'Keep Your Head Down' and 'Do not get in their way', are I realise, perhaps not the optimistic slogans people like to hear. I consider myself a geek and based o

'Keep Your Head Down' and 'Do not get in their way', are I realise, perhaps not the optimistic slogans people like to hear. I consider myself a geek and based on my own experience and also discussions with other geeky people, I think geeks and hackers and generally creators have a difficulty accepting what the state is doing based on two key traits of (many) geeks: idealism and belief in rationality (perhaps these attributes contributed to Sonne's behavior). The world, of course, as far as its political organization and practices go, does not operate based on science, rationality, or fair play. If anything, you might best understand the government's actions by considering individuals' psychology, and how those individuals will behave when given power over others. What you see in Toronto, and in Sonne's case, is part of a never-ending conflict between individuals with respect for liberty and individuals with a need for authority. Authoritarians and libertarians have been clashing as long as humans have existed. A spoiler: the authoritarians win. Consider this passage from Bertrand Russell: "I am naturally pugnacious, and am only restrained (when I am restrained) by a realization of the tragedy of human existence, and the absurdity of spending our little moment in strife and heat. That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about my rights—it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things... There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the ‘intellectual love of God.’ Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle." A soldier was insulted when Archimedes insisted he finish working on his math problem before obeying the soldier and meeting with a general, so the soldier killed him. Today, while immediate techne are different, those two psychologies still exist. And while the soldiers might not kill you, their apparatus will not hesitate to imprison you and ruin your life in other ways (or in the case of Giuliani and Tomlinson, will indeed kill you). And so, as Russell points out, better to spend your limited days on eternal things, like Archimedes, then to fall into their game and be distracted by petty struggle. Hunter S. Thompson summarises the protesters of the 1960s: "The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move — either figuratively or literally — from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope... The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been." As Gavin McInnes says "Boomers, who are masters at glorifying their past, insist they stopped a war, but we all know it was Kissinger’s relentless bombing that ended it." Protest does nothing. The success of the hippies was not their conflict with authoritarians (our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrates how they won and always will win) -- that was a complete failure. The success and value of the hippies was their ability to create autonomous zones and safe enclaves from which they could explore personal growth and become, as Russell advises, absorbed in eternal things.