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Feb. 22, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:48
653 Crime and Punishment Part 1: Criminals

Criminals - sub-human animals our wounded humans in need of aid?

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's the 22nd, I think, of February 2007.
And it's time for us to look into the dark dungeon heart of prisoner rehabilitation, crime and punishment.
One of the most popular threads that I have not been following too, too closely that has been running on the boards recently has to do with this question of crime and punishment.
And it is, of course, a fascinating question.
And as usual, the debates, with some notable exceptions, tend to fall into two major categories that I think are worth exploring and examining, and though this is going to be more the theory, and then we'll look a little bit more at the practice this afternoon.
Now, when it comes to crime, there is two generalized, and I'm stereotyping here, of course, but that's all right, two general approaches, sometimes called the left wing and the right wing.
And the first, of course, is to view prisoners as inhuman animals or criminals as inhuman animals who have perfect control over their behavior, but simply will themselves to do evil things.
Whereas you, of course, in that same situation, would not will yourself to do evil things, but would pull a Horatio Alger-style renaissance of personal responsibility, hard work, and simple stick-to-it-ness that would help yourself pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
hard work and simple stick-to-it-ness that would help yourself pull yourself up by the bootstraps from what is recognizably the original home of criminals, which is abusive lower classes.
And I'm talking about the criminals who end up in jail, not the criminals who end up on coins because they have declared wars and so on.
So this challenge that people have is to differentiate between that position that they're inhuman animals, that no punishment can be too great, that they have forfeited all rights to life and property and liberty that they have forfeited all rights to life and property and liberty and usually the sanctity of and can be thrown in jail and gang-raped.
They've become subhuman and we can treat them however we want.
They have brought it on themselves, and there's this Jehovah old-style testament lashing with the hammers of Thor to mix my mythologies.
And no punishment is too cruel, so to speak.
They've lost their rights.
That's sort of the one side of the coin when it comes to looking at crime and punishment.
And there is a fair amount of what seems to me immature, macho, bullshit posturing in that.
But there's also some posturing on the other side, at least to me.
And I'd sort of like to counsel a third way to see if it makes any sense to you.
On the other side, what we have is not exactly sympathy for the prisoners, but an understanding, at least, or a striving to understand where they've come from.
And there are statistics there, like an average 70% of the prisoners...
Never completed high school.
Almost all of them have been through pretty horrific childhoods.
And you get into this kind of debate, where you say, well, you know, these prisoners all had horribly abusive childhoods, very little education, no role models, no economic opportunities, or few economic opportunities, to which the rejoiner inevitably comes, like the sloshing back and forth of one of those lava wave things with the jelly in them.
The answer inevitably comes back, well, I know people who went through the same sorts of things and didn't become criminals.
And the magical alchemy of free will and virtue is sprinkled into the mix, and that is considered to be the answer.
That although the criminals almost universally come from highly disadvantaged backgrounds, and that can be either financially or emotionally.
I think of the Menendez brothers and so on.
Or... It is the case that others who came from that kind of background ended up not becoming criminals and therefore they're responsible and therefore they can have almost any punishment inflicted upon them and we should throw them in a rotting hole and spare no more thought to their existence.
Now, there are logical challenges, logical problems, of course, in both of these positions, and I would say pretty insurmountable and pretty significant logical problems.
The logical problem with the argument from environment, or the argument from circumstance, or the argument, in a sense, from negligence or neglect or provocation, is that it does remove the choice element of, The element of choice.
And again, I'm going to get into a free will debate here because we just don't have enough information.
But the logical consequences would be that we can't punish people for things which are not their fault.
You cannot punish people for things which are not their fault.
You can't press charges against your wife if she rolls over and accidentally hits you in the mouth while she's sleeping, assuming she is sleeping and you haven't annoyed her.
You can't press charges.
At least no reasonable justice system would accept those charges.
