Social equilibrium is a very powerful force. It's also often underestimated. We think that just because the rules aren't written down anywhere, or enforced by formal contract, we can ignore them or change them arbitrarily. Not the case. Life is really just a series of games, each with its own rules and equilibrium behaviors; and if you behave differently, there's a price to be paid. You don't set the rules, and you're powerless to change them.
If you enter a highly competitive market, for example, you will soon discover how little freedom you really have. Open a grocery store in a large city, and you'll see that you can't even choose prices you charge for your own merchandise, or wages you pay your own employees. There's an equilibrium price for what you sell; charge too much or too little, and you'll go out of business.
The Wire, which is not only the best TV show but one of the best works of art I've ever seen, captures this observation in a very powerful way. It shows people being thrown around by forces larger than they are. But the show is much more insightful than just that. There are of course some rules of life that will never change, or at least not in foreseeable future: people want status, money and sex; there's pressure for supply and demand to balance each other, etc. We all know this; it's trivial. But the show also makes another point which is often overlooked: institutions shape culture. There are certain equilibrium behaviors required by the rules of the drug trade; you can't change what those behaviors are--if you want to be successful, you must follow them. But if the rules of the game were changed, so would the behavior of its participants. The problem is that the participants themselves cannot change those rules--change has to come from outside.
Illegal drug trade (or, as it's called by its participants, "The Game") is by and large a game of status. Gangs and gang leaders fight over territory and prestige; profits are only secondary. That's the way The Game has always been, as played by its old school participants (like Avon Barksdale and Marlo Stanfield). Then, new participants show up (such as Stringer Bell or Proposition Joe) and try to turn drug trade into a game of profits; a business. Stringer Bell says "TVs, cars, CDs, all this other shit gets bought and sold without n****s shooting each other. I don't see why what we're doing should be any different." They try to eliminate fights over turf and concentrate on improving quality of the product they sell and overall efficiency instead.
They can't win. There actually is a good reason why people shoot each other over drug transactions but not over "other shit" that gets bought and sold: drug trade is illegal. The most important implication of this is that there's no guaranteed non-violent way of enforcing contracts. If you cheat me on a drug transaction, I can't take you to court; I have to get back at you some other way. Given this, plus the high profit margins, drug trade offers strong incentives to cheat. It attracts people who enjoy cheating and violence for its own sake, like Marlo Stanfield. If it were legal, it would attract people like Proposition Joe, who'd try to improve product and maximize profits instead of the number of corners they own.
This leads to another (though related) point that The Wire makes very skillfully: People have personalities, life has roles to play. The rules of life are such that certain roles have to be played by certain personalities. One person can play more than one role; if Detective McNulty were born on the other side of the tracks, he could easily have become an Omar Little (and vice versa). But if you try to play a role that your personality is not the "equilibrium" for, you'll be forced out of it (just like Stringer Bell was forced out of his role of a drug lord), and someone with the "right" personality will replace you. Unless powers that be change The Game itself.
Below is a clip showing a scene where Omar, a freelance drug thief, kills Savino, who is "muscle" for one of the biggest drug lords, Marlo Stanfield. Marlo's soldiers have just very cruelly killed one of Omar's dearest friends and Omar is trying to find them. Savino tells Omar he was not one of the killers. Omar knows he's telling the truth--but kills him anyway, because if Savino were there he'd have done exactly what the killers did. In other words, Omar is wreaking vengeance not on the person, but on the role that person plays.
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