The right to speak and to be silent

We live in a media saturated world. Portability is everything; information has gone beyond power and plunged into the lower echelons of Maslow's hierarchy, ranking now somewhere just above food and shelter. The words "out of touch" have become a dangerous condemnation carrying with them the connotation of ignorance and irrelevance. And in this vast flow of information, entertainment, and all the shades between, many of the traditional constraints on media have become obsolete. The standards of value and the concept of the "original" have lost their clarity of outline. The notion of quality determined by an experienced and knowledgeable system of filtered authority has been replaced by a system of values funded by populist approval that is both ultimately liberating and sadly too often tied to the lowest common denominator.

In this torrent of information, there is a real truth to the concept of freedom of speech, so clearly delineated by the founders of America and so long supported by the institutions of the country. In the age of the internet, self publishing, and self promotion, there is a new, emerging definition of that phrase, a sense that every voice has not only the abstract right to speak, but the practical means to broadcast that speech. Yet, as always, a cadre of dangerous codicils follows in the train of that new freedom. Without limitation or filter, each voice has the potential to find an audience and be discovered; there is new opportunity for all the remarkably talented voices who were always unable to find a venue to showcase their ability. But that potential must still fight against the volume of information surrounding it. Discovering wonders in the flow of information is like seizing seashells that roll in the tide; the seeker finds wonderful things, but many of them slip through his fingers and wash away, barely glimpsed. Those talents must also struggle against the vagaries of public opinion; popular opinion rarely favors the highest quality or the greatest talent; it frequently uses other criteria with far lower common denominators to pick its great heroes and its favorite voices.

Yet with this newly emerging definition of the right to the freedom of speech comes a subtle, yet insidious assumption. There is, with the idea of the right to speak, in this media saturated medium, an assumption of the right to be heard, a right that is not enshrined in any seminal document or American heritage. If I speak, this new wisdom seems to say, I must be heard. The value of speech in this new marketplace is its power to attract popularity and attention – witness the recent studies placing a monetary value on followers on Facebook. The notion of speech as a means of record keeping and self discovery is fast fading into incomprehensibility. Speech is a brutally public event, an intrinsic part of the rising evaporation of privacy which is so passionately embraced in modern society's desperate need to connect and find companionship and meaning in the impersonal flow of data. We are all free to speak, and there is a sense that we have a right to be heard. If no one hears us, we are invalidated; our personhood is somehow violated, and our existence loses meaning.

All of that is metaphysical to say the least. The changing role of speech and the mutating perception of privacy is intangible. And although the implications of those essential changes in ideology and society may be fascinating or terrifying, they are hard to quantify in terms of their effects on the marketplace. Yet there are visible impacts, both in the perception of the corporate world and in the perception of the individual roles of consumer and creator. Last semester, one of my students wrote a persuasive essay on freedom of speech, focusing particularly on an artist who chose to use profanity and abusive sexual references in his work. What interested me in the essay, however, was that the paper was not a defense of the artist's right to express feelings in any way he wanted to under the right of freedom of speech. The essay was instead an assault on a corporate entity that had refused to act as vendor for the artist's work because of its content. That corporation, the student alleged, was violating the artist's freedom of speech by not selling the artwork.

Of course, this was a single basic composition essay. It was one voice, one opinion. But it was not the essay itself that was interesting; it was the premises hiding beneath it. The essay assumed that the question was not about the artist's freedom of speech; certainly, the artist had the right to create and to publicize the creation in a variety of ways. But the question was of a corporate entity's right to choose whether or not to act as a distributor for a work of art. According to the student's point of view, the answer was an unqualified "no." Corporations have no right to make such choices. Their role, like any other venue, is to act as an unfiltered amplifier of voices, and refusing to do so is not merely a choice based on image, profitability, and corporate values; it is a direct violation of the artist's right to speak because it potentially denies that artist listeners.

I passionately believe in the principles of supply and demand and the capitalist component of corporate decision making. I tend to think that principles of competition and quality usually re-balance the marketplace. I frequently disagree with the decisions companies make, yet I defend their right to make those choices. Take, for example, Apple computers.

