“When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war. The old image must be recovered at any cost”
Marshall McLuhan/Quentin Fiore: War and peace in the global Village.
In the news a, presidential contender is asking vowing to use the death penalty more. I just recently posted:
As they say, there’s nothing new under the sun and themes continue to reverberate and repeat.
Likewise, what we say about these things is often repetitious, but we need to repeat and repeat until we get it.
On the other hand, we know that repeating facts often doesn’t do anything. The more you try to convince people the more they dig in their heels. I guess one hope is that the more we discuss things just maybe we will come up with new ways to find the truth of things and there will be more agreement.
For me the reason people want to kill people is pretty simple, they think it will solve a problem.
I have often thought of it in historical terms as we are evolved from a more primitive and animalistic nature it has been a slow process. Animals kill, for the most part, for food. And they don’t kill excessively. However, they also kill for dominance, territory, mating, and preservation and strengthening of the gene pool.
I attached three articles that point out that the human is by far not the most violent and that environment, education, and culture do have an effect on murder rates.
But of course, the candidate advocating more executions does not see themselves as promoting murder. Humans, have highly advanced cultures and have developed systems of jurisprudence. We believe in something that to me is still a nebulous concept and that is “justice”.
Capital punishment and murder are at bass the same thing. As I said we kill people because it solves a problem in our mind. Yes, reason tells us that it is solving a problem, but it is an emotional problem.
But Reason also tells us, in the last hundred years, that capital punishment doesn’t do any good as far as deterrence and to all indications, retributive Justice does no one any good. We may think it does, but research shows that it doesn’t tend to heal the hurt and can perpetuate a cycle of violence.
Chimpanzees kill to solve a practical problem. To solve a problem of real or perceived scarcity or because of sexual competition, humans at this point, kill to solve an emotional problem.
“When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war. The old image must be recovered at any cost”
I’m convinced the great majority of killing is due to a feeling of humiliation. If you have the power to respond to that hurt that you have suffered, you may well kill somebody or at least damage them greatly.
So, when we talk about capital punishment it seems that we are speaking about a portion of society that has been hurt in many ways whether through real or perceived aggression and they were unable to think past that hurt. As is often said hurt people hurt people and that’s about it.
Politicians play into this. It’s an easy way to get attention. It is an easy way to give a false sense that they are going to do something for you and make things better by hurting others. By punishing those that are hurting you. And the politician would not do this unless they were fighting the ghost of some past humiliation. In the end, it’s all abstraction. Of course, until someone gets killed.