Lots of us have even tried our hand at skateboarding. It’s because there was a large sweeping wave of popularity that brought many different kinds of people into the fold. In other words, skateboarding was ‘made cool’ in so many minds that the arm of social enforcement was simply everywhere.

There were millions of people using millions of different rhetorical strategies reminding you, insulting you, telling you, imploring you to believe just how cool skateboarding was. We even got it ‘from the inside.’

In early VG movies, Dave Paine would regularly (for a time) include clips and banter with skateboarders like Mike Frasier. Now, it just so happens that Mike Fraiser is a great guy who’s nice to all the kids and talks to people—no matter who they are—like human beings. That’s certainly handy. It also goes a long way (at least back then) to making Mike Frasier rollerblading’s favorite skateboarder.

I don’t blame Dave though. Dave is awesome, and his efforts in rollerblading are simply above reproach. (Don’t forget what I wrote about him on Sunday about how hard he tried to avoid using skateboarding language). But his actions at times mirror those of many others. Arlo, for instance, seems to have imagined himself as living in the shadow of skateboarding, and, as a result of him thinking that way (and the access he had to young minds) many of us incorporated those same beliefs into our own way of thinking.

The insidious thing is how we continue thinking about it. We all think about it and people like me write articles about it. It’s a giant self-perpetuating cycle stuck in our minds that we can’t seem to escape from.

But skateboarding isn’t our only demon. Pastoral power reaches across and functions within many other internal dimensions of rollerblading as well.

You ever make fun of your buddies for taking an extra ten minutes to put all their pads on before skating? What about when someone puts on a helmet to go street skating? How about snickering to your homies about the rollerblader with the JNCO Jeans you see at the skatepark doing no-grab misty flips or laid-out back flips?

Better yet, how about making fun of the dude from out of town who doesn’t violate any of those norms but still has bad style?

Those kinds of susurrations are exactly where pastoral power lives.

And very few of us are exempted from guilt. What we believe is very often manifested in our actions, and institutionalized in our language, organizations, and companies.

We self-govern with ideas and values that (frequently) somebody else instilled in us. And that’s pastoral power because the person who instilled the value in your mind probably isn’t the person who came up with the idea in the first place. These things are ambient in the world, and they’re enforced not only by countless other people, but also by ourselves—within ourselves, to ourselves, and often, against ourselves.

It should be clear that a person who has the power to get you to think something and enforce it against yourself and against others has a terrifying degree of power over you.

Often there isn’t anything you can do about it. But knowing what’s going on in your mind is at least a decent first step.

Thanks for reading.

-fs