In terms of corporate policy and decision making, I am aggressively opposed to Apple's policies. I refuse to purchase their products because I find their strategies offensive. Take, for example, their recent decision to ban applications for the iphone and ipad which have been encoded on software that allows conversion for multiple platforms in favor of limiting all programming to only their proprietary language. Or consider their decision to ban cartoons by a renowned cartoonist on the basis of possible defamatory content. I find those decisions draconian and offensive. But are they a violation of freedom of speech? I feel that they are corporate decisions of policy, not preventions of personal expression, and I defend the company's right to make those choices. There are competitors in the marketplace who, if public desire demands, will provide alternative venues for speech. If something is worthwhile; it if strikes a chord with the human spirit, there are a thousand and one places in modern society for it to be heard, and if it is meaningful, someone will listen.

But perhaps I have too much faith in humanity's appreciation of quality, beauty, and value. Perhaps the notion of value and quality ruling the marketplace has become too overwhelmed in the rising tide of ease and convenience to have the weight to right the market. Perhaps we are too busy being consumers and connectors to attempt to be creators and to stop to consider the value of freedom of speech beyond the 140 character limit of a Twitter post about momentary desire or the most recent accomplishment in Farmville. Perhaps the promise of convenience at the cost of choice is too tempting, and our sense of personal responsibility has become so atrophied that it is willing to submit to corporate venues rather than seeking out new voices and judging them for ourselves.

The amendment preventing the government from abridging freedom of speech has become part of a glib framework of assumptions that needs to be reconsidered at its most basic level. In a world where words, bytes, and personal information are all mixed together into an incomprehensible flow of information in which all speech is a public cry for attention, perhaps we need to consider speech in the context of silence and try to recapture the value it has only in the presence of its opposite. Perhaps we need to consider the value of speaking for ourselves, putting thoughts into words, not in an attempt to connect with others, but in the attempt to connect first with ourselves before we assume the right to freedom of speech, and more seriously, the attached modern assumption of the right to be heard. Perhaps that reconsideration of speech, the recapturing of the value and merit of words beyond the call for connection and the wall of white noise, will rekindle a new sense of responsibility and call out the creator within us to stand beside the consumer that is threatening to dominate our world.

Premises

Teaching my students the art behind persuasion, I always emphasize the importance of knowing one's premise. If you don't know where you started, I tell them, you may be shocked where you end up. And, of course, if you're building an case on shaky assumptions, your audience is liable to turn off your argument before you begin it.

All of that sounds quite clear and impressive in the context of a freshman English essay. It is hardly apparent in practical application.

Social assumptions are the tectonic plates of culture. They are massive ideologies upon which daily life is built, and while thy support everything done in the hustle and bustle of existence, they are unseen and easily forgotten. Certainly, they occasionally emerge in dramatic ideological earthquakes, changing the geography of thought with revolution or pogrom, but for the most part, they remain deep beneath the surface, safely assumed rather than seen. Yet even forgotten, they persist, moving slowly beneath our feet, shifting and grinding against one another as the social landscape shifts across the centuries. They are, perhaps, most visible in the searchlight of history. Recognizing what they assumed occasionally casts into harsh relief what we assume, and makes the thinking individual realize that, in the course of human events, the premise of our social beliefs has changed.

Take, for example, the idea of human nature and personal morality. From the earliest recorded history, the idea emerges that human nature was somehow flawed or imperfect, and that the individual had a mandate to strive for a standard of moral "good." That morality was in keeping with some higher entity – a sense of obligation and improvement in striving for an ideal. Societies were structured around that conviction of punishment, reward, and obligation because of divine standards. There was a pervasive belief that, rather than merely benefiting the majority of society, moral standards and personal virtue benefited the individual and met some deeper, less tangible requirement. They spoke not just to the greater good; they spoke to the soul and the improvement of the individual.

That assumption is highly visible in the opening paragraphs of Common Sense. Paine writes that government and society are quite different from one another. Government, he says, is "the badge of lost innocence," a necessity rising out of flawed human nature to protect ourselves from one another. It comes from man's need to "surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest." His premise intrudes. For Paine, the assumption of a Judeo-Christian "fallen" man, morally imperfect and imperfectable, is an inherent part of the need for government. Government is a policeman, a fall back for the times when individual moral obligations fail. It is not a desirable creation; it is, rather, a necessity rising out of shame. And, naturally then, its power must be limited and built upon the moral standards and obligations of those under its rule. It rises from the individual rather than imposing upon him.

