The skinhead, the gypsy and the liberal are waiting at a bus stop

A parable with many morals.

I’ve had a parable to own ‘em libs for quite a while, so I decided to present it in English. The characters should be familiar to an international audience. The liberal is from Budapest, but no further setup needed.

The skinhead, the gypsy and the liberal are waiting at a bus stop

in the small, rural town of Bumfuck, Hungary, on a Saturday night. There’s tension, as it should be, thinks the liberal, those two hate each other. Now I’m best friends with gypsies, on paper, as I should be the best friend of every minority, and I hate skinheads, as I should hate every bigoted neo-nazi. That’s a 2 to 1 advantage to our team with the gypsy, thinks the liberal.

You’re the liberal.

While you’re wondering how to approach the gypsy with your alliance proposal, him and the skinhead start whispering to each other. Then they decide to kindly ask you to hand over your wallet and your phone. Before you can make sense of what’s just happened, they’re off to the nearest pub to have a drink together.

So, what has just happened?

Morals

This parable has many insights to how the real world works, I’ll list a few:

• Skinheads and gypsies come from the same social strata: the bottom. They probably know each other already. They don’t know you, you don’t know them, you’re the outsider, the fresh meat. Your ideological framework means little to both.

  (the individualist assumes everyone else is also a stranger to one an other)
  (the ideologue sees oppressed an oppressors where there are equals)

• Poor Hungarian kids from a disadvantaged background become skinheads for a similar reason that make gypsy kids join gangs. Joining a gang is a defense mechanism, to stop being an individual in an environment where gangs rule (a bit like how ethnic gangs form in prison). It’s natural, it’s necessary and not such a serious deal as it may be perceived by an outsider. (individualists overestimate the severity of ethnic group association)
  (ideologues overestimate the importance of symbols)
  (privileged people judge the poor for options they do not have)

• Poor people, dumb people may be ignorant of a lot of things, but they do understand condescension and they’re — rightly — offended by it. Elites are oblivious to this and think the lessers wouldn’t notice this, if they approach with enough kindness, and it can backfire.

• Whether the gypsy and the skinhead hate each other or not is unimportant; they weren’t fighting, so why were you trying to stir shit up, liberal? Looking for a conflict where there isn’t one, as a visitor?
  (looking for a problem where there isn’t one)

  (the ethics of interventionism)

• Being poor is a stronger identity, a stronger cohesion than gang, ethnicity or ideology. Poverty can’t be solved by substituting it with a higher ideal, ideology has zero calories.
  (even the perfect ideology is useless if no one on the market is looking buying any)

• Oppression can be a local phenomenon, independent from the usual effects an individual would expect based on their ethnicity, ideology or privilege in the greater society.

  (academia hypothesizes who’s the victim, nature decides)

I’m sure there are many other ways to interpret this parable. Have fun!

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Cover: Google Street View, somewhere in Hungary. Free subscription to anyone who can locate it.

Note

There’s no miscommunication between the parties. No cat speaking in dog. They all speak the same language. They all perceive each other for what the they are. Apart from the whispering between the gypsy and the skinhead, it’s all in the open and the situation is universally understood by all. They wouldn’t even need to whisper, they could discuss mugging the liberal in front of him, openly, it wouldn’t change anything. Even the liberal’s inner monologue could be known to the other two, the result would be the same.

It’s not a situational game where you can make the liberal talk himself out of the bad outcome, the outcome has long been encoded in vectors beyond the control of the participants.

Note 2: intervention

What if the gypsy and the skinhead are already fighting?

1. The liberal may keep his distance, he’s not from a rough background and thus afraid to intervene (tolerance from a distance, having a moral stance segregated from the actual troubles)

2. The liberal intervenes, but it makes the gypsy and skinhead stop fighting and adjust to the new situation. Back to mugging the liberal and going for a drink.

3. Whose side should the liberal take? He has no idea why they’re fighting, maybe the skinhead’s in the right. He can only have assumptions based on stereotypes, skinhead = guilty, gypsy = innocent. Which goes against anything our modern justice is based on.

   If the liberal is still fine taking the gypsy’s side without knowing any details about the conflict, should we entrust him and the kinds of him with any kind of judicial power?