A Society of Wannabe Vigilantes
I wonder sometimes, with my overwhelming love for all things superhero, whether or not Alan Moore was correct when he created Watchmen.
While the Zach Snyder film and subsequent extension of the story by Damon Lindelof fall in line with the standard view of heroes battling villains too large for we mere mortals, Moore's thesis was that the very existence of powered and masked vigilantes was a recipe for fascism.
With the opening of the Pandora's Box of Social Media, the idea of citizen vigilantism is on the rise. Regular non-powered people challenging police officers armed with their smartphone cameras. The Texas anti-abortion law with its lynchpin of enforcement being citizens suing anyone and everyone assisting a pregnant woman pursuing her own private reproductive rights. Podcasters re-investigating crimes for entertainment. 'Karens' behaving as if each of them are un-elected versions of the Neighborhood Watch. Twitter sleuths un-earthing quotes tweeted decades ago to destroy careers of people in their occupational way.
I love the film Mystery Men, a 1999 comedy directed by Kinka Usher and written by Neil Cuthbert, loosely based on Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot Comics. The story focuses on fictional Champion City where the superpowered Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear) has effectively stomped out all crime. The Mystery Men of the title come into play when Amazing is kidnapped by Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) and this group of wannabe heroes band together to save him.
Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller) pretends to have super-strength when he gets angry but doesn't. The Shoveler (William Macy) is literally just a guy with a shovel. The Blue Raja (Hank Azaria) dresses up as a colonized Indian who throws cutlery at bad guys. The Spleen (Paul Reubens) can fart deadly farts on command. Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell) can only turn invisible when no one is looking and The Bowler (Janeane Garofalo) has a bowling ball inhabited by her deceased father.
It's a fun movie but, at its core, it is about regular people deciding to take the law into their own hands to combat what they perceive as evil. In the presence of over-the-top villains, I suppose it makes sense but when the evil-doers are just other people we disagree with, the cocktail of self delusion mixed with the zealotry of perceived moral high ground is a guarantee for mayhem.
Vigilantism—the private, violent enforcement of public moral or legal standards—grows in two types of situations. It doesn’t come from a government being weak or absent, leaving citizens on their own, but rather when the very principles that make up a government and its people themselves seem to be changing.
And it doesn’t often come from situations where one ethnic or racial group clearly dominates others but rather in times and places where who belongs to a particular community is up for debate. Vigilantism is often about the attempt to establish power.
The KKK. The John Birch Society. The Weather Underground. QAnon. All vigilante groups.
Black Lives Matter. The Black Panthers. Antifa. Likewise vigilante organizations.
There are, however, far more rightwing, white supremacist, anti-immigration vigilante groups out there than leftwing. Like four times as many. No superpowers. Just social media, access to guns, and an agenda to establish and maintain power.
Vigilantism is often about the attempt to establish power.
Power corrupts. We all know this to be true and we see it on display everywhere in the world. Amazon's The Boys is an accurate a snapshot of what it looks like when society gives a greenlight to vigilantism, to frontier justice, to any one person or group declaring that they are judge, jury, and executioner. Is it any surprise that certain groups see The Punisher (no powers except an amazing talent for armed warfare and a grudge) as their patron saint?
By definition, vigilantes cannot be legally justified – if they satisfied a justification defense, for example, they would not be law-breakers – but they may well be morally justified, if their aim is to provide the order and justice that the criminal justice system has failed to provide in a breach of the social contract. Yet, even moral vigilantism is detrimental to society and ought to be avoided, ideally not by prosecuting moral vigilantism but by avoiding the creation of situations that would call for it. Unfortunately, the U.S. criminal justice system has adopted a wide range of criminal law rules and procedures that regularly and intentionally produce gross failures of justice.
These doctrines of disillusionment may provoke vigilante acts, but not in numbers that make it a serious practical problem. More damaging is their tendency to provoke what might be called "shadow vigilantism," in which ordinary people manipulate and subvert the criminal justice system to compel it to impose the justice that they see it as reluctant to impose. Unfortunately, shadow vigilantism can be widespread and impossible to effectively prosecute, leaving the system's justness seriously distorted. This, in turn, can provoke a damaging anti-system response, as in the Stop Snitching movement, that further degrades the system's reputation for doing justice, producing a downward spiral of lost credibility and deference. We would all be better off – citizens and offenders alike – if this dirty war had never started.
What is needed is a re-examination of all of the doctrines of disillusionment, with an eye toward reformulating them to promote the interests they protect in ways that avoid gross failures of justice.
The rub is this: if we allow the self-imposed Batmen and Batwomen to band together and wreak havoc in the name of just causes we are in effect giving carte blanche to those self-imposed Jokers to do the same.
The argument posed in so many of the comic books and graphic novels is that each time we anoint one vigilante, the door is opened for more and some of them (I'd argue most of them) are not looking to leverage power to help those most in need of it but to exact vengeance upon those they disagree with.