Yet that premise has shifted. As recognized as Paine's pamphlet may be as part of American history, its premises are uncomfortable for much of modern society. The real conviction of moral standards presented by an immutable divine authority that require the personal responsibility of each individual has faded. The undergirding foundation of faith has shifted away from religious morality and into the realm of science, and that gradual change in underpinning has altered the world built upon the premise.

Science dominates the past century. It bears remarkable gifts that comfortably occupy the place that our ancestors reserved for magic and miracle. Over the decades, science has, with increasing confidence, come to offer all of the answers provided in the past by religion with the ringing comfort that its assertions, unlike those of the ideas it replaces, are based on rationality tested by quantifiable human logic. It is tangible, accessible, and repeatable; it vanquishes the intangible with the power of the rational. Yet in so doing, science sets itself up as a sort of new, human faith. It requires belief in the ability of humans to reach perfection and infallibility through experimentation. It also generates a deep, rumbling shift in the premise of the society that lives on its tenets.

If science provides the answers to a better world, then the idea of "right" and "wrong" as coming from a higher authority and relying upon the responsibility of the individual is replaced by the idea of "right" and "wrong" as a means to the greater good. Morality is neither individual nor absolute. It is a matter of serving the needs of the majority. What benefits the largest part of society, is, morally, right.

In all of the wailing and mudslinging of modern American politics, the words "socialist" and "communist" appear with astounding frequency. They are applied to pundits, policies, and politicians. Yet few realize that the ideas behind them are indeed visible across the political landscape, and they are not only common, they are natural outgrowths of the foundation beneath them. America's foundation is secularly scientific; it is no longer operating under the Judeo-Christian premise of individual responsibility and morality of the founding fathers.

In his vivid description of the psychology behind the soviet show trials of Stalin's era, Arthur Koestler discusses the foundational premises of soviet communism/fascism and points out the natural progression of cause and effect between premise and society. His interrogator, Ivanov, declares that "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community….Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible." We have not yet admitted it to ourselves, but we are steadily sliding toward what Koestler's interrogator calls "vivisection morality." We judge all things by the power of arithmetic and statistical efficacy rather than the moral value of the action or its preservation of personal liberty or integrity. Personal integrity has no statistical value, and without a belief in a moral value that supersedes rational quantification, it has no value at all.

Taxation to support social programs and the power of the government to force its constituents to buy products and services are reasonable and justifiable if one stands upon the new premise of society. If individual morality is no more than an outdated superstition without any higher authority to validate it, then government is no longer an unpleasant necessity to protect personal property. It is instead a means of guaranteeing that the greater good is maintained, a scientific, statistical mechanism that strives to make moral decisions based upon the standard of benefiting the largest number in a society. The government based upon those premises has no respect for individual liberty or the principles of protecting property, nor should it. Rather, it is interested in economic efficiency and distribution of wealth to guarantee the best for the most. It is not serving the purpose of some higher power interested in individuals improving themselves; it has, in fact, rejected the idea of any higher power than that of human logic and mathematical improvement.

Math, science, and the majority have replaced God, and their ascendance has invalidated most of the founding documents of the nation. The founding fathers, regardless of their personal religious beliefs which were varied indeed, shared a common premise – a belief in personal moral responsibility in relation to some higher power. They lived and wrote under the assumption of Judeo-Christian notions of the value of the individual and responsibility to an existent, genuine higher moral authority. If we accept the shift in our nation's premise, or at the very least, fail to recognize that our starting point has shifted, then the arguments those men made, the claimed founding documents of America so frequently and ignorantly cited in modern political argument, are essentially useless. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all emerge from the notion of individual worth, personal morality, and the government as the protector of liberty rather than the moderator of the greater good.

