I referee men’s league hockey. From the time I first drop the puck until the time of the final buzzer I can send fully grown men to the penalty box just by pointing at them and then pointing at the penalty box. In the past I have kicked men out of the game altogether. Sometimes I get a little grief in the penalty call I make but they always do what I tell them to. If I tried to do that at any other time then in the set time period of the game everyone would think I was crazy.
Everyone involved in the game understands that in the hockey game there are certain rules to be followed. If these are not followed the whole game breaks down, but that these rules do not apply anywhere else.
In this hockey game I act as the referee. To be correct I am not a referee; I am a man who sometimes acts as a referee. I can’t go around being a referee when I am not in the middle of a hockey game and where those around me respect the referee title.
We generally see this separation in the games we play but we are not good at seeing this separation in the rest of our lives.
In Canada there is what is called universal health care. Many of us would say things like, “my doctor said I should do this.” A correct way to phrase that would be to say, “the woman who sometimes acts as a doctor said this...” We get confused by the title we bear (patient) and by the titles of those we deal with (doctor). As a man it is best for me to say, “The woman who sometimes practices doctoring said I should do this and I will if I do my own research and see if she is telling me a good thing to do, otherwise I will do something else.”
This scenario became extreme during the fear pandemic whereby many people (including me initially) went along with what the ‘doctors, ‘politicians, and ‘journalist’ said without many of us standing as a man or woman and deciding for ourselves.
The men and women who are politicians, medical people, and journalist are public servants. When they start telling us what we should do and we listen to them is the same as me trying to be a referee out on the street.
We can choose to go along with what others are saying or we can decide for ourselves if it makes sense what others are saying and practicing. Anyone’s title is not who they are. They are always a man or woman who acts under a title some of the time.
I am not a citizen of Canada. I am a man who will use the title ‘citizen’ if it has some benefit to me. There are some social perks by using the citizen title in Canada, certainly in some aspects of health care and in using a passport to travel to different countries and back again.
Overall health care in Canada is atrocious but if I injure myself a hospital is a good place to go to stop bleeding or set a bone so I can use the benefit of being a citizen of Canada and access its healthcare. I travelled through the US two months ago just because it is faster to get to southwestern Ontario by driving through Michigan so a passport is a good idea.
But if the legal fiction of the Canadian Government tells me that Canada’s ‘citizens’ must heed a medical mandate then I may not act as they think a citizen should. As a man I will decide for myself what is the best action or non-action.
Most of us understand the game rules in the games we play yet this generally breaks down in the wider reality of our lives.
To continue my story about refereeing. I am a small man; I think every man who is in the hockey league I referee is taller than I am. Some of them would be a foot taller or twice the weight. Yet here I am in the middle of all this testosterone quietly doing the task set before me. I always stay calm; I sometimes make mistakes and have to live with the fallout of complaint. If someone swears at me, I calmly send him to the penalty box. I pretty much ignore anyone who questions me while they are in an emotional state. If they calm down and ask a polite question, I will answer it. I do quake inside sometimes. I question my response when a player questions my ability and after the game I go through in my head what I should have said. I am consciously trying to quiet that voice however and I wish to just accept the feelings I am having.
tim
I do not speak for ‘The Sovereign’s Way’; I am just sharing some of my experience that has come about because of TSW course and my relationship to it. https://thesovereignsway.com/law-for-mankind-options/?link=45555
Thanks for the comment , I started watching the video, it looks very good. Do you watch UFC?
You might appreciate this, https://youtu.be/YyKSn66tlss?si=cRs3ty6mo0uWRIdC, about Mark Ratner who was a ref and developed the rules for Boxing and later, UFC. This whole series (fightlore) is well done, graphically. I think it is very cool that you are a ref, and what you pointed out about the very temporary power it bestows is fascinating. Without some rules, it would be just the brutes, and even the brutes want some rules. How it all differs from the gladiators who often died and who often were captured in war only to die for entertainment, ahem.