This is more important than you're letting on.
By whatever standard you want to use, I was not a very good moderator. I hardly ever took any kind of disciplinary action, and to the limited extent that I contributed to the discussions on the public boards during most of my tenure, my posts tended to steer conversations off on ridiculous tangents. What I regret most about my ‘service’ is not, however, the disappointing farce that was my public persona as a Knight, but, rather, that I utterly failed to use my office to motivate changes in the institutional policy of the boards. The root of the problem, as I understand it now, was not wholly invisible to me then, and yet I offered neither my general impression of the need for change nor any practical solutions for carrying out such a transformation. I’m still lacking when it comes to the details of policy proposals, but I feel an obligation to share my thoughts on the cause of this latest crisis.
The problem with EoFF as an institution is that it is an institution. It is not this fact alone, of course: a corporation, for example, is an institution, but it can generally function without the kind of difficulty we see before us now. This is because the purpose of a corporation, to make money for its investors, is not at odds with its impersonal institutional nature. On the other hand, the purpose of EoFF has always been, in my view (and I like to think in most everyone else’s), to create a community of friends. This goal of community, the goal of friendship, is not well served by a hierarchical structure and a fixed code of law, but the nature of the medium and the expanding number of participants necessitate some degree of institutional order. Because of the fundamental friction resulting from the combination of the institutional impulse and the communal impulse in a single entity (and their ambiguous relationship to each other), we occasionally find ourselves left as participants in a true Hegelian tragedy, a conflict between two goods.
The virtue of an institution is order; it is a set of rules and the equality of all its members under those rules. The institution values efficiency in working toward a single purpose. It is profoundly impersonal, and all members who violate the rules are treated exactly the same by those given the power to execute the fixed penalties. The virtue of a community is goodwill among all its members; it is a shared sense of understanding and respect. The community of friends does not have a fixed structure or set of rules, but the standards of acceptable conduct are generally understood. Everyone is an equal participant, and those friends who act inappropriately are not automatically separated from the community.
Many in this thread argue that our friend ‘Kishi should be banned forever for the sake of justice, for equality under the law. The dedication to this kind of institutional justice appears to most here an admirable quality, but I ask you to consider whether it is truly just to instantly and permanently reject a friend, to cast him out of your community for as long as it should last. What do you really gain from forsaking one of your own? Ultimately, this raises the question of whether the institutional standard of justice is appropriate for our community.
You can say (and you have said) that it would only be fair, that if one member is banned for breaking a rule, then all members who break it should be banned. You can say (and you have said) that many members have met the same punishment for breaking the rule. You are not wrong to say these things. To the extent that EoFF is an institution, this is the ideal it should be striving for. However, if you, like I do, agree that the ideal of friendship should be the true spirit of EoFF and should always have supremacy over the institutional principle here, then you will vehemently oppose the action to ban ‘Kishi. Furthermore, you will challenge every instantaneous and permanent ban that is imposed on any one of our friends.
I am not passing judgment on the actions of our friend ‘Kishi that allegedly warranted so severe a punishment, for I lack sufficient unbiased information. I am, however, passing judgment on the policy that permits and demands this punishment. For a member who has been with us so long and who has given us so much, an action would have to be many orders of magnitude more destructive to our sense of community than the worst of the accusations leveled against him in this case in order for the thought of permanent banishment to enter our consciousness. I say this not out of support for some kind of aristocratic privilege, whereby only certain veterans or staff members are exempt from sanctions for their actions, but I believe rather that any member who demonstrates in good faith his or her interest in being a part of our community and maintaining our friendship deserves to be treated as a friend and not as an enemy of the institution. Those who would wish to hack the site or otherwise severely disrupt our community in their first days here should not simply be forgiven, of course, but we should always exercise the utmost caution when it comes to executing any extreme measures.
We now find ourselves with an opportunity to fairly evaluate our goal and the path we are on. From where I stand, the boards have been drifting away from the ideal of community for a long time; it is only natural that so many here would cry out for the strict, impersonal severity that the institutional structure offers. It is comforting, in a way, to know that the most well-liked and influential members can suffer the same cruel fate as anyone else. I warn you, though, that the glee this sentiment provides is fleeting, that it pales in comparison with the joys of forgiving your friends their errors of judgment and retaining the benefits of their company. I can only hope that the present crisis opens your eyes to the true extent of the problems that have been accumulating for years, and that you will come to embrace the path of friendship.
Though I have for some time been largely absent from the day-to-day events of the boards, I have not abandoned you, and I have not forgotten what it means to be a member of this community. I solemnly pledge that I will do everything in my power to improve our condition and help us live up to our best ideals. If we act wisely on the matter before us, this can be the first day of a new era. It will be simultaneously a renaissance and a revolution; a return to our beginnings and a new course to a better future.
