On Crime, Criminals, and our American Way of Life

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Thomas Paine

To me the heart of CheBob's post (The Superbowl of Fascism; found at Lonestone Revolution) is about the oppression of one group on another for various reasons, religion being but one. In my opinion it is not so much about which group (race, religion, ect.) is oppressing another it is about who or rather whom is profiting from this oppression.

Who profits from wars? Is it the young men and women that are asked to give their lives to protect their country's "national interest" in other lands or is it some other group? The group that profits from the pain and suffering of our fellow kindred are the enemy of all of mankind, not those with hatred, anger, and misguided or twisted versions of their religion. Although these things cause pain and suffering, few that fall into this category actually profit or benefit from their beliefs and actions, and all to often suffer as well.

Since in most societies it is considered a crime to cause pain and suffering to fellow citizens it is often considered an even more horrible crime to do such for profit.

However, in our own country the crime of profiting from pain and suffering of others is not considered a very serious crime but it is also the standard by which our economy is built. That which makes the United States the richest country in the world is the length to which we as a people allow ourselves the sin of causing pain and suffering in other countries and our own.

None of us, and I mean NONE are free of this sin, we all live very well at the expense of others. However, we are all guilty of a far greater crime than just profiting from the pain and suffering in the world we are also all participants in this, by enabling and by lending aid and support to these conditions, whether it be by our apathy, by just allowing the situation to continue because we don't want to risk our own comfort, or by allowing our government to be run unchallenged by the very criminals that are in fact our real enemies.

By our very actions we are put ourselves at risk of being exploited by the same mechanism that exploits others for our benefit. That is why I included the Thomas Paine quote.

Fascism is a very real threat to all of us, but I am really a lot less concerned with a few possible “fascists” in the middle-east and much more concerned with the ones that have control of the money, power and the military might of the United States. Because they are not only a threat to the rest of the world they are a very real threat to me and my family, right now!

In response to the above comment I was asked by Troutsky:

“what determines the "criminal" aspect in the first place and allows it to accumulate so much power.”

Okay, so I need to define why I see the conditions of pain and suffering in the world as criminal and how does it happen. Let's see if I can do that in less that 4,000 words.

In all societies there are rules by which we must live in which we must behave in order to be participants, CheBob has taught me to refer to these as “social contracts”. We basically have an agreement with and amongst our fellow citizens to respect each other's rights under this contract.

Some of the most basic of these are as old as civilization, don't kill your neighbor, don't steal his crops and livestock (food/wealth), don't burn his hut down, and don't harm/enslave is family. These are the basic tenets by which all civilizations have in fact become civilizations. Some of the later additions to these basic “laws” are: don't allow your neighbor to be killed or harmed if you can prevent it, don't allow his crops and livestock to be stolen if you can stop it, help him to put out the fire if his hut starts to burn, and see to the well being of his family if he is unable to.

To me these are the basic laws of humanity and the foundation of human rights. I also believe that one would be hard pressed to find a society that didn't agree that all of these laws are in the best interest of the community as a whole.

Now if one steps back and sees all of humanity as his neighbor, one can start to look at the world with humane morality, and compassion. Humane in the sense that we see our fellow humans as human and moral in the sense that we are acknowledging a universal social contract. In order to do this one must see past their own “social conditioning” which is much different from “social contracting”.

Social contracting creates a symbiotic relationship, I help you and look out for you and you help me and look out for me. What social conditioning does is creates a punishment/promised reward situation. In psychology, conditioning is defined as:
“A process of behavior modification by which a subject comes to associate a desired behavior with a previously unrelated stimulus.” This is best illustrated by the example of Pavlov's dogs, ring a bell before you feed the dogs, in time the dogs salivate every time you ring the bell.

