A Costly Indulgence

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I keep running into the idiocy that I’ll call “therapeutic approaches to crime.” Or if you prefer how my kids portrayed this on the regular, with extreme sarcasm, it went something like this:

“Hey, where are my comic books?”

“Don’t know!”

“What do you mean don’t know? They’re in your room. You took them without asking.”

“It’s a fair cop, but society is to blame.”

Which was Monty Python, of course, but also what I keep running into from people with various letters after their name who come up with justifications in all seriousness.

You know, like the special flower on X who was sure we could get rid of crime if we just increased minimum wage to $30. Or the even more special flowers who think that paying everyone for breathing would get rid of crime. Or the socialists/communists who are convinced that you should abolish the police and have social workers intervene instead. Some of these are actually evil and don’t mean anything of that, except where they could make society worse to destroy everything so they can then install their dictatorship of choice. But some are just stupid, and truly believe this. Partly because — of course — this is indoctrinated into everyone in school. Which is why you find “serious” books about Jack the Ripper’s victims talking about how they were victims of society, really, not just of a deranged killer. (Yes, I know they were victims, not technically criminals. Kind of. More on that later.)

Part of it is years upon years of people being told anything bad anyone does is “society’s fault” for “driving them to it”, partly it’s all the stupid tales of how evil mean our ancestors were for executing people for “stealing a loaf of bread”, part is the remnants of the old bizarre early twentieth century idea that if only people were “educated” enough they’d stop committing crimes. And partly it’s the sludge of Freud working itself through the culture.

It’s hard to remember but in the mid to late twentieth century Freud was not only taken absolutely seriously, but also as the explanation for everything TM. Learned people and experts absolutely believed his crazy cakes theories. (Turns out Freud was a brilliant psychologist, who absolutely diagnosed the problems with ONE patient. The patient was himself.) So, you know, every geek who hadn’t yet got around to even THINKING of sex was known for an absolute fact to be a mass murderer just waiting for his repressions to burst forth and kill someone. It was a fact TM.

Because of this there are a lot of softheads running around absolutely convinced that if we just give the poor troubled criminals a bit more love and understanding, they’ll be completely law abiding.

After all, we’ve come a long way from the time they hanged people for stealing a loaf of bread, and to quote Obama’s speech writer: “The arrow of history bends towards mercy.” Which is exactly the sort of patented insanity smeared with bullshit we can expect from the SCOAMF.

Because history never came with an arrow, and mercy is a luxury good.

What do I mean by luxury good? Well, the reason people used to get hanged for stealing a loaf of bread is that for many families that daily loaf was all that stood between starvation and survival. A loaf of bread, in terms of worth, both in cost of materials and work and for that matter of ability of anyone to buy it was a much more expensive and vital thing than it is to us.

The baker who set up a hue and cry when his loaf was pinched was not the evil man willing to send the poor orphan to the gallows for so little. It was because the money from that loaf was desperately needed by his own family.

Now, Sarah, the loaf of bread thing is probably just an exaggeration of silly Victorian writers. Perhaps. But you find penalties for things that are almost as silly. To us. People hanged for stealing a few shillings, or a cheap piece of jewelry, or perhaps a length of fabric. Or other equally harsh penalties.

Look, what you have to understand is that we’re unimaginably rich when compared to most human beings throughout most of history that we don’t sweat the small stuff. Until someone impinges on our ability to survive (and it takes a lot), we’re willing to let it ride and to try things that anyone with two grams of sense would know wouldn’t work, or only work in very rare cases.

But throughout most of history what criminals took was normal people’s ability to survive, and it was trivially easy. Because people lived close to the knife’s edge. So they couldn’t afford romantic ideas such as that someone became a murderer because his mom refused to buy him a teddy bear when he was 3. (Or gave him a sexy teddy bear when he was three.) What they could do is deal swift justice on those who impinged on their ability to survive. (And sometimes yes mistaken justice, and mob justice. Because humans. Scared humans.)

It wasn’t until the Victorian age that it became fashionable to feel sorry for the poor criminals and talk about how they couldn’t help themselves.