And you similarly, if you have a highly sort of mentally handicapped child who takes something shiny from a store, puts it in his pocket, and walks out to examine it with glee, it's not particularly just to press charges against, like with premeditated theft and malevolent intent against the individual.
That's not particularly rational.
So if the circumstantial argument, which comes usually from the left side of the spectrum, if the circumstantial argument is considered to be the most important, then punishment becomes a non-starter.
You can't really punish people then.
And on the other side of the spectrum, The pure free will, irregardless of circumstances, that a child born to a Harvard professor must be judged the same as the child born to, I don't know, a crack-addicted prostitute or something, fails to take into account the statistical evidence that those who end up behind bars come from histories of horrific abuse.
That correlation is not made, right?
That correlation is not dealt with.
So I'm not going to make a case for how this all works in a free market society.
I certainly have some ideas.
We could talk about that another time.
But I would like to make a plea, in a sense, for a reconciliation or a third way between these two views.
I don't feel too comfortable saying that environment is all.
Because people respond to incentives.
And some incentives, I do believe, are a matter of choice.
And as I have talked about in the past, what I consider to be free will, which is purely unscientific and simply the result of introspection, what I view to be free will is the choice whether to focus on long-term and balance long-term versus short-term objectives.
And criminality, in its very essence, is the lack of a willingness or a desire or a capacity, let's say, to focus on the long-term consequences of one's actions.
That is really what breeds criminality.
There are very few people who, if they had an urge to steal something, they knew they would be caught and they would spend five years in jail.
Would make sense of that decision, right?
It's the impulse control and the lack of focusing on long-term consequences that really breeds the criminal mindset or is an essential aspect of the criminal mindset.
And we all know, we've seen interviews or seen documentaries where people say to sort of young ghetto toughs, where do you see yourself when you're 30?
And they're like, in a coffin, man, I'm going to be dead.
And, of course, that kind of nihilism does not exactly breed a desire to shovel away goodies into your 401k plan, and neither does it this kind of criminal approach to life or this sort of very short-term, immediate gratification approach to life.
It doesn't breed...
It doesn't breed the idea, well, you know, I've got a long time to live on this planet.
I might want to defer some gratification now in order to build up some intellectual, emotional, financial, and career-wise capital so that I can have a fulfilling job and this and that.
And, of course, the love aspect as well is pretty important as well.
One of the things that I believe is fairly important in terms of deferring gratification is to wait to get to know somebody a little bit before you have sex with them, which is never, of course, encouraged.
There's no, I can't even remember the last time that I saw.
A TV show, for instance, or even a movie, which had any kind of artistic intent or merit, wherein people didn't just sort of meet each other, have intense conversations, and fall into bed, and then attempt to get to know each other and start a relationship.
That's sort of how it works.
Or rather, how it's portrayed.
It certainly is not how it works.
So... This capacity to defer gratification and to be able to project the consequences of choices.
When you choose the action, you choose the consequences, as Dr.
Bill Head says, this ability to be able to look beyond the gratification of the moment and to review the long-term consequences is something that's sort of notably absent in the criminal element, and it tends to become self-reinforcing, right?
So when you start to steal or whatever, let's just stick with stealing and take away the violent crimes for the moment.
When you start to steal, you don't think about the negative consequences in terms of even the practical things, like the fear of living, the living in fear of being caught, not actually being able to enjoy the goodies because you know where they came from, the self-esteem element not actually being able to enjoy the goodies because you know where they came from, the self-esteem element of having stolen something what that's going to do to your self-esteem, your capacity for love, your whatever, all of these kinds of things, right?
I mean, it is a rot. And having had a very minor career as a shoplifter when I was in my early teens, I can speak with some experience about, you know, minor crimes.
I stole some candy bars and a couple of toys, and that is something that...
I mean, I have some knowledge about where all that behavior came from, but what happened was, for me, I stopped because I became afraid.
And the fear was, of course, an enormously helpful thing for me, as it has in general been throughout my life.
The fear was my friend.
