Crime and Punishment

Discussing my article “Black Lives Matter” with a few Africans, I heard the phrase: “White colonists treated us like animals.” And then it hit me, why is the fact of using animals as slaves considered to be something completely acceptable and normal in our society? Why the fact of killing for fun (hunting), torture (laboratory research), violence (scientific experiments), and execution (putting the pet down) of animals does not make people want to fight for their rights? Why did the death of one dark-skinned criminal who attacked a pregnant woman in her own house bring thousands of protesters into the streets, whereas the mass extermination of dozens of species of innocent animals does not seem significant enough to anyone to somehow change this? Why is the cruelty against animals not punished at all in most countries? After all, a person who abuses a weak and helpless creature can, after cats, start torturing children and women! At what point did people, for some reason, decide that they were the masters of the planet and could do whatever they wish without worrying about any consequences?

Let’s figure out why human life is NOT the highest value, why society should take control of the birth rate and upbringing of children, and why, helping weak people, you destroy the future of your children!

Let’s start with the famous Trolley Problem. There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people (an alcoholic with cirrhosis of the liver, a heroin addict, Hitler, a fat man in a pre-infarction state with diabetes, and Harold Shipman) tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person (Alexander Fleming) on the sidetrack. You have two options:

1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?

Obviously, in this case, the person who discovered penicillin and saved millions of lives is much more valuable than 5 other people.

Now let’s look at how justice works for bacteria, for example in the colonies of pseudomonads, and how wasps organize their own police in their hives, to compare it with what humanity is doing now. Pseudomonads, when life gets hard, gather in groups and start to produce glue, which helps them stick together and move to upper layers of the substratum to the light and a bright future. However, when there is a group and the opportunity to choose between personal and collective interests in favor of personal ones, some especially cunning individuals stop producing glue. Since it is hard, takes a lot of free time and they never liked it anyway, they simply begin to use the labor of other members of the colony to live happy lives, while the rest of bacteria keep slaving for the common good. The problem is that at a certain point the number of working bacteria stops being sufficient to maintain the well-being of the colony, and the entire community dies.

And who is it customary to support in human society? — That’s right, the homeless, the disabled, the poor, poor families with many children, sick children, and other groups of unfortunate starving people who are unable to take care of themselves on their own. What does this lead us to? — That’s right, to the increase of groups of people who pull the colony down and to a decrease of groups of people capable of keeping this colony floating. So what? Should we now become inhumane and leave the needy in trouble? — Of course not, we need to help absolutely everyone, until we all die together from hunger, a global pandemic or lack of oxygen, due to the lack of plants, which disappeared due to the absence of bees that died from pesticides that people sprayed over the fields to feed 8 billion hungry mouths.

Now back to the wasps. In their colonies, only the queen reproduces, and the rest of the wasps are workers, and they work for the general welfare. If worker wasps somehow manage to lay eggs, they will be mercilessly destroyed by other worker wasps, because breaking the rules of the system destroys it. It leads to an imbalance, a lack of a sufficient number of workers, due to an increased number of those giving birth, and the colony dies following the scenario of pseudomonads. Why can bees foresee such a scenario and prevent it, but people cannot?

Now, let’s get back to the birth and education of children. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to a family, but according to the same declaration, every child has the right to housing, food, clothing, health care, and education. Attention, please! I have a question! How can people who are not even able to feed themselves provide their children with all the designated rights? We believe that taking away one right to have children is inhumane. How can it be then that taking away 5 rights from these children, allowing such people to reproduce, is legal and does not bother anyone? Here someone may be indignant and say: “This is their own business, and society should not interfere with it”. However, the problem is that such children, growing up, become part of society. That is, society, by supporting financially the birth of such children, contributes to the fact that alcoholics, drug addicts and other low-income strata of society multiply, using children exclusively as a source of income, and instead of strong and smart members of society, we get even more asocial beings who will become criminals, homeless people, murderers, and terrorists. After all, being a parasite of society is a conscious choice. Such people initially do not want to invest in the common good, but only use the resources obtained by other people. Suffice it to recall the famous film “Intouchables” and the dialogue between Phillipe and Driss.

• So you like being assisted?
• What?
• You don’t mind living off others’ backs? It’s not a problem for you?
• No. How about you?
• Do you think you’re capable of working? With constraints, regular hours, responsibilities…
• A sense of humor after all.

Now is the time to move on to the main part — crime and punishment. Modern society, trying to be as humane as possible, de jure, punishing criminals, de facto, punishes law-abiding citizens. For example, to have a roof over my head, food, and clothing, I need to work constantly and hard, while prisoners get all those things completely free of charge at the expense of the “state”, which means at the expense of taxpayers. Educated families, for example in Ukraine or France, choose not to have more than 2 children, as they understand that they cannot give a decent future to a larger number of offsprings. However, alcoholics, or, say, refugees, have 6–10 children per family, since the state helps them financially, and they, in fact, live only off child allowances. The question is why a working family should give part of their income to support a family of loafers? Why is the state punishing them so? Why do children from normal families have to buy apartments, while children from orphanages receive houses at the expense of the state, that is, taxpayers? What is the sin of children with parents? Why are smart children from ordinary families are not always able to acquire free education, since their places are given to children from disadvantaged families, even if the latter ones have neither the desire nor the mental abilities to get this education? What is the crime of smart children of decent parents?

The ideal system of punishments should retribute the very fact of breaking the rules. A society can be successful and effective only if each of its members strictly follows the letter of the law. A person who has violated the rights of others — by stealing their phone or killing their child — should equally be deprived of their human rights. Criminals must either be used as free labor in dangerous plants and factories and other types of physically-demanding work or be executed as those undermining the security of the system. After all, any crime is a violation of the rule, and having violated it once, a person will keep on doing it again and again. Another question is how to organize the system for catching criminals in such a way that innocent people will not get in there? We will discuss it in our next conversation.

Let’s move on to the conclusions. 1) Not all people are equally valuable. The value of people, in fact, is greatly exaggerated, given their number and negative impact on the planet. Yet the number, for example, of elephants, cheetahs and dolphins is constantly decreasing, which means their value is growing. Animals are much more important and valuable than people, and their rights should come first, especially since our safety directly depends on the safety of animals and plants. 2) By “helping” people (solving their problems instead of them), you increase the number of incapable creatures, who will soon grow in numbers so much that they will devastate all your resources and destroy the future of your children. 3) The birthright is not a personal privilege, but a decision that affects society as a whole, so society must control this process. How? — Let’s talk about this in my next article.