Which brings us right around to the victims of Jack the Ripper. Who were of course victims, and no one deserves to die that way. BUT on the other hand, most of them were petty criminals. “Sex workers” then and now inhabit a half world, where other crimes happen, and most of these women were petty thieves as well as prostitutes. But more importantly, most of them existed in that space where criminal and victim flow into each other. They might or might not have ever turned truly criminal, but they lived on the petty scale of not having honest work, prostituting themselves, drinking themselves stupid, and seemingly being unable to pull up.

It is people like this that the good liberals of the early twentieth century envisioning rescuing with “education” as though by teaching people things they could stop them being alcoholics or having basic effed up personalities. And they’re the people that the late twentieth century people envisioned rescuing by asking about their mothers. And the people our blinkered little socialists think are only effed up because “capitalism is an unnatural order that causes mental illness.” (In the sense that it allows people to live long enough and eat enough to worry about mental illness, they might be right.) They have this entire mythology of a garden of Eden without G-d where everyone shared and shared alike and there was no private property before a mysterious fall (variously ascribed to agriculture or other nonsense) when suddenly capitalism entered the world and everyone became victims or victimizers. Look, it’s a stupid religion, but I don’t fault them for their beliefs. I fault them for trying to impose their nonsense on reality and making us worship their fucked up gods. If they contented themselves with living in the monastery of holy redistribution, snarling at evil capitalism at the proscribed hours of the day, I couldn’t care less.

But as is, they insist on bringing their fantasies into my reality. They claim that police is evil not because they use force, not because — on occasion — they’re less than honest, not because — on occasion — they don’t catch the right guy. No. Police are evil, in the dear socialists little minds because they enforce established rule and “capitalism.” So far they are telling the truth. They hate law enforcement because it keeps the established order going, with the dear socialists occupying the space between lunatics and academics (BIRM). Where we let them exist because they’re impotent and we’re merciful.

BUT what they want is to occupy the space where they command all force. Where they’re at the top and enforcing the rules. To get there, they need to encourage disorder and riot, and get normal people scared. (Also they believe if things get bad they’ll automagically be on top.)

This is why the socialists with power try to convince everyone else (And convince academics and the indoctrinated (again BIRM)) that what we should send to the scene of the crime is not a policeman but a social worker. Not because it will help anything, but because they know it won’t.

And that is a problem.

You see, we’re immensely rich. We can afford to let people steal any number of bread loaves. We can afford any amount of illusions, like that homeless addicts who threaten the public are “victims of society” who are “unhoused” and just need a place built at the expense of the public. We can afford insanity like USAID and its distributions of money for Peruvian trans operas or whatever the hell that was. We can even afford to pay people to riot in and burn our cities. And survive.

What we can’t afford are socialists and their bullshit.

Because what they’re threatening is the idea of private property and the ability to keep that which you’ve wrested from the Earth by the sweat of your brow.

And if we lose that, as a society, we’ll be back to being so poor we have to hang the urchin that steals the loaf of bread, because that loaf of bread is the margin between survival and not.

Coddling criminals is a stupid indulgence. Coddling socialists is a potentially life-threatening one.

It’s too expensive. We can’t afford it.

63 thoughts on “A Costly Indulgence”

  2. Very well said, coddling those who would do us wrong, whether common criminal or socialist schemer, costs us all too much. The damage is visible all around to those who will look. Good post!

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  3. One of the most spectacular backfires of recent history by the Left was their screaming insistence on police body cameras. Of course they thought it would document how horrible the jackbooted thugs were, randomly shooting and killing “chilluns” for no reason. Instead, now we have dozens of YouTube channels (I can give you a few of my favorites if you want) where we can see exactly what police have to put up with. Being adult daycare for drunks. Mental health problems where people who used to be safely locked away are out on the streets and causing violence to innocents. Those who BLM and their ilk were defending as “innocent’ who turn out to instead be serial repeat offenders who are loud, disrespectful, violent, will do anything to avoid the consequences of their actions, and are backed up by a “community” that won’t hold them responsible for anything. And DAs who won’t prosecute and judges who won’t sentence.

