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The Growing Menace of Violence in Society

By ANTHONY FRANCE, Crime Reporter

Humanity’s approach to crime has its roots in imperfect human impulses, that of lashing out at a real or perceived transgressor. It is born of an impulse to anger and vengeance. Throughout human history our fundamental approach to crime has progressed no further beyond the savage impulse. Our answers to crime have really only been to punish and/or to kill.

Crime is an Area of Social Dysfunction

We have never moved to rehabilitate because to do so would be in opposition to our imperfect human impulse of vengeance and to authoritarianism. Humanity’s premises are not open to examining crime as a problem to be solved. Crime is an area of social dysfunction where all of our conceptual pathogens reach a crescendo, where our cumulative cultural stupidities make their most garish display. Would we but dare to look at the problem of crime, and our approaches to it, and point the way to solving most of our social dysfunctions.

Crime, as is also the case with every other human activity, is a reflection of the individual’s mentality, what the individual has learned and failed to learn, is the premises and reasoning patterns that have become deeply ingrained. Crime reflects the ethos and the content of what a society is teaching! The level to which it is manifest within a culture is a reflection of the objective rationality (or absence of) within that culture. The high level of crime in the United States is a statement of its high level of cultural delusion, and our subsequent corruption for example.

Shame is the Primary or Ultimate Cause

The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence. Shame is a necessary but not a sufficient cause of violence, just as the tubercle bacillus is necessary but not sufficient for the development of tuberculosis. The different forms of violence, whether toward individuals or entire populations, are motivated by shame. The degree of shame that a man needs to be experiencing in order to become homicidal is so intense and so painful that it threatens to overwhelm him and bring about the death of the self, cause him to lose his mind, his soul, or his sacred honor. Maybe he is in debt.

Thus the growing menace of violence has escalated to a level of crime in which its roots lie, both on the dimension of the individual specifically at the psycho – social level, and on the level of relative individual circumstances such as culture. In recent news a 28-year-old is slain during the course of a gang fight. Fights in the area are common, with an average of two to three incidents a week, especially on weekends. The rottenness is clear but perhaps its pervasive nature is due to the fact that society has deteriorated so much in values that such is no longer found to be aberrant.

Robert Kennedy once said:” there is another kind of violence….violence of institutions; it is indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men.” So, the question now is, what can we do?

September 1, 2010 - Posted by Alex Spencer | Ready, Society | anger and vengeance, forms of violence, Primitive impulses, psycho – social, Robert Kennedy