also get palpably angry when we laments its absence now. They call our collective memory of the safety of the 80s and 90s a delusion.
But it wasn’t a delusion. It was just that there were expectations baked into society. We didn’t have to say to each other:
This is my house, not yours. You have no right to enter or approach without my permission.
I am a person; my body is my own. You have no right to touch it unless I say so.
This is my country, not yours. You are not entitled to what we have simply because you covet it for yourself.
We didn’t have to say these things because individually and as a society, it was made plain there would be consequences for violating our sovereign personal and property rights.
It’s not enough to build a paradise. That very act is an invitation for others to come and take it for themselves. We have always known this, and yet our comfortable, too-long prosperity has convinced a powerful few that it is enough to use calming words and the occasional offering to the wolves baying at the door.
It isn’t. It will never be.
The carrot is all well and good to motivate good behavior among the in-group.
But it’s the stick that makes us safe from the outside.
I *loved* this post! So many things were different back when I was growing up in the 90s-early 2000s, and I had no idea people were calling it "delusional." How can they call it delusional when they didn't even exist?
Even in the 1980s and 90s, we knew where the boundaries were. Men protected women, their towns, and their neighborhoods. The strong protected the weak from bullies. It was just the way life was.