Bad solutions to easy problems

The things that this woman in the first video says are technically not incorrect. In response to youth crime- in particular in the Northern Territory- she says says that it is important to understand underlying issues such as ‘‘looking at the way we fund our schools’’ and understanding that ‘‘people are unable to make a living which means parents are unable to be there as parents’’. In the second video, the man blames it on social media and the woman says that we need to get to the ‘’root causes’’ of crime and understand that it is a ‘’health and welfare issue’’.

Whilst structural disadvantage obviously affects criminal behaviour, it is not the justice systems job to address the whole structure of society. That’s like saying it is the job of the right arm to address a cramped lower back or poor hip posture. You can have a discussion about whether society more broadly needs to address structural disadvantage, but that us not what these people are doing. All they are saying is that we need to look into structural causes. What we do about them is still left up in the air. Probably for good reason, because these people on the panels benefit from structural disadvantage.

The justice system only needs to punish violent offenders. The job of delving into the ‘‘root causes’’ of crime is the job of intellectuals, philosophers and artists. If you want to delve into the root causes of any human behaviour- as far as it is even possible- you need a theory of mind. Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Plato, even novelists like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and so on, these people were the ones who tried to penetrate into the root causes. But the thing with theories of mind is that by necessity they do not posit external circumstance as the one and only determinant of human behaviour. The whole point of a theory of mind is that humans have a mind, an internal locus of attention that perceives the world in particular ways and that then motivates people to act in particular ways. Another thing when trying to analyse root causes is to realise that there is no root cause. Human nature is a mystery and should remain so, being obsessed with knowing everything all of the time can prevent change and make life dull.

How could the courts understand the root causes of a murder? If a young man stabs someone in a shopping mall and he is taken to court, how do you expect the judge to fully understand all of the contingent events of that young mans life that could have led him to committing that murder? You cannot. When you ask people to delve into root causes you just get the same answers: low socioeconomic status, ethnic minority status, alcoholism in the family etc. these answers are all externally located, they take power away from individuals. Why does every poor kid not end up stabbing someone?

But maybe that is the point of this discourse. Sometimes people say more than they mean to say. Maybe the whole point of the ‘‘root causes of crime’’ is course is precisely to frame individuals as victims of circumstance and therefore to view poor people as inherently corrupted. If the root cause of crime is poverty, if that’s all it comes down to, then that poor kid down the road is a criminal.

This discourse on the root causes of crime also opens up a whole panolopy of preventative measures to crime, some which might not appear as preventative at first because they are very subtle but they are related to the doctrine of prevention. Everywhere you go now there are rules, rules and more rules. Speed cameras on every streets, no smoking signs all over the city, ‘‘we will not tolerate abuse’’ signs on every shop front, governments are trying to censor dialogue online, cars are being built that automatically slow down as you soon as you go 1km over the limit, harassment and ‘‘microaggression’’ lawsuits are being filed whenever women get grossed out, kids who shout in class are sent to psychiatrists, CCTV cameras are all over the city centres (presumably to catch criminals but not to lock them up, just to examine the ‘‘root causes’’ of their behaviour i guess)… should I go on? Kids have to wear bike helmets, they’re not allowed to go outside (unless mummy plans a ‘‘play date’’ or a sleepover), skate parks are closing down etc. of course not all of these prohibitions are bureaucratically-imposed, some of them are imposed by people themselves, but that only shows how powerful the surveillance state is. It is bottom-up and top-down.

The discourse around getting to the ‘‘root causes’’ of crime reinforces and legitimises the surveillance state and by extension the state. So you can see why the government reinforces these narratives. One of the best ways to prevent people from committing a crime is to watch them, people act very different when they know are being watched.

You do not need that many laws actually. You just have to arrest the violent and sexual offenders and then you could everyone else alone. If somebody wants to pop down to the grocery store five minutes away and he doesn’t want to wear a seat belt I don’t think it is a big deal. I also don’t think it is a big deal if someone smokes in public. I think you should be able to drink in public, there are countries in Europe where this is perfectly legal and nothing terrible happens. Some of us (Australians) have gotten so used to red tape and regulation that we would probably have a panic attack if the leash was loosened a bit.

