Last week I wrote in this place about enforcement. This was interpreted by some as a plea for repression, a nonsensical explanation that deserves no further attention. Yet it is important to highlight the other side of the same coin and say something about the condition for government enforcement: equality of law and a ban on arbitrariness.
Last week hundreds of Groningen residents in the earthquake area stood in a long line for compensation after all the gas extraction misery. Those who did not know about the queue, or who were at the back of the queue, will not receive anything for the time being. Our government apparently thinks that ‘first come, first served’ is a decent procedure, rather than a vulgar way to drive a sale.
The same kind of instruction applies to the corona vaccinations. The good citizen who wants his booster will not receive a call from the government, but can get an appointment via all kinds of shortcuts. As a result, the well-informed and bolder citizen is the first to be boosted, and the brave, waiting citizen is still waiting for a letter from the GGD, with the risk of becoming much sicker from corona than his more assertive fellow citizen.
These are just two of many examples that prove that the Dutch government has arbitrariness as an essential element in its administrative culture. Randomness associated with ideas about fighting, winners, and losers. Arbitrary that also inevitably leads to waste, as is proven by the new nitrogen fund in which 25 billion is reserved for the buy-out of farmers. Arbitrary too, apparently deemed more acceptable than the oft-cursed but fair bureaucracy, the vessel through which it communicates.
The scandalous treatment of the Groningers becomes even more painful when you compare it to the treatment of the farmers. Gas extraction in Groningen is a problem for all of us, because the whole of the Netherlands has benefited from the benefits of gas extraction for decades. However, the high nitrogen emissions from intensive livestock farming are primarily the sector’s own problem. Yet it is the farmers who are compensated many times more generously, because they are the most brutal and can paralyze the land with their tractors.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the Dutch, who are not shy at all, increasingly confuse brutality with assertiveness. The result is a blurring of standards; what was considered bold twenty years ago is now seen as assertive. Twenty years later, it is probably a dire necessity to get something done. Don’t forget how many people thought Sywert was ‘a smart entrepreneur’ last year; in twenty years he will probably get a statue. The government is partly responsible for this change in mentality, because the brutal ones are rewarded time and again.
Anyone who asks will not be skipped, but will even be given priority. Even the most well-behaved citizens, for example active in the cultural sector, see no other option in this era than an uneasy conversion to bastardhood, and are now also going to act ‘normally’ against the rules. The fighting mentality, the brutality clad in the euphemism of civil disobedience, is apparently seen by the government as a basic requirement of modern citizenship. But when the elbow citizen continues to beat the good citizen, civilization loses.
The rule of law is not there to strengthen the natural law of the fittest, but precisely to correct it. The lump sums for wrongdoing and the continuous rewards for bad behavior by the government reinforce a vicious circle, in which any form of enforcement eventually becomes questionable.