Thomas Paine begins his notion of common sense with the idea that "society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness," yet his assertion is increasingly incorrect in a world moving away from the premise of Judeo-Christian morality. In that world, government is the moderator of our wants. Wickedness, by Paine's definition, has ceased to exist as statistical benefit supersedes notions of "right" and "wrong." And we are left with a logical conclusion that allows the government to weigh the benefits of the many as far more valuable than the price of individual liberty.

 

    

A quote for the day...

From Thomas Paine's Common Sense - one of the prime documents of the revolution. I need to read and study this...but even just reading the opening of the pamphlet amazed me. Let me share:

"Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. the one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."


I think that says it quite well. We have confounded society with government on a truly stunning scale. Modern America is using government as a means of procuring wants, ignoring the fact that government, by its very nature, is a punisher. In using it to procure the wants of some, then, it is punishing others. That is the nature of government, and until (or unless) we learn to distinguish what Paine said in his first paragraph, the punishment will continue.

Loose Leaf

I don't fit in. I've known that for a very, very long time. Sometimes it has been a curse, sometimes a blessing, but it's always been a truth. Personally and politically, I'm a bit the odd one. But I've always been a dreamer. My early education focused on the founding of America through a patriotic and passionate lens, and that vision of the land of the free and the home of the brave melded itself inseparably with my own hopes and ideals.

Unfortunately, that proud vision of the land of our fathers became tattered as I grew up. It wasn't the political decisions of any man or woman. It wasn't some terrible war or traumatic truth. It was the toll of time and pragmatism. The bold lines of the portraits of framers and fathers were smudged; the edges of the constitution were tattered. There were no Jeffersons, Washingtons or Adams to be found. Politics could no longer be said to be about bringing ideals into reality and crafting the identity of a new and different people. It was a place of corruption, a place cut off from the practical concerns of the people it represented and the ideological ideas it should be aspiring to. It was discouraging, and the more I looked at it, the more disheartening it grew. So, like so many Americans, I turned away.

The ugliness of government continued to intrude, however. Government's power became increasingly invasive, and as I strove to succeed – to make my own small American Dream coalesce into reality - I found myself more and more frequently encountering both the government's influence and the opinions of those I worked with regarding the government and its courses of action. They felt helpless, apathetic, disconnected. They complained. I complained. But we accepted, cowed by the massive leviathan of federal authority.

Then, on the radio, I heard about the Tea Party movement. I was enchanted. Admittedly, I heard no statement of principles, no particular credo, but I wasn't looking for one. The name was enough. Those two words, "tea party" invoked all of the dramatic images and exciting stories of fourth grade history. It was patriotic; it was glowing with the simple, heroic idealism of historical narrative. And, more than that, it promised something I had long ago given up on: heroic involvement and adventure in shaping the course of the mighty dream called America.

Perhaps logically, that image called to others as well. For all of the much vaunted failures of the educational system, it seems that the Boston Tea Party has enough dramatic potential to fire the imaginations of new generations. I believe that a great measure of that call came from the same source that sparked my imagination – it was a promise of involvement, a promise of heroism and adventure, a genuine opportunity to matter.

In an increasingly oligarchic almost exclusively two party system, the idea of individual Americans having the opportunity to be heroes, to emulate the often canonized, rarely examined "founding fathers" is almost irresistible. Weeks ago, I heard a radio host allege that modern criticism of America is no different than that of 50 years ago; America has always been self-critical. That may be true, but modern criticism bears a deep difference – it brings with it the bitter aftertaste of apathy. There is a sense that the nation is a decrepit juggernaut bearing its constituents to some inevitable, unknown end.

That sense of doom and apathy breeds desperation. It served as the leverage for the promises of change and the sometimes almost religious fervor that catapulted Barak Obama into office. It provided the fallow ground for the images of a 250 year old act of rebellion to draw people into the tea party movement.

With time and success, however, comes rationality. By modern standards, the Boston Tea Party was an act of vandalism and violence. It was a powerful statement – but it was also, technically, a criminal one. It was an act of a mob, and although it sent a powerful message, it was not the act of great men. Without the ideas and the passionate, sacrificial organization of the generals and delegates, the tea party would have been nothing more than another piece of mob violence.