    I’ve always had respect for law enforcement, but I have a LOT more now for the good ones, which is the vast majority of them.

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  6. Lazerus Long called an armed robber a free-lance socialist. We need to use that kind of language.

    … Where all men are paid for existing/And no man must pay for his sins …

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  7. Part of it is, as you say, “It’s society’s fault”. Sounds a lot like “systemic racism” and “social justice”. What those all have in common is contempt for the individual and individual choices.

    One thing the “hanged for a loaf of bread” brings to mind though is the Old Testament injunction “an eye for an eye” which is so frequently cited to justify vengeance when it is exactly the opposite. God commands that justice means you take no more than has been taken from you. If a neighbor or stranger takes something from you or injures you, God’s command only allows you to take the same from him, not, if he blinds you, you kill him and his kin. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as in vengeance is left to Him, and is not for you to take.

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  8. I will say that I miss Freud. I prefer the concepts of an unconscious, of deep-seated drives, and of sexual desires to decreeing one must follow today’s fad politics. When a trans woman murders her family, Freud explains it better.

    I am flummoxed by the modern pursuit of barbarism.

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    1. Jungle. You still get the collective unconscious, archetypes, and so on, but at least Jung realized sex wasn’t the reason for everything. He even had a tendency to point some of his patients toward the church.

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      1. both mostly frauds, alas, and nasty pieces of work. Freud more so — both fraud and nastiness — but wouldn’t choose either even though I rather liked Jung when I was young.

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        2. Jung’s personal life was rather….messy. I liked him too, and the Asbury Park public library had the Collected Works, so I read almost all of them.

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    2. Old Dan O’Neill strip Odd Bodkins. Fred and Hugh are chatting; one says something close to ‘If Freud had lived in Dublin instead of Vienna, he would have blamed alcohol instead of sex.’

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    1. “Yes, Officer Krupke, you’ve done it again.

      This boy don’t need a job, he needs a year in the pen.

      It ain’t just a question of misunderstood,

      Deep down inside him, he’s no good!”

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  11. I have never really seen this discussed. But after the end of the Russian civil wars and the reds had won, well there were 10s of thousands of orphans. Communist theory thought these kids would be perfect. No old parents teaching them terrible things, like living a normal human life. So these kids just turned into feral youths. They were good for nothing. Of course Stalin just had them shot. So think of all these DSA. And where we’re headed.

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    1. It’s Society’s Fault! Society didn’t “deal with” that Monster Charlie Kirk so the “nutcase” had to do it!!!!! [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]

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  14. I agree logically, but I also have to admit it’s the double standard that always trips me up first emotionally.

    “Society is to blame for Bad Things!”

    “You don’t smile enough – that’s your fault and we’ll hound you mercilessly!”

    …I mean. Pick one?

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    1. Society is to blame only when the result is flammable. All other times, people are to blame.

      Society is to blame for crime, so let all criminals out. Society is to blame for infidelity, so remove the social stigma.

      But if “my” spouse cheats, that’s obviously h/er problem. If some one steals from “me,” that’s personal and must be punished.

      Blaming society is a tool, and can be deployed at will just like any other tool.

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    2. I’ve had a lot more of a protected life, from birth through who I married, and our family we have grown.

      Still. I have to put it this way: “If I didn’t have standards, their standards would cause me to have whiplash.” Just saying. I can’t keep up. Not that I remotely want to try. Thus, stealing from my son’s generation “Whatever.”

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        1. Standards require principles, consistently applied. Leftroids have neither principles nor consistency, which would interfere with chasing the whim of the moment. They believe that makes them better than all those Eeevul Conservatives.

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  15. “It’s a fair cop, but society is to blame.”

    I have been forced to seek out demons and Norse gods to get around this in my writing. It’s been programmed so deep in my head that it keeps popping out at the most inopportune moments.