You know in some social housing estates in Sydney there is a security guard outside the door of the apartments and you have to show them your ID just to get out of your own apartment. Your own house. You need identification to get out of your house. In the Northern territory alleyways and streets that connect with each other in the neighbourhood are locked after certain time, there is only one exit that goes from the neighbourhood into the city centre. Sometimes they leave it locked it all day, so that you cannot walk around your neighbourhood. There are policeman outside of the bottle-shops scanning ID’s and refusing entry to anybody who is on the ‘’banned’’ list which apparently is half the city. There was also a two week curfew in March. All of this is so avoidable if you just lock up the violent criminals. The state are creating a failed state.

That’s the thing, the government actually doesn’t treat poor people well. They often impose weird, erratic measures on them, like curfews and bans. They are able to do this because they convince middle-class people that this is the only way and people buy it because from the age of 5 they have been trained to believe that higher authorities know best. I remember being 6 or 7 and sitting around at the dinner table watching the news and talking about the things we saw on there. Everything there was carefully maunufactured to get a particular reaction. Maybe they wanted us to feel fear, or anger, or joy. Whatever it was, it was all planned and structured according to the needs of the people in charge.

The Matrix is absolutely real but I think the thing that that movie got wrong is it suggested that there was a ‘’truth’’ pill that could offer a way out. How do you escape something that is everywhere? You’d have to run off to the woods. The matrix is too effective. It has spread its tentacles too comprehensively.

It is important to remember that the people in charge have also been exposed to propaganda and themselves believe in what they are doing, though there is more than enough sinister manipulation too. This is not a monarchy, our leaders are not specially raised to rule us. Anthony Albanese and Justin Trudeau probably spent their childhood doing the same things you did, watching the same television shows, riding their bike in the same parks, reading the same history textbooks. Blaming everything on the elites is itself a symptom of impotence and fear. The whole system is built on propaganda from the top to the bottom and no one is able to extricate themselves away.

II.

The ‘‘root causes of crime’’ rhetoric is not wrong nor is it right. It is just irrelevant. By making something relevant which is irrelevant you are lying. Imagine a man has an irrational fear of crowds, he decides that in order to combat this he has to hold his favourite teddy and repeat the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 over and over again. This man is in a sense lying to himself by investing magical properties in things which are not magical but this lie actually helps him to live better. In a similar way, the catchphrases on the television allow people to invest in the system in a way in which they wouldn’t otherwise.

It is also important to remember that the ‘’woke mind virus’’ draws its inspiration from the same narratives that created liberal-capitalist societies. Maybe they’re distortions, but there is still a link there. The doctrine of civil rights and unlimited growth have always been ideas that were slightly irrationally and emotionally invested, as all ideas are. Find me a purely rational system! It might go too far, as it has in San Francisco and London, but that doesn’t mean that in other areas and in other times it didn’t work.

Wokeism is just liberalism after two world wars and the communist manifesto. Let us not underestimate the residual impact of the 20th century. It was really a damning indictment on the modern ideals of rationality and progress. The 21st century is basically just one long reaction-formation, a century haunted by the question, ‘’what the fuck do we do now?’’

III.

The two big money-makers today are the medical institutions and Big Tech. Investment bankers make a killing too but they do not really have an ideology they just feed off of the ideology of the corporations/government. Anyway, these are the hubs of the wheels, the locus upon which the system turns around. Peter Thiel has lamented that since the 1970’s innovation in all areas but technology has basically ceased. The problem with this is that ‘’innovation’’ is inherently linked with technology. When we see fantastic modern, clean infrastructure in Singapore we do not call that innovation we call that urban development. When new medicines are created which help a lot of people we call that research. When artificial intelligence is created we call that innovation and growth. The subtle shift in framing is important. (By the way I am strictly pro urban development and medical research. I am not anti-innovation).

There seems to be a similarity in the way medication is being handed out with reckless abandon now and the way loans were handed out with reckless abandon before the 2008 financial crash. The COVID restrictions might have only intensified the ideology of the medical apparatus, in the same way that 9/11 may have intensified yearnings for the ‘’American dream’’ and perhaps justified unscrupulous behaviour.

IV.