The fear managed to pull me back.
It wasn't that I had this sudden epiphany, love of my fellow man, a desire for virtue.
But I certainly did fear getting caught and feared the consequences of getting caught to the point where I simply stopped it, right?
So the fear was healthy, but the fear also had something to do with an innate capacity to process the long-term consequences and the belief that a different kind of life was possible for me, but I had to kind of stop the stealing first.
So I view...
The kind of correctional occurrences or the correctional philosophy, the crime and punishment philosophy that goes on in the current world to be similar to the kind of medicine that would be developed during the Black Death,
during the Plague. Because what we have in the modern world, in the West, and I'll speak mostly about the United States here, that's actually the one that I know the most about in terms of prisons.
What we have is a state-educated, state-run, state-culturally defined in the lower classes through welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, dependence upon the state for both financial rewards, public housing, for the mind-mangling babysitting services of the public schools, and so on.
What we have is a situation where Criminality is being manufactured by state policies in the same way that sick people are being manufactured by the bubonic virus in the Middle Ages during the time of the Black Death.
You can't keep up.
You can't keep up.
And the kind of brinksmanship triage, battlefield triage, that would occur either in a war zone or during a time of ubiquitous plague is something that would not sustain That philosophy or that approach to medicine when you're on a battlefield or when you're in the middle of a plague would not be sustainable when the war was over or the plague was brought under control.
So right now we have a veritable tidal wave of criminality That is specifically, and in the short term, manufactured by things like mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes and you're out, by the drug war, by high taxes causing jobs to be eradicated for the lower classes in the realm of manufacturing and the other sort of traditional entrees to the middle class for the poor.
So you have specific policies that are...
Both lowering opportunities for criminals to not, for people to end up not being criminals, and also raises the profitability through making, particularly, of course, drugs illegal, raises the profitability of being a criminal.
And we know that people respond to incentives.
They recoil from disincentives and they pursue incentives.
It's like water, gravity, and a hill, right?
That's how it works.
So when it comes to looking at prisoners, the state has generated and greased a very slippery slope, wherein working hard and moving up is becoming harder and harder, wherein working hard and moving up is becoming harder and harder, and working down, so to speak, and becoming a criminal, even if we accept that it's just the ones defined by the state, not the real criminals like the rapists
and the murderers and the thieves and so on, but the people not the real criminals like the rapists and the murderers and the thieves and so on, but the people who tax evade, who go to the gray market, who work on cash basis, who deal drugs, So that's the short-term way in which the state manufactures criminals in the very sort of immediate sense of,
Now, there's also the long-term sense in how the state manufactures criminals, which is it educates people really badly.
40% of those who graduate from high school up here in Canada have trouble filling out a simple job application.
And what do you think that's going to do To people in terms of their preference for honest employment versus criminal occupations.
It mangles their brains so that they can't think or reason in any particularly sensible way.
It bores the hell out of them, which for boys in particular raises the Impulsive behavior.
When you're bored, you tend to be more impulsive and those impulses tend to be less healthy.
So it really bores the crap out of kids, particularly boys, which is not healthy.
The vast majority of teachers, particularly when the kids are younger, are women.
So, of course, we have this other issue that a lot of the people who are criminals are raised in fractured families, single parent, usually mother-headed families.
Most of their friends have female-only families, as I called it, the low-rent areas that we lived, the cheap apartment areas that I grew up.
I called them the matriarchal manners because it was all run by women.
We used to trail after the male superintendent like ducklings on a badly imprinted orange balloon because it was just so astounding to see a man around who had any kind of authority.
And so you get these boys who are being taught by women exclusively, and it's not that boys don't have anything to learn from women, but they certainly can't learn the proper way to deal with manhood and the attendant strength and aggression that comes with being a man, And that, of course, is ridiculously bad as well.
They're not taught any emotional skills, which would be pretty essential in a school.
They're just basically locked into their seats.
They're lectured at in petty ways about stupid things.
