1.5.10.5.3 Societal Interventions – Negative Drivers

Version 1.0 October 2022                             (Previous Version)

Other drivers of offending are harder to forgive, largely because they involve negative emotions and motivations.  These include

anger, disgust, selfishness, status, viciousness and political or religious violence.  

The emotions behind these drivers often arise in error, because we misunderstand the immediate situation.  The bad behaviour that ensues is often, often obviously, and often obviously directly, contrary to our own self-interest and self-destructive.  

Social interventions can include educational initiatives to dispel myths that justify violent responses, to foster tolerance, to encourage self-control and so on.  They can also include initiatives to reduce social disadvantage which could complicate the situation at the time. 

But frequently, perhaps almost always, the offender has NOT totally lost their self-control (as in a delusional psychosis) but they allow themselves to be overcome by their feelings, and often act in a purposeful and effective conscious manner. 

In many cases the solution to crime involves addressing the social preconditions that cause it.

 

Negative Drivers Details

Below we provide more details about each of the listed negative drivers:

anger, disgust, selfishness, status, viciousness and political or religious violence. 

 

Anger

A very common driver of offending is the feeling of overwhelming anger. We commonly feel anger when we have, or someone close to us has, been physically hurt or threatened, or felt wronged in some way.  For many male offenders, feeling “wronged� arises when a female partner behaves normally, but in a way that upsets the male. 

*    Anger can sometimes drive us to react immediately, to lash out, and at other times to plan our response.  An angry response could be limited to a single punch, which may miss, or may cause minimal harm, but which can sometimes cause death.  An immediate angry response could involve a longer physical fight, or reaching for a weapon and using it to cause serious injury or death.  A planned angry response could involve devising complicated ways to hurt people or harm their reputation, a simple revenge attack, or a bigger plan to shoot and kill as many people as possible (which seems to happen often in the USA).  Many people convicted of murder simply made the wrong choices, often under the influence of alcohol, overreacting hastily in anger to a perceived offence that is later seen as trivial.

*    As a society we cannot tolerate violent responses of any degree or kind, including those motivated by anger.  Many people get angry frequently.  Men often get angry at women, especially their domestic partners.  Often the anger has no basis in fact, and a violent response is almost always unhelpful.  We can address violent behaviour with broader education about conflict resolution, and when needed, anger management.  We can reduce the impact of spontaneous violence by making it harder to access weapons and easier for potential victims to flee or get urgent, useful help.  We can motivate people to intervene angry attacks occurring with passive bystanders doing nothing. We can ensure all violent offenders are identified and confronted, provided with re-education and rehabilitation, and when it is effective to reduce violence, convicted and punished.

*    Righteous anger is what we feel on some else’s behalf, when they have been treated unjustly (unfairly harmed or discriminated against).  It is still not reasonable to be violent against other people, but it is reasonable to use that anger to drive a non-violent political response.

Disgust

●   Sometimes an overwhelming feeling of disgust drives us to offend. We commonly feel disgust when we experience bad smells or gory signs of violence.  A common reaction is nausea – feeling sick and likely to vomit.  This is a basic human emotional reaction that is hard to control.  Such immediate, localised, victimless reactions are understandable and forgivable.

*    But complex human beings have complex psychological reactions and can feel disgust at things we find offensive or feel are contaminated.  Our cultural background is a major driver of what we find disgusting.  Foods acceptable to some people are disgusting to others.  The intensity of the feeling ranges from dislike, to aversion, revulsion and abhorrence.  Ethical problems arise when the disgust is associated with a person, their appearance or behaviour.

*    Some people who live sheltered conservative lives have no connection with or awareness of feelings of homosexuality, and feel disgusted by the thought of homosexual relations.  These feelings were quite common everywhere, until the last few decades.  Now they are more common in older rural males and stricter religious societies such as Muslims and Eastern Orthodox.  The feeling of disgust reflects a prejudice, a judgement prior to knowing the facts, since typically homophobic people don't know any homosexuals well (or don't realise they are homosexual). Homophobic feelings are often rationalised with false claims that homosexuality is unnatural and hence bad, or that it has a degenerative effect on the individuals and society, which is demonstrably rubbish.  Certain ancient religious texts also condemn homosexuality further falsely bolstering these rationalized feelings.  So many homophobic people believe homosexuals should be excluded from society, some think they should be jailed or locked up with the criminally insane, some believe that violence against homosexuals is justified and even amusing – for some young men poofter bashing was a night’s entertainment.  While there is a trend away from homophobia in Northern and Western Europe and North America, there is a resurgence in Russia, ex-USSR countries, Africa, and the Middle East where homosexually remains illegal or is being recriminalized.  Harmful behaviour against homosexuals is evil.

