...
Everything is too big for us to fairly judge, to reasonably affect, to get to the truth, to manage.... It requires us to hire governments, to institute rules that can never possibly be flexible enough to be fair... or even correct. Then, you add the death penalty into this morass and it harms us even more. You're going to read this and think that even though he maybe shouldn't be killed for those heart attacks—too out of his gourd, seriously juicy diminished capacity defense—the rest of the spectrum of offenses makes it clear he deserves it.
But people making these judgments don't have all the facts, and neither did the jury, and even if we all did, by the time our system gets to it, it will long have been the case that the weight of the bad karma had shifted from him to us. People in bars can break bottles over each other's heads in their disputes about state-sanctioned murder. Churches can roil in controversy with that damned troublesome commandment. In every case, the whole gestalt relieves us of our duty to be grownups.
But most psychopaths never go to jail. They are as destructive, but instead of getting the needle, they get rich. This can be so because they are the ones deciding who gets nailed for what they themselves do and who does not. And, since we have been relieved of both our duty and desire to be grownups, nothing fixes this.
Thomas Sheridan tells about the way the Inuit tribes handled their psychopaths. They pushed them off the ice. Came back and told everyone it was a hunting accident. There was no worry about the justice of it. Everyone involved in that execution knew precisely the predatory and destructive behaviors of the offender and their consequences... and that it couldn't be rehabilitated out of him. He abused his privileges in their society, harmed and risked everyone else, and they lived up to their responsibility to it. He didn't see it coming. There was no cruelty. There was just the truth and the determination to defend life.
That can't be accomplished inside the metropole. You can see all around you how little you are allowed to know about your town and about our country and about our world. Even if it were all freely available and honestly reported in the media, you still wouldn't be able to operate in it as a grownup because there's too much of it! Nobody, not even geniuses, can take it all in. It is not possible for grownups to sustain this. It would be possible for autocrats to sustain it if the planet were able to provide it and maintain a livable atmosphere, but that means everyone has to stay children, utterly dependent on the will of the people in charge... who are psychopaths... and have to be to rise to that level... to be ruthless enough to get it done.
This was once a world where people understood this, and organized themselves accordingly.
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