They're bored. They're frustrated.
And they don't see anything that launches them into a productive career at the end of high school, right?
So they can go through all the slog of going through high school.
And what do they graduate to?
Well, maybe they'll get a job serving coffee at a donut shop.
But there's nothing on the line with any sort of unionized protection or growth capacity, which can occur with or without unions, and of course I have no problem with unions as long as in the free market sector.
But there's no leg up for them.
There's no reason for them to defer gratification.
And the cost benefits of, quote, honest versus, quote, criminal behavior become far less important.
You can survive on welfare.
You can survive by impregnating women, as we talked about when we looked at Charles Murray's book, Losing Ground.
So there are all of these sort of facts and realities, and we really could go on and on about all of this stuff, and I won't, because I think you sort of get the general idea.
That the state, as a monopolistic defense mechanism for society, or at least that's its sort of claimed reason for existence and reason for having power and control, the state is entirely centered around manufacturing enemies.
Manufacturing enemies both foreign and domestic.
That is what happens when you have a monopoly, a force-based monopoly.
It has to continually lie to the population.
And the reason that it has to continually lie to the population is simple.
It portrays itself as a voluntary choice, but it is in fact a coercive monopoly.
And so it has to continually keep the And it's that fundamental falsehood.
That we're held down with a knife to our throat, but thrown a rose and told it's lovemaking.
It's that fundamental falsehood that the state constantly needs to keep people in a state of suspense and fear and insecurity over.
And where it can't do that, it absolutely has to bribe them.
This is the great split.
People wonder why the divide between rich and poor is widening in the Western world, particularly in the United States.
Well, it's very, very simple. The state terrorizes those who have no ability to harm it, and it bribes those who have an ability to harm it.
So, creating a dependent and insecure and aggressive and frightened population And continually taking away their incentives for good behavior and providing them greater and greater incentives for bad behavior, defining their inevitable activity as criminality, is perfect for the state.
It creates enemies in terms of those it sends to prison and also in terms of those Who then end up resentful of the state.
That's another reason why the state has power.
It abuses those who are out of the sight of power.
The US has a much higher rate of incarceration for blacks for the population than South Africa ever did at the height of apartheid.
5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's criminals.
And this affects not only, of course, those who end up in prison, but it affects their families and their extended families and so on.
So it creates constant divisions and hostilities and rages and resentments and so on, which is all perfect, right?
The more unstable and violent society is, the more people cling to the state.
So naturally the state has every incentive to provoke and create this kind of division.
So I was watching a 60-minute show on the Duke rape case the other day, And I won't get into it in much detail other than to say that the evidence, even to my untrained non-legal eye, the evidence is completely ridiculous.
The accusing stripper, she changed her story.
There was no physical evidence.
And there's physical evidence that at least one of the men accused of rape could not have conceivably been doing it because there's cell phone records and cab witnesses that place him either on the phone or...
Yeah.
But nonetheless, the prosecutor, who has never asked any questions of the accused, is continuing to plow forward to make his case.
And why? Well, because there is a black population that loves certain aspects of a black population who love this kind of race-baiting.
Oh, they're raping our black daughters who are unprotected, these privileged white kids with their fancy lawyers and their rich daddies, and I won't, I'll fight for you, and this kind of stuff.
Well... I mean, nobody's talking about the real issue here, which is that the black population is responding to this nonsense.
That's the cause. I mean, this guy's just a political hack who will say anything to anyone to get a cheer out of a crowd, and it's the cheering that draws him like a moth to a flame.
And nobody's talking about the real issue here, which is that the blacks are receptive to this kind of lynching that's currently occurring.
And why? Well, because they're arrested, they're abused, and of course the state or their leaders have told them that it's not the government that is abusing and controlling them, but it's the white guys.
It's the lacrosse players, right?
They're the ones who are really abusing and controlling the black population.
Not the state.
And of course that's partly because a good number of black leaders get their income either directly or indirectly or partially, Through the state, right?