    Super nerd Jimmy Carlson gets dumped on the front step of Hela’s fortress of Helheim, in Norse hell. Thanks largely to Jimmy behaving himself in a civilized fashion and not lashing out like a berserk when challenged, he gets an interview with Hela, Queen of the Underworld.

    ~

    “That’s what I do here,” Hela nodded, pleased that he had seen it. “Those who suffer greatly in life need looked after for a time before they can face their final reward. That fool Odin thinks this is a torture chamber you know, the place where the worst offenders are punished after death.”

    “Legends are mixed on that,” Jimmy told her. “There are a lot of stories, ma’am. Like the story of Siegfried, where they pretend that guy was a hero.”

    “Everyone has their journey,” said Hela philosophically. “Try not to worry about it, mortal man. We all take what the Fates give us and do what we can.”

    “That’s what they said,” agreed Jimmy absently as he recalled his conversation with the Norns, mind wandering now that he wasn’t fearing for his life quite so much. “Do you know anything about photons, your Majesty?”

    “He likes photons,” supplied Beatrice at Hela’s skeptical expression. “He’s trying to invent a way to keep certain one-eyed kings from dropping humans in Niflheim.”

    “A pike in the eye would be my choice,” snorted Hela.

    “Spirits grow back,” said Jimmy, thinking about it. “And we aren’t sure who it is or why. It might be that king, or it might not. So, I’ve been wondering why light acts the same here in the celestial realm as it does at home. Seems weird, honestly. A lot of other things aren’t the same at all. How does a goblin reconstitute itself after being vaporized? That’s like unscrambling an egg. Entropy does not run backwards unless you push it. Where does the energy come from?”

    Hela observed him closely. In the intensity of his thought, he had forgotten where he was and who was sitting with her arm around him. “Time for you to go back to Midgard,” she decided.

    ~

    My idea here draws on the old legends of Hela, written before Marx, Freud, Jung and the rest of the Victorian age grifters slithered into the popular culture. Those who perpetrate evil are punished. No hesitation. Jimmy is concerned about making -sure- to get the right guy while Hela reaches for her spear. Because Hela knows the hearts of men, she doesn’t need evidence.

    The evil ones are chased away to hide from their guilt in the misty pine forest of Niflheim. Those who suffer evil in life are comforted in Hela’s manse, that is the job of Helheim. The guard dog Garmr decides who enters and who gets bitten on the backside.

    Bottom line, Hela and Garmr both decide based on the -individual- and the content of their spirit. People get what they deserve. Society is not considered.

    That’s because in the ancient world the modern formulation “society” was not a thing. There were people, and there was a polis. This is a notion that goes back long before Plato and his Philosopher King. The polis is where the people live. The people create the polis, not the other way around. The people strive to do their best so the place where they live will prosper, they don’t blame the polis for their personal shortcomings and failures.

    I strongly think the story is more enjoyable when the characters decide how things are going to go. You can drop a strong character into a crappy situation and marvel at how they move through the mess with style and grace. Much better than watching a dumb-ass with no moral fiber flounder and fail, then blame society. Part of that “dingy stories” thing.

    /here endeth my rantings./

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  16. We can afford the occasional loaf being stolen. What we can’t afford is people taking garbage bags into stores and filling them with an entire shelf’s worth of individually inexpensive products. That’s what we’ve had to deal with in some blue cities.

    Also…

    “Only a lad!

    You really can’t blame him.

    Only a lad!

    Society made him “

    . — Oingo Boingo

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    1. Chad Felix Greene on Twitter yesterday was posting on the various volunteer charities he’d worked on and how all of them fell apart because the people they wanted to “help,” either didn’t want the help being offered or they took shameless advantage and took so much noone else had anything.

      Our little local food bank requires ID, address and proof of income. Some folks may be abusing it, but on the whole it seems to be working.

      Someone else on Twitter suggested the bodega owners would clean out Mamdani’s city grocery and resell the items in their own places. Would not surprise me.

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  18. ”The arrow of history bends toward mercy.”

    That arrow being a purely Marxian religious icon, by extension that implies that future communists will be more merciful than past communists.

    But why?

