Trego's Mountain Ear

I think it was high school that set me on the path to libertarian thought.  At 13, I encountered an environment that limited most of my time to other people’s activities.  The hardest one to take was the mandatory pep rallies.  Somehow, they always seemed to interrupt more pleasant activities.

I guess high school was really the closest I ever came to what Irving Goffman called a “Total Institution.”  Other folks I have known have had more experience with total institutions – but a 1-Y deferment kept me from immersion in boot camp, and I never got so crossed up with the legal system to get familiar with the prison system. 

Goffman viewed the total institution as having very established boundaries and being set up to change human behavior.  Since I started high school at 13, I traveled on the bus, which took me to a campus in Eureka.  As one grew older, a driver’s license and a set of wheels provided release from the confined area – but that didn’t occur for me, as the youngest of my class, until my junior year.

The definition of a total institution, taken from What Is a Total Institution? is “a closed social system in which life is organized by strict norms, rules, and schedules, and what happens within it is determined by a single authority whose will is carried out by staff who enforce the rules.”  Kind of matches the description of my high school days.  Get on the bus, transported to a confined location, and be controlled by a single authority.  The difference between high school then and a real total institution is that you can go home at night.

When I started studying Goffman – a mainstay in symbolic interaction – I got to the point of trying to understand what they were trying to do with pep rallies.  Still haven’t figured out why it was included, mandated,  in my high school experience.   The authorities must have thought that the pep rallies would resocialize me – since resocialization is part of what total institutions do.

I suppose students are supposed to be socialized into identifying with the school teams.  I don’t see how that benefits them – and that gets me into libertarian thought.  Folks who were trying to teach me what to think, what identity to hold, actually pushed me into valuing personal liberty. 

The problem is that it is easy to organize statists into political parties, while its a real challenge in finding a payoff for people who place independence as their highest value.  And I think mandating my attendance at pep rallies put me on the road to libertarian views.  So this chart may explain what I learned in high school (where they limited my personal freedom):