You don't bite the hand that feeds you.
You rouse people again, and that's what they're paid for, right?
To create divisions that are artificial so that we never look at the real issue.
So the state is absolutely intent on manufacturing criminals.
The more frightened people are, the more they're going to cling to the pseudo-protection of the state.
So looking at the existing system of taking people who have done wrong, running them through a really bad system of proof, and putting them through a system where cops get promoted and commended on making arrests and throwing people in jail,
Which causes them to fabricate evidence, to plant evidence, to lie under oath, all of the kind of stuff.
And where you have DAs who can gain enormous political prestige, power, and money through pursuing high-profile cases that create divisions and sensationalism within society.
And the solution to all of this activity, and of course there are genuine criminals thrown in there, The solution which is generated by the state is to take these people who have been, quote, convicted of a, quote, crime.
We don't know the truth.
The truth never comes out of the government's legal system.
That's just unthinkable any more than economic efficiency.
Justice is never going to be provided by the state any more than economic efficiency, good education, help for the poor, effective solutions to anything.
So what amazes me is that people look at a state-based solution, which is to throw people into rotting, dank, raping cells to torture them for years and then to turn them back loose into society.
This is a state solution.
And there's a surprising number of libertarians and even market anarchists who look at this vengeful, violent, tortuous, murderous, destructive Training people for evil.
It's like you're taking a dog that attacks people, you're putting it in a dank hole, you're poking it with sticks for a couple of years, and then you're turning it back loose in the world.
Well, this is another way, a much more direct way that the state manufactures criminals, is it gets people railroaded into jail to fund the prison complex, which is a very large and profitable entity within society, and then it subjects them to the most horrible and psychotic tortures imaginable, And then it turns them back loose on society.
But what do they think is going to happen?
Take an aggressive dog, poke it with a stick for a couple of years in a dark room, and then let it loose on society.
It's going to lurch around, wobble around, and just bite someone.
That's inevitable. So the whole idea of raining vengeance down upon the criminal is...
An entirely state-based solution.
This is not how private industry does it.
This is not how private industry would deal with it.
Because it is just so obviously inefficient.
And the state gains from the presence of criminals, both in the immediate financial and in the general conceptual fear and nervousness and feelings of helplessness from the population as a whole, So the state benefits from criminals, and naturally then everything that the state does manufactures more and more criminals.
So, this solution, which is blatantly put forward by an agency with every interest in the world in creating and provoking and creating more and more criminal behavior, is taken as some sort of sensible solution by people who are skeptical about everything the state does.
About everything that the state does.
They're skeptical of it.
Oh, except for crime and punishment.
There, suddenly, magically, amazingly...
The state-based solution is a good thing.
The state can't run the post office.
The state can't build roads.
The state can't protect the environment.
All things which are relatively simple compared to the problem of ameliorating the behavior of bad people scarred by unholy childhoods.
So the state can't do the simple things.
But somehow, magically, the state can reverse the effects of violent abuse.
And I'm not saying those effects can be reversed.
I want to get into that debate.
The state can't deliver the mail on time, but the state can wisely apply justice and punishment to criminals.
The state benefits from the presence of criminals and the expansion in the numbers and the strength of criminals.
But, nonetheless, the state is going to be perfectly well equipped and executes in a very just manner the punishment or the restraint or the change of those who have committed crimes, even those who've committed violent crimes.
So the amazing thing, of course, is that it is simply a state solution.
A current system of incarceration and punishment is a state solution.
And if you believe that the state has come up with a wonderfully magical, perfectly great solution in terms of dealing with crime, well then you're not even a minarchist.
You just would like the guns rearranged a little or pointed at slightly different body organs or whatever.
But then you absolutely miss the whole point of the non-aggression principle.
And of course, you know, you can hear the chimes of people starting up their inevitable motors of, oh, but self-defense, you can't have self-defense, and then you're saying you can't even kill someone in self-defense?
