I have long given thought to why people enjoy inflicting pain on others the way they do - it is not in the human nature or evolution to enjoy the torment of one’s own kin, after all.
And yet these unnatural acts somehow continue, men hacking men to death, men forcing themselves on screaming women, women ruining women and laughing like a hyena as they do so - why do people hurt people?
A question one might ask in relation to this is why do they not feel shame in doing so?
I bring up shame here because shame is the basis of operation of much of the crime prevention systems today, whether it be for those who are legal criminals, or those who dare to defy their cultural norms.
I do not want to tackle this question head-on, because it is a selfish question - when a person’s cheeks redden, they do so because they ask of themselves - what will someone else think of me?
Shame, therefore, is a relative emotion.
Shame: This Society’s Hope Against Crime
Making sinners think and worry about others’ perception of them after the crime is not an appropriate solution to the problem of human sadism, because as soon as someone (society) is removed, the committing of a crime by a criminal becomes inevitable.
I have used rape as the crime to demonstrate my example, because rape is one of the highest crimes against humanity in which we can clearly measure the victim-perpetrator dynamic.
The other crime of that highest degree, murder, does not leave the victim alive unfortunately for us to gauge the full scale of the impacts it leads to.
An unrelated pointer is that rape and murder often occur together.
But raping a woman alone on an island is as worse as raping a woman in the middle of a city, both involve the heinous degradation of a human being to an object of pleasure and wild amusement.
Shame remains, hence, a makeshift solution at best.
There is another problem with using shame as a solution.
For shame to kick in, the society must know for a fact that the accused is indeed a criminal that needs to be prosecuted.
It burdens the victim with the onus of proving her pain and her scars and her abject humiliation, failing which the man can stand in front of the woman with unashamed pride, especially so if she had already tried and failed at securing justice for herself.
Only their eyes know the truth, the fear in hers and the challenge in his, but alas the justice system does not accept fear and ownership in eyes as a tangible evidence.
And thus the crimes repeat, each time with increasing audacity and boldness, justice sold to the man who could ‘prove’ his innocence, even if that proof is simply a lack of evidence and some covert donation to the keepers of justice.
If this reminds you of an all-too-familiar system, you’d be absolutely right.
I applaud your sharp eye, I am indeed talking about the land of Ram and Krishna and the former सोने की चिड़िया (golden bird).
As things stand today, justice in India is a revenge-of-sorts for the victim, not the future-crime prevention system it is supposed to be.
We all know that we voted some rapists and more criminals to the parliament, can we be sure that the same judge whose hands we entrust the lives of human criminals in, are as free of sins as all men with such powers need to be?
Humankind’s Response to the Sham Called Justice
It is as Modi said, the womankind do not forget insults, the same can be applied to all of mankind (and womankind, of course), and truth be told nobody really does forget insults.
Everyone fights back in their own ways, and the ones I have observed so far include:
a. Collapsing in on himself, namely, embracing mentally disorder
b. Collapsing in to rebellion, that is going against the world and the society.
There are three ways people do so:
Embracing norms that would be abnormal as per the times and increasing chaos (the feminist movement in response to our patriarchal culture, for instance)
Helping others going through the same moving forward, even inspiring others to (NGOs working on helping abused women support themselves)
Speaking out against the system and exposing the truth (Kamra for the former and me for the latter)
c. Collapsing and giving into the society, which means adjusting to share that society with those criminals by making someone else your victim, which is what most end up doing.
The pseudo-feminists are the best example to this.
Once upon a time, a woman had to ensure to live in fear, for where she walked, how she stared, and how she dressed and how she covered up her body to be exact.
Today, women still do this.
And so do men, in their own way - care for not walking behind a girl, not staring or even looking at a girl, and to carry himself modestly, hiding his wealth to be exact.
Women suffer rapes and men suffer false accusations.
The system of India is not actually designed to become more corrupted over time, it is designed to remain as it is so that those in power can keep filling their pockets and wild fantasies of luxury and sex.
The destruction of our society is an unintended side effect of its corruption, we are collateral damages owing to the unwitting designer who did not understand human psychology as deeply as he ought to have to keep the infinite money glitch running forever.
What is the solution, you ask?
For starters, to believe there is one.
This newsletter stops here.
The next section will deal with the proposed solutions to this problem, both at individual and higher levels.
The answers are typed and ready to go - but I need your support before releasing them.
I shall release the answers once I reach 75 total subscribers and maintain them for a week (a measure against temporary subscribers).
Alternatively, if a reader were so enthusiastic as to pay Rs 99 for it, I shall happy to share the next part with them prematurely.
I hope the readers are not so angry with me. It is a measure I have to take to protect myself against capitalism - I currently don’t possess the financial means to feed myself adequately, nor the guarantee the invoice owed to my client will furnish me the rent I need to pay by 5th.
I have always been the one to stand for accessible education and empowerment, hopefully this achieves these without compromising my own ability to survive.
I am not sure if anyone is still reading, but the reason for those glum editions earlier is my sheer incompetency for earning to feed myself, especially because I can still keep writing.
It hurts when you can do nothing to protect yourself from ruin, it hurts even more to possess a gift as rare as my pen and still be able to do nothing but pray for death.
Reflections