In any ideal involving large numbers of people, the mob becomes a factor. "We the people" somewhere bleeds into "we the mob majority," and the pull of the lowest common denominator becomes an almost irresistible black hole that sucks in the last rays of dreams and ideals into its gravitational pit. The Greeks put harsh limitations on "democracy" in an attempt to prevent the lowest common denominator from dragging their decisions into mob rule. The Romans devolved from responsible representative government into the appeasement of the mob, and found that the mob cannot be appeased. They pillaged their own cities beside the invading barbarian tribes and then begged for government assistance to mediate the loss.

Without clear headed leadership - leadership that understands the concerns of the people and yet strives to protect individual liberty rather than placate base human greed and selfishness with appeasement and protectionism that dehumanizes those it claims to assist - political systems devolve into mob rule. Perhaps modern America appears more elegant with its iphones and internet outlets, but ideologically, we are still in the coliseum. The crowd chants and stamps its feet; politicians yield to opinion polls and fear bricks through their windows, and the people go mad with the smell of blood.

I started this blog because I need to speak. My imagination is still sparked by the idealized image of those early Americans clad as "natives," throwing tea into Boston harbor to show their hatred of an unresponsive, invasive government. But I believe that such dramatic violence without wise leadership and clearly elucidated principles is dangerous and destructive. The "Tea Party Movement" as it has been labeled has not yet produced any such leadership or any clear philosophy other than anger and an un-clarified identification with the revolutionaries at the birth of the nation.

I want to capture that sense of adventure and the idea of being able to re-birth a government of the people by the people. But I think that part of achieving that ideal is understanding it. This place is called loose leaf because I am unwilling to simply stay inside the bag of any party – tea or otherwise. I advocate passion, but I deplore the thoughtless violence of the mob. Perhaps if we can temper passion with knowledge of the men who crafted this dream called America, we may yet reclaim it and return, from the coliseum to the floor of the senate and the verbal violence of the chambers of Philadelphia rather than the stench of Boston Harbor.

The Death of Responsibility

It’s bubbling up again. The questions of health care and the debate over its reform is once again finding its way onto the air waves and into the “top headlines” on my Google homepage. The debate has thundered on for months, each side seemingly believing that volume rather than substance will win support. Yet in all of the voices I’ve heard promising plenty and predicting pogroms, only one has made perfect sense to me.

The person interviewed was, surprisingly enough, a doctor. Questioned about the practicality of the lumbering behemoth of a bill that was, at the time, working its way through the legislature, he gave his interviewer a single, simple answer: nothing will fix the problem as long as demand is so outrageously high. He went on to explain that, in his opinion, much of the difficulty with healthcare, and the reason that American healthcare is proportionately outrageously priced and overloaded is that Americans expect healthcare to take care of every problem they or their family might have, and doctors want to make money, so they meet demand with supply. He also pointed out that doctors feel the need to meet demand because they fear legal repercussions from failing to test everything and provide the medication results promised in a pithy television advertisement.

I remember the doctor’s words because he reached beyond political partisanship to point out a deeper, simpler truth. Part of the problem with healthcare is cultural, not financial. We can legislate the hell out of our system, but until we can change cultural attitudes, costs are not going to drop.

The cultural attitude that costs us so much in medical bills is one that frightens me. It is an attitude of entitlement; a slide of responsibility out of individual hands and into the hands of some, not quite defined beneficent power that has, despite its human origin, risen above human concerns to absolute altruism.

Practically, such an idea sounds ridiculous. Ask just about anyone, regardless of political leanings, whether they trust the government, and you’ll get a hoarse laugh and an incredulous look. Trust the government? Of course not. Yet many of those same people are more than willing to allow the government to assume responsibility for their safety, their medical care, and their job security. That rising gap between practical understanding and government responsibility is chillingly visible to me. Every semester my students tell me that the constitution guarantees them the right to happiness; they justify everything from gay marriage to carrying a gun under that promise. You can chalk that up to the failure of our education system; you can laugh at student ignorance, but in the end, I believe that the mistake is the highest form of Freudian slip. It represents an increasingly prevalent attitude in American society; we have the right to be happy, and someone needs to make it so. Whether that happiness is the result of financial disbursements of money, the guarantee of safety for a small price of privacy, or pills to make us happy and well behaved, more and more people believe that happiness is a right, not a responsibility.