Yeah, but we're not talking about that just now.
We've already talked about self-defense.
What we're talking about is a massive institutional torture system, brutalization system, Which objectively manufactures more and more criminals and takes people who have, quote, committed, quote, crimes.
If you get thrown in jail for having a joint, then the brutality, the rapes, the constant threat upon your life, the stress, all the stuff that drives crazed prisoners to suicide, by the time you get out, you're done.
You're toast. You will never have a productive life again.
Once you've been sold for a pack of cigarettes to surrender your anus to rape and to make somebody's bed, to be somebody's prison bitch, what are you going to do?
Go out and get a job as an accountant later?
You're fried. Your whole emotional and neurobiological system is completely fried.
You'll be jumpy, you won't be able to sleep, you won't be able to stand up straight, you won't be able to have...
And you'll have internal injuries, which may plague you for the rest of your life.
And that's exactly what you would expect from the state, isn't it?
Isn't it exactly what you would expect from the state?
Just exactly this kind of counterproductive brutality.
So I just must confess to being a little bit confused about how we have these tub-thump-and-old-Jehovah-thunderbolts-in-the-eyeballs kinds of people who say that criminals are subhuman animals who should be treated like the beasts they are and no punishment is too great and so on.
Well, of course, all you're doing is telling me everything I need to know about your childhood, and of course you have no credibility when it comes to me, at least, to talking about punishment and crime and so on.
Now, the last thing that I'd sort of like to talk about in this section of crime and punishment is to just go over a little bit of the framework of...
Not exactly alternatives, but ways in which we could look at it differently.
Ways in which we could look at it differently.
Now, clearly, if you're in the middle of a plague, whatever you can do as a doctor is just the best that you can do, and people are going to be dying like flies, and so on.
So, the first thing, in order to come up with a coherent and sensible plague, The theory of crime and punishment is we have to recognize that no society can deal with millions upon millions of criminals in any really productive way.
And this, of course, is one of the reasons why, other than the fact that it's the state that's running it, one of the reasons why all of these prisoners end up being so horrendously abused.
Because this is the amazing thing.
This is the amazing thing about people who are all about punishing the bad dudes and being all tough about this, that, and the other.
Which is that it is a turtles all the way down situation.
It's got the problem of infinite regression.
It's the problem of infinite regression.
If you have a pet and you allow that pet to starve to death, then you're guilty of that pet's death.
If you have a child And you allow that child to starve to death, or you force that child to starve to death, then you are guilty of a crime.
Forget about the state. We're just talking about moral crime here.
If you lock someone in your basement and don't feed them, then you are guilty of a crime.
If you lock someone in your basement who needs their insulin shots because they're diabetic and you don't give them any insulin shots because they're diabetic, even though you give them food and water and they lose their leg or their eye, then you're criminally liable for that.
So this is the problem, of course, that I have with the people who say that the existing system of crime and punishment is somehow valid, that these people are subhuman animals to whom no punishment is too bad.
And even if you're not that extreme, even if you think, you know, lock them up and so on, then help me understand how this problem of infinite regression is solved.
Which is that the state, and let's just talk specifically the prison guards, the wardens, and so on, they take ownership of the criminals in the same way that a parent has ownership of a child when the child is too young to fend for itself and call for help and so on, use the phone. So...
The state has taken ownership of the criminals by locking them in jails and subjected them to this kind of, let's just say, confinement at least.
Therefore, any crime which occurs in the prison system is directly morally attributable to the actions of the people who have control over the prisoners.
So, if you have ownership of somebody, and you do not act if they get raped, then you are committing a crime.
If you lock somebody in your basement, and then you let people come in and rape that person, are you committing a crime?
Yeah, of course you are. Of course you are, because you're confining that person, and you have complete control over their environment and their circumstances so naturally.
If you have control over a human being, and they are harmed while you're in control of their life and their very existence, then help me to understand why that is not criminal.
