Good Cop, Bad Cop – Waking Up to The Error of Blind Allegiance

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

“To live outside the Law, you must be honest.” ~Bob Dylan

We are living in revelatory times. The mask of authoritarian rule is slowly dissolving. The veil is being lifted and the immoral power gained from deception and appropriation is slowly being replaced by a far superior moral power gained from truth and prestige. More and more people are waking up to the fact that power gained from violence is immoral. The era of blind allegiance is coming to an end. But it’s a slow and frustrating process for those few of us who have already remedied such a fear-based, slave-prone disposition and eliminated it from our mindset and lifestyle.

The most apparent crack in the tank-like armor of authoritarian rule lately, has been the gradual realization that police are nothing more than hired thugs paid to uphold the outdated laws of the authoritarian state. As it stands, the authoritarian state represents immoral power gained from smoke-and-mirror deception and violent appropriation. Cops are paid to uphold this immoral institution. Even worse, they are expected to be proud of it.

Here’s the thing: there are good people, but there are no good cops. In order to be a “good cop” the officer would have to hold people accountable to outdated, stupid, and in some cases, downright violent and immoral laws. Which would make the officer a bad person. So the officer is caught in a catch-22. Either the officer chooses to be a good person and does not enforce those laws, in which case he chooses to be a bad cop; or the officer chooses to be a “good cop” by enforcing those laws, in which case he chooses to be a bad person.

The only “good cop” is the human being who realizes the error of his/her ways, calls out the hypocrisy of the thin blue line, and then courageously turns in his/her uniform and badge, realizing that they could no longer in good conscience work for such a corrupt and immoral authoritarian state.

The tricky part is separating the cop from the person. It’s all too easy for us to attach our ego and our pride to our titles. For example, the typical cop will read this article and be overwhelmed by a flood of cognitive dissonance bolstered by their pride and their ego’s attachment to “being a cop.” All their conditioning will come to the forefront and guard against thinking outside the box that they were trained in. It’s all psychological, an emotional reaction by an emotional animal attached to its symbolic ideals, no matter how outdated, wrong, stupid, violent, or immoral those symbolic ideals are.

A good person cannot be a “good cop,” but a bad cop can still be a good person by ignoring outdated, stupid, violent, and immoral laws, which just makes being a “good cop” irrelevant. Let’s break it down…

“Good Cop”

“The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. The primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.” ~Derrick Jensen

When it comes down to it, the purpose of policing in an authoritarian state is not what most people imagine it to be. The slogan “protect and serve” comes to mind. The problem with this slogan is who/what is being protected and who/what is being served. Put simply: the plutocrats are being served and their property is being protected. What are they being protected against? Everyone and everything else. They are being protected from the poor and the powerless. They are even being “protected” (their profits, anyway) from the environment, of all things.

The irony is that most cops fall under the category of everyone else. So, really, they are being paid to protect the rich and powerful (plutocratic authoritarian rulers) from themselves. Not only that, they are being paid to be the frontline of both a state-driven money racket and a state-driven protection racket. This is unprecedented. And yet here we are, a conditioned and brainwashed collective, cops included, buying into state-driven nonsense (propagandized as “law”) at our own expense.

A “good cop” is a person who has been deceived into imagining that their job is honorable. A “good cop” will even use violence (forsaking their humanity for the badge) as a first resort if they deem it necessary, thus becoming judge, jury, and executioner (the epitome of power corrupting). A “good cop” blindly upholds outdated laws, petty laws, stupid laws, and immoral laws, just because their chain of command tells them to. They myopically uphold “law and order,” not realizing that so called law and order in a corrupt authoritarian state is almost always unhealthy and immoral. A “good cop” is a paid money racketeer, issuing tickets and appropriating money from non-violent people on behalf of the state, just because some arbitrary, usually outdated and stupid, man-made law was “broken.” In short: A “good cop” is a blind, order-following, cowardly, statist sycophant, and a hired thug.

The cognitive error of blind allegiance is unprecedented within the police and military forces. It is bolstered by an even more powerful cognitive dissonance that causes the “good cop” to stick to his/her statist conditioning. Upholding outdated, stupid, and immoral laws “feels right” to them because they have been, as we all have been, brainwashed into thinking the state is a moral entity, even when it uses violence to appropriate our wealth and the wealth of our environment.

As it turns out, thinking for oneself and leading oneself as a decent human being is counterintuitive to blindly following orders. So the “Good cop” is faced with a moral dilemma. The only way to be a good human being is to be a bad cop, in which case one might as well just discard the entire concept as ludicrous and simply (perhaps not so simply) be a good human being.

Bad Cop

“Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.” ~Derrick Jensen

When a good person wakes up to the error of their blind allegiance, they will either cease being blindly allegiant or cease being a good person. Because blind allegiance can lead even a good person to do evil things. This is because power tends to corrupt. Similarly, when a good person realizes that they are mistaken for being a “good cop,” they will either cease being a “good cop” or cease being a good person.

A person who has woken up to the grievous error of blind allegiance looks square in the face of the chain of command and says, “Chain of command, shmain of command!” They realize that the chain of command was only ever a psychosocial cartoon in the brain to begin with, a broken procession of ignorance heeding idiots, and, to be purposefully crude, a real life human centipede going through the motions of shitting down itself.

As the good folk at Storm Clouds Gathering made clear, “Power does not flow from the person who administers orders. A command is inconsequential if it is ignored or laughed at. Obedience is the real foundation of misplaced power. It is in fact the chain of obedience, not the chain of command, the accumulative force of cowardly and compliant citizenry, which allows men to take control. The problem isn’t the chain of command. The problem is the chain of obedience.” So it goes.

As it stands, there are few things more honorable than a “Good cop” becoming a bad cop in order to be a good person. We need more of this in the world. Forget the “good cop/bad cop” propagandized shtick from your statist conditioning. The true bad cop is actually a good person choosing not to be a “good cop” (bad person). It’s so twisted up it’s stupid. That’s the problem with state-driven conditioning. A good person literally has to rewire, indeed reprogram, their conditioned perspective in order to be a good person. Much reconditioning of the statist conditioning must be proactively worked through. Even cops need to recondition their conditioning.

A good person, upon realizing they have been a “good cop,” must become a bad cop in order to continue being a good person. Should the (now awake) bad cop choose to continue the charade of policing at all then? That’s on them. But it clearly dissolves into irrelevance, unless the bad cop chooses to be covert and educate/undermine the immoral authoritarian system from within. But chances are the “good cops” will catch on and recognize it as a violation of the thin blue line, and it would all be for naught anyway.

Either way, a good person must shed the immoral skin (title) of “good cop.” And so we come to a deeper understanding of Krishnamurti’s famous declaration, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted (“good cop”) to a profoundly sick society (Authoritarian state). Therefore, it is a measure of health to be a good person (bad cop) and defy those who are well adjusted to a sick society.

Read more articles by Gary ‘Z’ McGee.

About the Author

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.

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This article (Good Cop, Bad Cop: Waking Up to The Error of Blind Allegiance) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary ‘Z’ McGee and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.

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