(Punishment part 4)
Punishment Doesn’t Solve Problems
Punishing things doesn’t solve or even address problems. When the legal justice system punishes people, it doesn’t fix a goddamn thing. Punishment can’t go back and somehow prevent crime from happening, nor does it actually deter crime from happening in the future.
All punishment can really do is give dispensers and enthusiasts a temporary sense of satisfaction.
As mentioned (or actually inferred) in part two of this series, that temporary sense of satisfaction comes from a hormone and neurotransmitter cocktail being produced in the brain and body, which gets people physically high. You literally experience an inebriating effect whenever you enact or witness “justice” being carried out against those you determine to deserve punishment.
At the end of every movie, when the good guy wins and the bad guy loses and/or is punished, it stimulates your mind and body to produce hormones and neurotransmitters that get you physically high. Serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine and dopamine — just to name a few.
Punishing things can’t undo injury or effects caused by someone’s actions. Usually, pursuing the chemical highs associated with justice and/or satisfying one’s desire to punish things exacerbates problems and makes things far worse than they were before…
And just to put it into proper context here, this is how punishment looks when enacted between parties.
Person 1: “You killed my best friend!”
Person 2: “There’s nothing I can do to replace them, so I may or may not be sorry for that.”
(Anthropomorphized) Justice: “Person 1, here’s some drugs for you to get high on. And whenever you think about this event in the future, I want you to remember this temporary high I’m giving you now, and hope to experience it again.”
*Enter the authoritarian view — the strung out punishment junkies*
“But criminals need to be punished, Donald King! Everybody who’s not in my group needs to be punished, Donald King! That’s why we have laws, Donald King! So we know who deserves to be punished, and who deserves to be vindicated, Donald King!”
Listen here…
The legal justice system can only regulate punishment. Granted, if it weren’t for the legal justice system then every person in pursuit of chemical cocktails they don’t even know they’re addicted to would take justice into their own hands.
People would necessarily look for things to punish and reasons to be or feel injured, so that they could “rightfully” punish others, because they’re strung out on substances that occur naturally within their bodies, whenever they’re exposed to certain types of perceptual stimulation.
And I want you to think about that last statement very carefully, as it necessarily entails “social justice warriors” and the “alt-right” alike — in addition to internet trolls, racial or sexual-identity enthusiasts, fandoms, political party ideologues, religious zealots, homophobes, etc, etc, etc.
So the legal justice system is like the FDA of doling out punishment. They basically get to say who and what can dispense punishment and then punish those who dispense punishment without their consent. And even in that, they don’t actually solve problems; in fact, more often than not, agents of the legal justice system intentionally escalate problems, because they themselves are punishment junkies, and just itching to get high off of punishing things. Look here…
Prison doesn’t make people better, it makes them far worse. Punishing children doesn’t make them better, it only teaches them to hide unsavory behaviors and traits from would be punishers.
I think perhaps Black Americans are the most punished people (eh… accounting for the socio-economic status of the U.S.) on the face of the planet. Yet, punishment does nothing to deter crime or people in the Black community from taking ownership of and helping to perpetuate myths, narratives and in some cases truths related to their perceived criminality. If punishment actually worked then Black Americans would be the best-behaved people on the planet, and not just the most captivating, and (arguably) most talented.
Again, punishing things doesn’t solve problems. All it does is make punishers feel temporarily better, and only better because they get a quick fix off of it. Again, punishing things gets you high. And since punishment is a drug (or as I refer to it in my work a “conceptual substance”), which inevitably leads to addiction, the more you do it is the more you’ll require in order to feel satiated by it.
Serial killers are addicted to punishing. Tyrants are addicted to punishing. Serial rapists and misogynists are addicted to punishing. Racists are addicted to punishing. Abusers are addicted to punishing. That’s because, just like with all drugs, you build up a tolerance to punishing things. And the more you do it is the more you’ll need to in order to get the same result…