Well, I didn't rape the person locked in my basement.
No, but basically you took money to have that person be raped by those who wanted to rape.
And we're not even talking about direct guard abuse, which of course is also endemic.
We're just talking about the state who has ownership of criminals, and therefore, and let's say you want private agencies to be this violent and brutal with criminals.
The moment that you take ownership of another human being, I'm not talking about the justice of it, simply the practicalities, I don't think it's just, but the moment you take ownership of another human being, you are morally responsible for the harm that accrues to them.
You are morally responsible for the harm that accrues to them.
Why? Because you control their environment.
You lock someone in the basement, you turn off the heat, you go on vacation, they freeze to death.
All you did was flip a switch and walk out the door.
Did you murder them? Oh, of course you did!
So, if you believe that criminals are subhuman beasts and no punishment is too bad or whatever, whatever, and you've lost all their rights, they've forfeited all protection, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, well, you feel that they now have no rights because they have committed a moral crime.
Well, fine. But then the problem is that any harm that accrues to them in their confinement is is placed squarely upon the shoulders of those who are in control of their confinement.
And therefore, the criminals must be punished, but then also those who punish, or who allow the punishment to occur, which is of course endemic in prisons everywhere the world over, also fall into the same category of those who have no rights.
So those who confine them and allow harm to occur to them also have no rights.
And this is how we know that even prisoners have rights.
And I don't want to get into the term rights.
We'll just use it in its generally accepted term or manner.
Of course those who are in confinement have rights.
Because if they don't have rights, then whoever violates them is also morally wrong and must be in confinement.
You can't confine another human being and not offer them protection and not be morally culpable.
For any harm that accrues to them.
So anybody or any institution who allows harm to accrue to prisoners faces the same moral issue that got the prisoners into their confinement to begin with, which is that they've caused harm and therefore lost all rights.
So you can't solve this problem.
You can't solve this logical problem.
By saying the prisoners have no rights and can be abused.
Because the prisoners have no rights because they have harmed others.
But allowing harm to accrue to others is also immoral.
And so you get this chain of infinite regression.
We throw people in jail because they've done harm.
But then those who are controlling their environment, the jailkeepers, the wardens, also do harm by allowing harm to accrue to the prisoners, and therefore they must be thrown in jail too, so somebody else must come along to guard them.
But then the moment something bad happens there, you get the picture.
It's infinite regression. You can't solve this problem logically.
I mean, you can still stand by your spears and thunderballs, but you simply can't solve the problem logically, and then you're just expressing a random and actually quite hateful opinion.
So there are alternatives to this approach to things, to this vengeful approach to simply allowing brutalities to occur to criminals, and we'll talk about those a little bit more.
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I haven't mentioned this every time, so please don't think that's only two.
But boy, I'm telling you, you know, based on the number of listeners that we have here, If I could even get 10 or 20% of you to sign up to be subscribers, come on, 17 bucks a month, 50 cents a day.
Don't tell me that that's too arduous a price to pay.
50 cents a day for usually two podcasts a day.
So 12.5 cents for some common sense.
I don't think that that's too high a price to pay.
And I don't think that you can get it anywhere else.
So I think that signing up to be a subscriber...
It's a reasonable and decent thing to do.
So I hope that you will do it and it would certainly allow me to concentrate far more.
If I had subscribers, then I will absolutely get much more podcasting done when I go to this part-time or full-time because I won't have to worry about other forms of income generation.
So if you like any podcasts and you want more research, more quality, more visuals, and if you want to give me the opportunity To work on getting a radio show or a television show and all that kind of stuff, then if you donate, you're helping me get a lot closer to that situation because I won't have to spend my time focusing on filling in the money holes that are left by a lack of subscribers.
So I hope that that is important to you.
I think that I can do some good stuff to get the word out.
And if you agree, then you could do a lot to help me in that by giving me a more stable financial base.
I would hugely appreciate that.
And I will talk to you soon.
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