    That system still will founder on the rocks and shoals of human nature, and the people at the top will still need groups (“classes” in their religion of envy taxonomy) to blame when things don’t work. And the hoarders and wreckers and Kulaks do not, of course, deserve any “mercy”, standing as they do astride the path to pure communism and utopia for the workers of the world.

    So, why?

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  19. The “arrow of history” does not bend toward mercy. But civilization permits mercy when the crimes are less heinous and heinous crimes are less frequent.

    Punishment of lawbreakers is civilization’s self-defence. When someone cuts ahead of you in line, calling them out and shaming them publicly is sufficient defence. But when someone robs you at knifepoint, the defence of both individual and civilization requires that the malefactor suffer, and we’ve decided that prison time is appropriate.

    If we stop punishing those who prey on the civilized, civilization itself is at risk. And those who would destroy civilization understand this better than we do.

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    1. calling them out and shaming them publicly

      That only works if they are capable of shame, and don’t regard “calling out” as a diss that justifies deadly force. See Chicago, LA, etc.

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  20. “Deinstitutionalizing” mentally ill people was touted as the solution to grim mental hospitals. Unfortunately, the “community based” clinics where they were supposed to get the meds they needed never materialized; the forces of NIMBY and BANANA mobilized, waving signs and petitions and filing lawsuits. So they were left to the streets; even the alternatives that used to exist, like SRO hotels (even the Y no longer offers lodgings, and I’m sad about that—they were a cheap option when I was traveling) no longer do.

    Even though both sides of the aisle bore blame for this, the Usual Suspects screamed that evil Ronald Reagan had caused it just out of motiveless evil.

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    1. A well meaning local group wanted to build a mental-health facility for veterans on some land north of town. That land happens to be very close to a school. This led to concerns being voiced, and after much to-ing and fro-ing, a compromise being reached.

      Now, what about people who happen to be veterans and who prefer not to be medicated or get other “help” for their conditions? No one cares to deal with that, because the legal system is tilted toward, “do not confine people against their will if they are not violent.”

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    2. The closing of Agnews State Hospital, the local psych care facility, including long term care, pushed the vast majority of the “mental hospital” residents out to “board and care” homes, many run in the run down old Victorian homes downtown, clustered in the oldest neighborhoods around San Jose State University. That meant my freshman year featured other-than-students sleeping off their self medication exercises in the landscaping in the quad, when they were not screaming at nothing at the top of their lungs – and I was a commuter student. My friends in the dorms said at night it got even more enthusiastic on campus. Those “board and care” homes seemed to do a lot more board and less care.

      Eventually gentrification and the increasingly crazy Silicon Valley Real Estate market pushed those Vics up out of the low-cost category which the halfway houses and board-and-care could afford and, while campus got less spicy, that just pushed those folks onto the streets.

      But I saw first hand what “out you go, hope it works out for you” mental health treatment plans did to those folks.

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    3. I wasn’t paying much attention to political/governmental affairs at the time, but if memory isn’t dis-serving me, the elimination of mental institutions in California seemed to coincide with Jerry Brown’s (spit) first term as governor. (And JB was governor just after Reagan.)

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  21. Aside: I see Fauci the Excreble has plead the 5th to all questions in spite of his “everything, everywhere, all the time” Autopen pardon, and the clear ruling from Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79 (1915).

    I need to go read the transcript in case it’s there (I bet not), but I am not sure how his lawyers squared that circle. Is he renouncing his acceptance of that pardon? Can one unaccept a pardon years later, only while testifying to Congress, and then reaccept when one walks out the door? Is this just a delaying tactic hoping the courts saying “nope, See Burdick (1915)” takes long enough that the Donks retake Congress? Will the Donks still protect him after all the “I am such an admired supervillain“ diary entries?

