It has been truly fascinating to see, on the internet, people who have previously justified the United States' lax gun controls on the basis of the necessity of an armed population to resist a tyrannical government to do an about-turn and suddenly decry violent expressions of dissent as illegitimate. Considering the coronavirus lockdown protests of the month before and the current round of protests now, both violent but occurring for very different reasons and involving different sections of American society, I think the vision of mass popular uprising against an oppressive government that right-libertarian supporters of the Second Amendment envision is, in the strongest sense of that phrase, a wish-fulfilling fantasy.
Anyways, responding to the actual topic at hand:
First of all, it should not be contested that the case of George Floyd is incidental to a society run by men. It is the natural consequence of the existence of evil which is found, from time-to-time, among police. To suggest otherwise, or to suggest that this case is incidental to a society steeped in racism, would require evidence that lies far beyond what the facts of this case alone can tell. Yet, in the past week, Floyd's death has led many to believe that society in the United States is not only steeped in racism, but that it is endemically racist. On these grounds, evildoers have rioted in cities across America, resulting in night-long curfews, which have resulted in the law-abiding being quartered in their own homes while rioters run roughshod throughout the streets.
It is my opinion that your view of why these protests are happening is deeply limited. For most people sympathetic to the protesters, George Floyd's death did not make them believe anything. It was
already believed, for perfectly good reasons, that United States policing was deeply racist and Mr. Floyd's death was merely the spark that set off the fireworks. People are not out protesting the death of one particular man, they are protesting an institutional injustice of which Mr. Floyd just happened to be a highly visible example.
These riots are not an auspicious beginning to America's future, and, worst of all, they are symbolic of the destruction of a republic that has stood for over 200 years. [...] Rioting and looting on the back of George Floyd's death only stains his memory, undermines the cause of an otherwise innocuous protest, and burdens businesses that are already struggling in the wake of COVID-19.
There are, of course, people who are simply making noise for the sake of noise, and rioting for the sake of rioting. Since I don't think that there will be any disagreement from anyone on these forums that these people are the worst dregs of American society, I will for the moment exclude them from consideration and discuss only those rioters who are violently rioting as an extension of and in support of the protests. I will also acknowledge that the current protesters and people who are supportive of the protests are not a unified bloc and there consequently are radically differing opinions on whether violence as a means of protest is appropriate; as it so happens I am a part of the group that believes that it is not.
That being said, even if I disagree with their actions I can understand and am sympathetic to those who choose violence as a means of protest.
First of all, why is nonviolence good? I would argue that the reason that it is good for society to be nonviolent is because it gives people security. In a lawful society, disputes are resolved by law, and therefore people are reasonably assured that public authority will not punish them as long as they follow the law and that, even if they break the law, they will be punished only as prescribed by law. This frees the population to build their lives in confidence; they do not have to fear that their life will suddenly be turned upside-down by arbitrary actions from public authorities. This is why we resolve disputes peacefully and this is why nonviolence is good.
But for those people who do not feel that following the law makes them secure from public authority, what incentive do they have to remain nonviolent? If they already feel that they do not enjoy the benefits of the rule of law, why would they ever make an effort to uphold it?
Second, if peaceful protest and dialogue fail to accomplish anything, then what means do people have except force the issue by violence? When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, as the saying goes, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
Rioters have been able to justify their actions not only against small businesses, but also churches and the World War II Memorial, by re-affirming to themselves that the "system" which allows business owners—most of whom are of a minority status—to operate, is the same system under which Floyd was murdered. The only issue is that their argument presupposes the existence of a "system" that does not exist. They riot against it, they personify it, yet their failure to define the omnipresent "system" is precisely what allows them and hangers-on to realize their dreams of anarchy. Rather than blame the "system," they should blame themselves: you are to blame if you make bad decisions in life.
An analogy that I like to make is a steam engine. A single molecule of water vapour charts a random path through chaotic Brownian motion, and physically speaking there is nothing wrong with seeing steam as a collection of individual water molecules each with its own velocity undergoing Brownian motion through collision with their immediate circumstances and neighbours. If you intend to
fix a steam engine or even just understand why one isn't working, however, this view is extremely unhelpful; to do these things you need to view steam in the abstract, as a collective mass of substance that demonstrates collective behaviour.
So it is with human beings. An individual is unpredictable and in possession of some degree of free will, but people as a group behave in statistically-predictable ways in accordance with large-scale forces. The decision of whether or not to have a child, for example, is an extremely personal one made for extremely personal reasons, but I don't have to personally know a single European woman to confidently predict that Sweden will have a higher crude birth rate than the Netherlands next year.
The lives of people, just like the paths of water molecules, are determined to a fairly large degree by their environments. There is the obvious limitations of environment - one can't take a job that doesn't exist, marry a person one's never met, and so on - but environments also influence so-called individual choice. People are raised in a society and live by interacting with a society. Consequently, making a decision that is independent of social influences is no less absurd that making a decision that is independent of the decision-maker's own life. The United States doesn't force anyone to believe in any given religion, for example, but people who grew up under Christian parents tend to choose to be Christians more often than people who grew up under nonreligious parents. Clearly this "individual choice" is not truly individual, but is heavily influenced by incentives offered, cultural attitudes imbued, and personal experiences given by society to individuals. The choice of what religion to follow isn't the same choice for someone who grew up in a devout family as for someone who grew up in an atheist one.
In much the same way that abstract macroscopic features of steam like temperature and pressure are representative of real, individual, and microscopic environments of each water molecule and influence the path they chart through an engine, abstract macroscopic features of a society, such as racism in law enforcement, are representative of real, individual, and microscopic environments of each American resident and influence the path they chart through life.
This is what is meant by social system.
The Declaration of Independence states clearly and unequivocally, "all men are created equal"; it does not say that some men are created equal, or that all white men, or all Americans, or all Christians are created equal. A quick review of literature from the period demonstrates conclusively that by "men" the revolutionary generation meant "mankind"; that is, humankind. See Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), chap. 3.
[other quotations snipped for length considerations]
[more discussion of early American politicians also snipped for length considerations]
Are you generally in the habit of taking politicians at their word? That is a highly unhealthy habit and I would advise you to break it as soon as possible.
Even if we accept the dubious claim that the founding fathers of the United States did not believe in black inferiority, I think it is obvious that for a society to be racist, it is not required for any particular member of that society to hold racist opinions (although I will note that considerable numbers of Americans do in fact hold such opinions). For a society to be racist, it is only necessary that people
behave in racist ways, whether or not they believe in racism.
Early American society was systematically biased against black people. There were real reasons why a black slave was less likely to become successful in the newly-independent United States than the white plantation owner he worked for, even if they were of equivalent strength of character. Therefore, early American society was racist. It doesn't matter whether a white plantation owner
believed in racism or not, when he was
perpetuating it by exploiting the labour of black slaves.
And this is what is most sinister about the social systems that you so casually dismiss. It's possible that the founding fathers of the United States genuinely believed in what they wrote. It is possible that they genuinely believed that slavery should be abolished. But many of them nonetheless continued to own slaves and lord over black people because in the society they lived in and the country they helped establish, it was highly profitable to own slaves and politically difficult to advocate for the abolition of slavery. With such economic and political incentives dangling in front of them, they
freely chose to act in ways contrary to their conscience - and as a result millions of black people continued to suffer under horrifying conditions.
If this is understandable when it comes to early American leaders, I don't understand why so many conservatives find it difficult to understand this when it comes to people of the Information Age.
TL;DR: Examining people's behaviour independently from the social context in which that behaviour occurs is a pointless exercise in futility and people should stop doing it.