*    Similar feelings of disgust arise in most societies, targeting other LGBTQI+ people, those with mental illness, dwarfism, or cerebral palsy, many foreigners, other religious or ethnic groups, different races, and different castes (especially Dalits or so called Untouchables).  The feelings we are discussing here are not just intellectual or dispassionate notions of difference or even inferiority, but a visceral, bodily reaction of disgust, disdain, contempt and disregard.  These feelings are also rationalised by reference to religious texts and are justified by populist politicians appealing to the lowest common denominator to bolster their political support.  They provoke angry exchanges, brutal violence, social discrimination and political oppression.

*    Interventions to address violence are presented above.

*    Many other interventions required to address these forms of abuse.  They include education, in the broadest sense, in schools and in communities, to overcome feelings of disgust related to normal human behaviour, different foods, dress or behavioural styles; to promote diversity; positive integration and mixing in social contexts; showing these targeted people as normal human beings in art, literature, TV, movies and social media; anti-discrimination laws, anti-bullying and harassment policies; and severe penalties for the most egregious cases of abuse.

Selfishness

●   Often, but by no means always, selfishness is the main driver of offending. 

*    Envy may be included in this category because it involves wanting what someone else has, and taking action in response to that desire, whether this be spiteful or acquisitive.

*    Some (good Christians or Buddhists perhaps) suggest forgiveness is the appropriate response.  Turn the other cheek, offer the thief your coat as well (Luke 6:29).  In a few cases this may be appropriate, if it so embarrasses the offender that they stop offending.  But it has limited use.

*    We can take steps to minimise the occurrence of acts of selfishness with empathy and ethics training in children’s education; by providing a stable, reasonably prosperous society so the need to be selfish is minimized; and by ongoing cultural reinforcement that society should be more about sharing and caring and that greed is NOT good.  Those leading affluent lives must put their good fortune in context of the rest of society and learn gratitude for their good luck.

*    Selfish offending that still occurs can be partially addressed by making it unprofitable: making sure that most offenders don't get away with it, altering the classic risk/reward calculation, by increasing the likelihood of getting caught and having penalties that significantly outweigh the gain – tailored for each offender to reduce the risk of reoffending.  Then we can appeal to the offender’s enlightened self-interest – we don't have to hope for a personal moral and emotional transformation.  

*    If the offending is repeated, society can increase monitoring of the offender and increase penalties.  Eventually the behaviour ceases or the offender is locked up for life.

Status or Honour

Often, especially in more traditional or macho societies, status or honour is the main driver of offending.  For many people their reputation is a prime driver of their behaviour.  For professionals, business people, artists, and many others this is totally legitimate.  For others, a person’s status is mixed with family honour and based on anachronistic ideas of the standards people must maintain. 

*    In many families their honour is seen to be tarnished if a family member breeches some social rule.  Typically this includes acts of adultery (sex before or outside marriage), sex with the supposedly wrong person, including homosexual sex.  Many young women are killed or maimed by their own families because that have transgressed in this way.

*    In many cultures an insult requires an immediate obsequious apology or a violent response.  The murder of a family member may be seen as an insult to the family honour, as much as a tragic loss of a loved one, and that insult can only be redressed by killing the murderer OR someone else in the perpetrator’s family, who may be otherwise blameless.  These kinds of responses can lead to ongoing vendettas in which many people die.  They occur in criminal sub groups or minorities in affluent liberal democracies, and are more common in southern states in the USA, but are more common still in traditional poor societies.

*    Steven Pinker, in his book Better Angels of our Nature discussed honour societies and honour killings, showing that societies that were less honour based are less violent.

Viciousness

Sometimes, rarely, not as frequently as most people think, viciousness is the main driver of offending.  This category covers actions where there is a desire, perhaps hidden or unacknowledged to hurt or control ‘the victim’.  This may include excluding the victim from society or from certain activities.  At the extreme end this is vicious, at the other end it is nasty.

*    Jealousy is included in this category because it involves a feeling of ownership and control.

*    If the offending is repeated, society can increase monitoring of the offender and increase penalties.  Eventually the behaviour ceases or the offender is locked up for life.

●   We are also aware that inappropriate violent behaviour, that causes injury or death, is often essentially unplanned, or executed in a fit of rage, or period of psychotic or drug induced delusion.  Specific episodes of this kind of violence may be hard to predict, but they are common, and the conditions that lead to this violence are fairly well known. 