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    1. FM, apparently there’s 3 paths he could take:

      1. We haven’t settled whether the OttoPardons are valid. Until they are, he still has legal jeopardy, and thus 5th Amendment protection.
      2. Even if he’s pardoned for federal crimes, he can still be charged with state level crimes, as Trump 1.0 officials were. In fact, NY said specifically they were charging people under state law so Trump couldn’t pardon them. I’m not sur if anyone has tried to apply the Supremacy clause to pardons. Note: If state level crimes are still possible, look to see Democrats use them against ICE agents.
      3. He’s taking the 5th because he’s being threatened with perjury charges for anything he says now that doesn’t match what Congress expects to hear.

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      1. I just looked and AFAICS there’s no legal challenge actually filed against the Autopen pardons.

        There is a quote from Comer saying the Fauci Fifth throws shade on the pardons validity:

        “If former President Biden’s blanket autopen pardon is valid, then Dr. Fauci has no right to refuse to answer questions,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said after the hearing.

        “Dr. Fauci clearly knows his autopen pardon is on legally questionable grounds and decided to protect himself today rather than provide the truth to the American people.”

        But a Presidential Pardon in the hand is worth a gazillion politician quotes at press gaggles, and even the beneficiary of a blue sky acting as if the sky is orange does not make it orange. The Burdick ruling kinda goes through the validity question and concludes there’s not any limit on the President’s pardon power, especially from Congress, and it would be fair to conclude the courts can’t dink with it either, even under a presumption that POTUS was POTATUS, but none of the Constitutional actions to declare so were used, even by Kammy to get into the big chair.

        The state criminal charges thing is a real question. I think things like the Rodney King/LA Riot Federal prosecutions after state charge acquittal were in fact double jeopardy, but if those were valid then Texas or Florida filing state charges against Fauci should be valid as well. I do not like the precedent for when the work turns – it seems like it’s one more step toward what gave Republican Rome Gaius Iulius.

        Were I Fauci I’d be more concerned about civil action. He made a ton of money in the course of his job, including huge cash awards they let him keep stemming from his WuFlu sainthood. If I were DJT I’d look into preemptively waiving any and all Qualified Immunity defenses for Fauci and anyone else with a Presidential Pardon under the theory that actions pardoned while working for .gov which a jury would find to be liable for judgements and penalty are by definition beyond the valid defensible scope of their job.

        The perjury one is probably the best explanation, but if he told the truth now he could say his prior lies in sworn testimony were covered by the Autopen Pardon, then were back with Congress in the Courts trying to undercut a purely Presidential Executive function, and that’s a tough sell.

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      2. Reply in mod. Tough to opine on legal thangs without invoking the syllable of doom. It shall eventually emerge, blessed and respondent, into the glorious light of day.

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        1. anything he says now that doesn’t match what Congress expects to hear.

          “You don’t care about the truth. If you don’t like the truth I tell, you’ll charge me anyway.”

          That will be the approach.

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    2. He’s (apparently) an asshole, and he is old.

      If he got himself into enough trouble, he may have no good strategy, beyond trying to spin things out a bit and dying of old age first.

      He is 86. It is not unconditionally clear that he must have all that long.

      He’s a key person of interest in the hypothesis of screw ups across professions, and a long pay off of losses for law and for medicine. It is basically unclear that his lawyers must be sane about their own professional exposure, risks, and liability.

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      2. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s convinced himself all his lies were actually “noble truths,” or some such. He may be unable to admit his sins.

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  22. Earlier than Victoria, I think. You can find the idea that crime is created by society in William Godwin. And it was popularized by his daughter Mary Shelley, in her story of how an artificial man is driven to murder by abandonment and social abuse.

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    2. Yeah, this is my beef with “Victor is the real monster” readings of the original novel (no objection to film adaptations that go down that route so long as they are entertaining). Victor is the original monster, for making a son by unconventional means and abandoning him, but once his perfectly articulate and intelligent creation starts murdering inoffensive women and only mildly offensive children, it’s pretty clear the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.

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  24. All of the Theater Kids seem to think that every criminal is Jean Valjean, stealing that loaf of bread (or ribeye steak ) to feed a starving child.

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  25. I think a lot of people are basicly Pelagians, believing that all people are inherently good and merely need good role models to follow.

    I’m on Augustine’s side, myself.

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