Using Game Of Thrones To Make A Point (SPOILER WARNING / S05E02) (Societal Trust)

First, I will begin here by briefly discussing the recent episode of Game of Thrones without spoilers, so that the preview on Facebook doesn't spoil anything. Further, I am going to discuss the events of the episode (I hope,) without spoiling anything later on. I will try to remain within the context of the episode as much as I can.

Since I watch GoT two days after everybody else, but I've read the books, I have a strange dichotomy when it comes to new episodes. My friends will all come talk to me about it, wanting to know if I've seen it yet, and of course the answer's no, but at the same time I know most of the events that will have happened.

Fun.

So, this most recent episode, "The House Of Black And White," featured pivotal moments in the lives of five characters, although their effects in a couple of cases are a long way off.

Have we gone far enough beyond the preview now?

I wonder.

Without anything that isn't given away in last week's preview, Arya Stark's pivotal event is the most obvious; she finally arrives in Braavos, and thus at the eponymous House, which you may have guessed to be an assassin school. It's more than that, but we'll leave that for later.

The characters whose pivotal moments were the most immediately apparent were Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen; he becoming Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and she making a political mistake so vast that it warrants this entire post.

So.

The build-up for the mistake is that one of her loyalists, Mossador, murders a prisoner awaiting trial; the prisoner was a Son of the Harpy, and a pawn of the former slavemasters of Mereen. Having chosen to give the prisoner a trial, however, Daenerys knows that the rule of law cannot be subverted by simple emotion if true justice and freedom is to prevail in her domain, and accordingly, she brings Mossador before the people, denounces him, and has him executed in accordance with the law.

The mistake she makes in doing this, of course, is that she doesn't make the case for law to her audience; the former slavemasters don't care, and the former slaves see only that she has killed one of their own. In an instant, she goes from beloved leader, to threatening despot.

It's an awful moment, and one I'd been waiting for, because I wanted to see how it would play out on TV.

But watching it, I felt that not everyone would take the message that I took from it. Accordingly, I felt the need to explain.

A while back, I wrote an article entitled Tribalism, in which I discussed the idea of trust in a society, and the ways tyrants control their populations by splintering them into smaller, more easily controlled groups.

What I didn't do, there, was include the value of the rule of law itself in that discussion.

So.

As I said, the true error Daenerys Targaryen made was that she didn't make her case to the public. 

Her audience consisted of her loyalists, most of whom remain so dependent on her continued success, as with any ruler; the freed slaves, who see her as a symbol of their freedom, but also as a symbol of their fight against the oppressors who had ruled them before; and the former rulers, who see her not as a new ruler, but as an obstruction.

She has a strong, fine sense of justice. But very little in the way of political instinct.

What really happened there was an opportunity to demonstrate herself as a just ruler for all; not merely a figurehead, not merely a liberator, not merely a usurper, but a valid, worthy leader in her own right. And she failed because she didn't want to make a speech, or didn't think she had to.

In any society, the rule of law must be universal or it has no value.

In other words, for the law to have meaning to anyone, it must apply to everyone.

In the United States, we're seeing a gradual dissolution of that idea, as the very rich, the famous, and the politically connected move farther and farther away from law, and accountability, while the law is most stringently enforced against those who have no means of recourse.

Nobody is liking the consequences of that, regardless of whether or not they connect the dots between that dissolution and the results.

Riots against the police. Police shooting innocent people. Police killing suspects regardless; their job is to detain and arrest, so that the courts can do their job. It is not assassination.

And whether you believe the cops are 100% innocent and pure as the driven snow, or 100% literal Satan and Hitler love babies, or like me, think they're likely humans and therefore subject to having both good and bad amongst their number, you have to acknowledge that the popular opinion of the police in this country is rapidly turning more and more negative.

What do you imagine happens to the rule of law when the trust of the average citizen in the apparatus built to sustain that rule fails?

First, the citizens stop believing.

Then they stop participating.

Then, the rule of law itself fails.

Then the society fails.

No force can bring down a society more quickly or thoroughly than a lapse in the trust of its citizens for the legitimacy of its government and laws.

It does not, and cannot, matter to the law who broke it; only the transgression, and mitigating factors.

It does not, and cannot, matter to the law how connected or wealthy the transgressor is; only that the crime was committed.

And it cannot matter to a ruler, either.

In the case of Daenerys Targaryen, Mossador's actions had to bring death.

But they should not have occasioned the collapse of societal trust we witnessed in that episode.

She should have given Mossador a trial.

She should have said something.

I'll say it for her, since she didn't.

"I am your queen. You call me Mhysa, your mother. But even mothers have the duty of justice.

For Mereen to stand, to be a place for freedom, justice must prevail. The law must prevail.

A prisoner was taken; a murderer. 

But a citizen of Mereen.

If I am your Mhysa, he was my child as you are.

All my children deserve no less than a fair trial, no matter what they have done; this law applies to all, and it must apply to all, or none are safe.

Mossador took it upon himself to steal that right from my prisoner. He killed him, and in so doing, denied that prisoner my protection under the law.

But the law applies to him no less than to my prisoner, or any of you, or me.

Murder brings death.

That is the law.

Mossador is my friend. He is one of you. He has been a trusted ally and an advisor.

But for all of that, and no matter how it wounds my heart to do this, none of those things can be permitted to place him above the law.

The law must have meaning for all of us, must protect all of us, or it protects none of us.

Mossador committed murder of a prisoner in captivity.

For that, his sentence is death.

Forgive my tears, my children. I am strong enough to keep the law, but I bleed today with all of you."

I suspect that if Daenerys had said that, or something similar, things would not have gone the way they did.

Because she would have been showing the public - her enemies, her allies, and the unconvinced - that she stood for the law even when it hurt her to do so.

In doing so, she would be showing them a leader, a ruler, to follow.

Our government, in the real world, is failing on that charge.

It is failing faster than most of us suspect.

I hope that trend reverses itself, as past a certain point, the fall becomes inevitable.

I don't want to walk past and see your faces on the other side of the wire.