In those three small words, “the pursuit of,” the founding fathers definitively put happiness in the hands of individuals. They guaranteed us the right to chase our dreams, to pursue happiness with all of our substance, but they did not guarantee we would get it. Obtaining happiness is, in the end, up to us. It is our individual responsibility and choice – and in the grander scheme of things, history teaches us that it is often the pursuit, not the obtaining, that makes men great.

Yet that greatness is increasingly lost. Many authors have speculated on the impact of antidepressants on creativity and suggested that many of the great artists in history, had they lived today, would have been medicated out of their misery and, along with it, their creativity. More and more often, our culture focuses on a top heavy structure of responsibility that promises the right to happiness guaranteed by a well organized social system that increasingly combines with science to take the place of religion. Individual greatness and heroism is good, for what it is, but such greatness (particularly when based on actual actions rather than media creation) is damaging, for it makes others more responsible and less happy, wishing for something they may not have. Take, for example, the attempted bombing at Christmas this past year. The bombing was foiled by individuals on the plane, individuals who took responsibility for their lives and that of their fellow passengers. Those women and men acted heroically. Yet I do not know the name of a single one of those people. Instead, modern culture immediately sought a hierarchical response. Rather than focusing on the heroism of the individuals who stopped the bomber, cultural media immediately began contemplating what part of the machinery of airport security had failed and how the government could step in to guarantee safety. It was not enough to honor the idea that individual responsibility saved lives. It was the job of some great benevolent machine to prevent the need for individual heroics because, of course, individuals cannot always be counted upon to be heroic.

On the radio several weeks ago, I heard a commentator discussing an article which examined the overall negativity of American culture. “I don’t see a difference,” he declared, “being critical of the country and its leadership is a healthy part of our culture. We’ve always done that.” Indeed, we have, but as I told my uncaring radio, the sense of helplessness, of loss of ownership, has never been so intense. As we lose individual responsibility as a cultural value, we also lose our sense of cultural empowerment. The idea that the government actually represents the people in any meaningful way is fading, replaced by a sense that there is an inevitable power structure, having very little immediate connection with the people, whose purpose is to enable the individual right to happiness. There is a rising sense of fate, a notion that the leviathan of government is far too massive for individuals to influence, and that notion of accepting the inevitable seems to be rapidly tumbling into nationwide depression and the evolution of a culture of systemic, rather than individual, responsibility.

Ironically, that loss of responsibility finds expression in practical terms as well. We find ourselves in the grip of structural responsibility, in a place not unlike that created by Soviet authority. In his book The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild tours a Russia emerging from the shadow of Stalin, and he notes the general state of collapse of the cities and even the public areas of the apartment buildings. He writes that in stark contrast to the squalid public areas, Russian homes are immaculate; those spaces are theirs. It is their “feeling about public property that was the problem. Until this changes, real democracy in Russia, a democracy that does not just go through the motions of holding elections but is built on people’s confidence that they themselves control the state, and not somebody else, is far off” (187). Sadly enough, the same could be said of modern America. We have lost the confidence that the people control the state. Instead, we feel impotent, coddled in the promise of happiness provided by the state, yet frustrated by the endless ineptitude of a bureaucratic dragon we feel we cannot slay. We are not emerging from the shadow of some tangible regime; we are sliding into the shade of cultural irresponsibility, seeking happiness that we view as a right, yet have no desire to pursue and make our own.

So when the radio begins to tell me about the impact of healthcare reform, I switch to the 80s station. It is not that I don’t care – quite the opposite. It is simply that I do not believe that healthcare, or much of anything else, can be meaningfully reformed until someone has the courage to face up to the cultural illiteracy that lies beneath the partisan dog and pony show. Until Americans realize that they are responsible for their own health and that their time is better spent in pursuit of happiness than pursuit of populism, legislation isn’t going to change a thing. People will continue to demand pills to solve everything and social safeguards to protect them from failure – and from spectacular success. As long as we live in fear of the effort and risk it takes to pursue happiness, we’re never going to catch it, and we’re never going to be mentally or emotionally healthy from the effort of the pursuit – no matter what they legislate.