*    Sudden violence is harder to address, but we can minimize the excuses.  In the past, criminal culpability was thought to be reduced is the offender had been provoked (especially by his wife having an affair) or was influenced by alcohol or other drugs.  Now the defense of provocation is not accepted, and the decision to take the drugs prior to offending is part of the culpability.

*    All the social welfare, health promotion and educational initiatives already mentioned can also have an impact on this so called random violence.

*    We can reduce access to weapons, especially assault rifles, so that when the rage or delusion arises there is less opportunity to shoot many people.

*    We can reduce the social acceptability of violence. 

•    America has a narrative common in movies and TV series (as early as the series The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors, which commenced in 1958) that when other approaches fail to solve a problem it is acceptable to take arms and shoot people.  The National Rifle Association and its supporters promote people’s supposed rights (granted by the USA constitution) to own and bear arms.  Despite claims to the contrary this cultural background leads to more mass shootings in America than anywhere else in the world.  Other countries have reduced access to guns, especially military weapons, without their governments becoming any more oppressive than the American government.

 

Political and Religious Violence

Some violence is well planned as part of a political and/or religious campaign. 

*    Sometimes this is an attack on a supposedly military target, in what is seen by the perpetrators as a war.  For instance, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacked military bases, police stations, and the British cabinet (when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister), in what they saw as a war for independence – but the British treated as common criminality.  Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, was assassinated in 1991, in a suicide attack by Hindu Tamils, which killed 14 others and injured dozens, as he was supposedly the commander of forces oppressing Sri Lankan Tamils.

*    Sometimes this is a terrorist attack, on a notionally civilian target, attacking ordinary people, with the intention to cause widespread fear for a religious or political purpose.  The idea was that the fearful population would force governments to grant concessions to the terrorist group.  In Europe and America anarchists conducted terrorist attacks against royalty and political leaders from the 1870s to the 1930s CE.  Terrorist attacks have continued world-wide ever since.  The most infamous attack occurred in 2001 by Muslim terrorists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, on the World Trade Centre in New York, which killed about 3000 people. 

*    The motivation for such attacks is usually the actual or perceived oppression or injustices experienced by the group the terrorists support.  Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination was motivated by India’s perceived support for the Sinhalese, Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka that brazenly discriminated against Sri Lankan Tamils, about 8% of the population.  Had this been addressed early on, there would have been little motivation for violent opposition to the Sri Lankan government.  (Instead, after 26 years of civil war, the government initiated a massive offensive causing a massive retreat by the Tamils who were then obviously facing defeat.  The government encouraged Tamil civilians to flee to a supposedly safe no-fire zone, then massively shelled that area, killing thousands or tens of thousands of Tamils for no purpose.  Tamils are still oppressed in Sri Lanka and each year thousands try to escape the country.)

*    There are isolated examples of terrorism achieving tactical success.  Truck-bomb attacks on American barracks in Beirut in 1983 killed over 300 American and French troops, which prompted the rapid withdrawal of American and French peacekeeping forces from Lebanon.  But terrorist groups have mostly failed to achieve their stated political goals, whether because of defeat (as in Sri Lanka), agreement (as in Northern Ireland) or a collapse in recruitment.

*    Some terrorist movements were successful in evicting colonial powers and creating states. 

*    Some activists who originally supported terrorism became respected political leaders.

•    During World War I British seized control of Palestine from the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire and after the war was granted a dual mandate by the League of Nations to govern the area in the interests of both Arabs and Jews.  Indiscriminate attacks on Arabs by Jews had begun in the late 1930s.  In 1946–7, dissatisfied with progress towards statehood, the ‘Jewish revolt’ led by the Irgun (a paramilitary organisation) targeted British security forces.  The Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion supported Irgun’s decision to bomb the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was done in July 1946, killing 91 people.  Eventually Palestine became ungovernable and the British government abandoned the country.  This was followed by a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Arabs by the Jews.  The Palestinian Arabs who fled then have never been able to return.  Israel soon proclaimed itself a Jewish state, with Ben-Gurion as its first Prime Minister.  (see https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/the-big-question-has-terrorism-ever-achieved-its-aims/ )

•    In 1948 the white South African government implemented a harsh, institutionalized system of racial segregation they called Apartheid, oppressing Blacks, Indians and so called coloureds.   Nelson Mandela was a leader of the black opposition, and eventually supported armed opposition to the oppressive, violent regime, including sabotage of infrastructure.  For this he was imprisoned for 27 years.  Eventually in 1990 the white South African leaders began negotiations with Mandela to end apartheid, which led to free elections in 1994.  Mandela became the President of South Africa and was lauded around the world.