The new leftist campaign to end injustice is strictly correlative to the ‘‘safetyism’’ and tight regulation that we see today. The campaign to emancipate women, emancipate minorities, disabled people, old people, gender fluid people, and poor people is only possible in a space where nobody is allowed to do anything without interference by a higher authority. Everyone is emancipated, but only if everyone is supervised like children. If you think about it kindergarten children are quite emancipated, at least at first glance. They run around like crazy, they giggle at everything and have such wide-eyed curiosity, when they cry they get a cuddle and a snack. Theirs is a life that looks so free of tension and limitation. But anyone with kids knows that the daily life of children is inundated with rules by necessity, ‘’don’t touch this’’, ‘‘don’t do that’’, ‘‘stop thats too rough’’, ‘‘shhh we are in public you can’t shout’’.

The desire for broad, generalised emancipation. A big ‘’go for it! You can be anyone you want!’’ might lead to a world in which every particular thing is prohibited. In which adults are told ‘’no don’t go there’’, ‘’please don’t shout it will upset the neighbours’’. I remember Slavo Zizek spoke about the paradox of the postmodern era’s approach to sex. No one can tell you what your sexual identity is, you are a free sexual being… but, every sexual encounter with unfair power dynamics is prohibited. Because every sexual encounter has implicit power dynamics, sex is prohibited. Is it the same with aggression? Is aggression universally permitted (eg. compassion and excuses for violent criminals) but then in all particularities is suppressed through surveillance and pedantic regulations? Maybe.

V.

I think the whole point of that lady in the first video being on the panel was shown when she gave the personal anecdote. If you can’t be bothered watching she says that ‘‘when i hear about a crime I think ‘‘Oh my god i hope it is not a black person’’ because i know that we are all criminalised’’. This may be true, people do tend to make inductions and generalisations based on personal characteristics. A man meets a promiscuous woman and concludes that all women are sluts. A woman meets an abusive man and concludes… and so on. It is called menotymy, when we substitute one particular trait of a person and use that as a representative of their whole self. We do this all of the time because we can never know someone’s whole self. So we use markers.

Minorities are in a particularly tricky situation here because they are much more liable to be identified with their group identity through pure virtue of looking different. This can have unfortunate consequences. But minorities also encourage this, they say ‘‘my black community’’, ‘‘my black sisters’’, ‘‘my muslim brothers’’, they say ‘‘WE need reparations’’, ‘‘WE need more representation in parliament’’. Who is we? They can benefit from this group identification insofar as they become more powerful when part of a cohesive unit.

But forget about the actual validity of the argument. Why was this particular woman selected to be on this panel? It is for personal anecdotes like that. Because she is a minority she can provide an ‘‘inside perspective’’. I’m not saying she is not qualified to be there, I’m just asking why her? She is a lawyer so she is smart but why this particular lawyer? This woman seems like a nice lady. She is not the one with any power here. The ones in power are the ones who decide who get to be on that panel in the first place, the ones who decide what questions to ask and who probably decide what answers are allowed and not allowed to be given.

In the second video we also see why that man was chosen to be on the panel. He highlights social media as a potential cause of youth violence. Not alcohol, not broken families, just twitter. Just Elon Musk. The fact that there are crackheads outside of your door trying to steal your wallet is a consequence of the fact that Twitter and Rumble and Substack allow people to talk online. This is truly incredible propaganda. It has become so ludicrous that I cannot believe the people saying it actually believe it. They can’t do, surely. Anyway, the more obvious and absurd the propaganda becomes the closer the authorities are to instituting more punitive measures. If the indoctrination is subtle and intelligent then that indicates a certain level of respect for the citizens who are receiving it. Absurdity indicates a ceasing of politeness and a move towards brutal force.

Another note about the second video. Why did they get an old lady to voice concerns about youth crime? Because they want to frame people who have these concerns as old-fashioned and not quite with the times. This immediately places the ‘’root causes’’ brigade as an enlightened force. They would never get a young middle-class professional to express these concerns because then people would take it seriously. It is worth watching the mainstream media and the government closely. Everything that they say and do is done for a reason. No details are left undone.

Last note: The comments on the second video were really negative and the administrators turned the comments off! haha! So sensitive these television moguls are. The government knows it has lost the support of the people (Australia I mean). It is all downhill from here I’m guessing.