Social conditioning is the means by which inequality is achieved, historically used by religions and states and in modern times business interests to control large numbers of people in order to maintain power over them and accumulate wealth from them. Two examples come to mind as to how social conditioning is used to do this. The first is one we all learned as young school children and may not even remember, that is asking our teachers permission if we may go to the restroom, the teacher always had the power, she could say “no” or “wait till we go to recess” or even humiliate us more by berating our lack of self control, not that announcing to the entire class that we had to pee wasn't humiliating enough. What is this situation teaching children, to defer to authority and power for even our most basic needs.

The second may or may not seem so obvious to some but if you have ever raised teens or been a mentor to one, you will get it. When a young person starts exploring their own identity and means of expressing outwardly what they believe inwardly, they are met with the full force of their parent's and teacher's own social conditioning. I am directly referring to youth fashion and culture. School boards and communities are always attempting to regulate and legislate what is acceptable in the means of clothing and bodily adornment for young people. Just pick up the student handbook for your local high school and you will see what I am talking about. The response all parents have heard is “I shouldn't be judged by what I wear but how I act” and they are absolutely right. When they were small children they were taught by the very same people that now disapprove of their outward appearance, to “not judge a book by it's cover.” Racial profiling has noting on youth profiling, because when an law enforcement officer sees two groups of young people in a park after dark and one group is wearing baggy jeans and riding skateboards and the others are wearing polo shirts and standing around nice cars, who do you think this officer will stop and have empty their pockets on the hood of his patrol car.

This is all social conditioning and it is the means of controlling a population. There are others but one that really gets my hackles up is the mythos of “the American Dream”. To me this is the ultimate stick and carrot, with a side order of bread and circuses. The way I see it, this is the way in which the American people are kept distracted in order for the profiters to exploit us and the rest of the world and also the source of our apathy toward these conditions. Social conditioning is exploitation because it makes us believe that there are others in this world that know better than ourselves what is good and right for us. When we give the power to make those decisions over to a state, religion or business interest then we have already given up our freedom to be self-actuating humans. It keeps us from asking, just because I can do it, should I?

I am not absolving myself of any responsibility in my own contribution to the conditions that I criticize, just because I think it doesn't mean I always know how to act on it. However, when you start to question everything you were conditioned to believe, interesting things start to happen in the way you look at yourself and your relationship to fellow humans. Let me just cite my own personal example of a big decision that my husband and I recently made in regard to the way we make our income.

We own and operate a semi-truck and haul livestock all over the United States. In the last year we finally finished paying off all of our equipment, which means our taxable income has increased. Since no one likes paying taxes and I absolutely resent having to pay for the war in Iraq, we had to figure out how to keep our tax burden down. So what to do? Conventional wisdom told us that we should purchase new equipment so we could have a big write off again, but then we would have $135,000 loan we had to payoff. So we asked what are the real costs, to that course of action?

Of course there was the new monthly payments that had to be made, which would force my husband to stay out for longer periods and work more, then we would have the added burden of paying tens of thousands of dollars in interest and insurance, which would lead to more work time for my husband. In addition to time away from home there were also the added costs of burning more fuel, contributing additional CO2 to the environment, which impacts global climate change, ie. Flooding in Indonesia, and drought in Africa. Then there were the resources that have to be mined to build the new truck, and the pollution from that, then there was the whole oil wars in the middle east which I already benefit from, with a very sad heart, and was trying to avoid supporting with my tax dollars in the first place. So how do we get out of this whole mess.

The answer was fairly simple once we question conventional wisdom (social conditioning). Work less, and give more to non-profits. The less we work the less of everything that negatively impacts others we contribute to. Over the next three years we will be transitioning into a new business, recycling old houses into energy-efficient inexpensive housing for low-income people. Which is another thing that conventional wisdom says is an oxymoron and can't be done, but I don't buy it.

So to wrap it all up, and summarize my answer to troutsky, the criminal act/sin that we all are guilty of is participating in and allowing the continuing violation of the universal social contract, and the means by which it is achieved is through our own social conditioning, by allowing it to go unchallenged even at very personal and local levels.

Please comment,
Aprilloper