this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Crime. There'll never be a world without it and at some point society will have to realize that there's an "acceptable level of crime", beyond which any further measures to reduce it would be unacceptably authoritarian.
As destructive technologies advance, any level of crime will become unacceptable, because eventually it will take only one person to create (for example) a bio-weapon to kill 10% of planet population. I predict we will have to design every new baby to fit into society, and ban humans with destructive impulses from being raised on Earth. Mandatory eugenics for the whole planet. Reserved free-range fuck-around planets for dangerous organic humans. Blowing up a Mars dome hurts only a few, because connecting tubes have air locks, and viruses can't survive outside. "Blast your prehistoric frustrations away in our all-out war park!" -God of War Inc., Mars.
Fix poverty and you fix crime. I mean there will always be people with severe mental disorders that make them violent or deadly, but this could also be potentially handled by making complete mental health check ups part of universal healthcare. People who are likely to become violent could be separated from the population and potentially cured.
I remember the case of a 6 year old girl who was adopted from a situation of severe abuse, violent, sexual, and neglect. She became a violence obsessed psychopath. She kept trying to stick needles in herself along with other self harm behaviors. She attacked her adoptive parents with a knife. After this they locked her in her room at night and put a lock on their bedroom door. She attempted to kill her brother, and tortured and killed animals.
There is a documentary about her called Child of Rage. Warning - this is extremely disturbing.
Eventually, as no progress was being made, she went to live with a therapist for intense behavior modification therapy. She was cured without the use of drugs. Now she is a successful RN and author.
I went way off track here but I wanted to reemphasize that poverty is the source of the vast majority of crime, and even the most broken psychopaths can be cured.
End poverty, end child abuse, end crime. End capitalism.
Ending poverty would certainly help, but I disagree that crime would be fixed. People commit crimes for many reason that aren't related to poverty. Envy, hatred, love, sexual desire, religious fanaticism, political extremism etc. Crimes like murder and rape often have motives completely unrelated to financial status. Not all perpetrators have severe mental disorders either.
In terms of "fixing" people who are violent, I agree in so far that the justice system should focus on rehabilitation and helping people. In many but not all cases, that can be achieved. But generally those people commit crimes first before they're identified. You propose mental health checkups to prevent that in the first place, but many people who are in a bad mental place would not voluntarily go to those. So would you make them mandatory for everyone? That would be quite dystopian, especially with the possibility of being locked up without even having committed a crime. That's exactly the kind of thing I mean by measures that are unacceptably authoritarian. And even then, people would definitely slip through the cracks.
That's fair.