If “reactive violence,” (Wrangham) is cash only, you try to take from me, I hurt you now and stop the theft, then punishment is like credit? They get to hurt you first, steal your stuff and pay later? So the way credit allows the banker’s friends to spend money they don’t have, punishment allows the freedom to act for criminals that they didn’t used to have when faced with chimpanzee aggression?
So punishment is what allows the theft, the advent of our punishment schemes makes crime possible, not the very opposite, as the practitioners claim? Punishment schemes offer credit to the criminal, they can pay later – and if they take over, or change the law, or simply escape, pay never. Authority, like the bank, just gives it to them, for a promise to pay it back.
Hmmm . . . one feels a need to account for collateral in this scenario – later, don’t forget. Hold it, it’s you, your body, innit. Never mind.
OK, this is what I intuited, this is where this was always going – David talking about debt as having moral connotations, as treating debt as morality – backwards, I think, just like when he was on the right side of it about cash, that no, credit predates cash and barter – I’m gonna say, no, credit also predates a punitive morality?
He’s talking about how debt is framed as a moral matter, but I need to as always, try to turn that around, that morality is framed as a debt, this madness of punishment, like crime is a loan, not a theft, not really proscribed, you can do it, you just have to be able to afford it, later.
- the above, Tweeted at Wengrow already, Sept. 4th.
A money loan is artificial, made up money, and crime and punishment is . . . artificial, made up immunity? Where crime isn’t stopped, its causes not addressed, you just have to pay for it later. I mean, we don’t punish the crime, do we, we don’t even address poverty or grievance, we only punish people. The crime has immunity now, as long as it is “paid for?” Plus of course, the banker’s friends means the jailor’s friends, some never have to pay it back and others pay double to compensate. Pad the numbers, make a bogus case that it’s a working “system.”
But let’s back up, imagine a bit.
The world is, as the Davids say, going along, people owing each other in minor ways, the bonds of community, it is a world of credit, natural communism in a group of group living animals, which surely means morality, as David said, we allow for some small imbalances with people we live with, these are the social bonds, this surely is morality, when we are keeping track, when we are vigilant and aware of abuses, we have all agreed to suffer small things for one another, when you cause me to suffer larger ones or a preponderance of small ones, this is a moral matter, accepted and not, right or wrong.
A few weeks with the Davids and what was that crap about volunteering for an ambush raid being the “roots of morality,” like the primatologists say, surely the roots of morality are more like, “You always take the best berries! Stay in your own spot!,” social debt, sharing stuff. You don’t mind they do it once, so much. So life contains “morality,” along with social credit and debt, always, that is to say, primates track who is altruistic and who is selfish, and to use this data and avoid or foil the selfish, this must be prerequisite to punishing them, but is that a step with a beginning?
Certainly the boss allows what he likes and puts an end to whatever he doesn’t, and surely a beating that isn’t a murder must be a lesson, if there is authority, there is punishment, so this too has always existed for humans. I think the apes have it all, they can still respond with reactive violence, they won’t sit still for abuse, but they hold some grudges, meaning they have a measure of proactive aggression as well, which means authority, kings and class, retribution.
I suspect their kings are line of sight only, as the Davids said they often have been for us too. He has the power to punish, but no system of crime detection or reporting, and when he’s out of sight, it’s either communism again, or the biggest guy in view is your proxy king instead. This remains common between all of us group primates, apparently. I think it’s a commonality I’m looking for here between the net of social sharing, debt and the dark side, selfishness, or crime. The idea that as we are one another’s banks with our extended networks of debts and favours and that we abstracted this to cash and transferable credit systems – I want to see the dark side of this, the networks of abuses and retributions that we abstracted to law and punishments, is that stating it right?
Positive networks of distribution of life, food and goods, and parallel negative networks of distribution of death and deprivation, yin and yang?
Not sure yet.
Not yet. This is in-group “morality,” the communism, the management of cheaters, and there is something different about simply killing cheaters and what we properly call punishment, I mean the dead cheater learns no lessons, the cheater is killed because no-one wants to have to punish him all the time. It is a reaction to cheating, but these killings are proactive, grudges build, and it is done to improve the future for the group, and the living learn the lessons.
This scenario must be a prerequisite for non-lethal punishment schemes, this example for the rest, and the thinking about tomorrow too – just in a one-sided, half blind way, I think the future is not so easily manipulated, and the magic deterrent of the example is compromised and complicated by the reality of the violence and trauma.
I think this prerequisite is and has been for many societies, a good place to stop. In a sense, dealing with cheaters is meta, it’s sort of cheating too, we are all above the fray watching when we have these conversations, and of course we’re really not, our biology is immersed in it – so as soon as you touch it, you stop, normally.
Again, the big orange book suggests we usually have. Deal with the overstepper, then shut up about it and carry on sharing, isn’t that the gist?
None of this seems to be taking me where I want to go.
All of this logic seems fine and eternal. It looks to me like if there were only the in-group, we may never have been in any danger of the modern, police state, 1984 world. If there is only us, it becomes hard to imagine why we would throw out this convention. Ah, perhaps this was the situation for some of the groups the anthropologists pulled that idea from, were the Inuit in conflict, at war with anyone, when Rassmussen heard the stories of how they took the people out who got too big for their britches? Breeches? Perhaps civilization only appears where land disputes do not, you’d keep the big bastard if there was a war and you needed that sort, is Antisocialization Theory, sort of.
I’m going to stop until I can find another angle, this isn’t going anywhere new, I’m starting to bore myself.
Sept. 4th., 2023
The idea of punishment as credit, that crime can exist on credit before the price is paid under a punishment scheme, so a child steals their brother’s cookie, owns it and eats it on “moral credit,” until Mom seeks to rectify matters and rebukes the child, likely with a slap, or a forced removal from the play place, that is to say, ah, this may be fun, Mom has purchased the child’s moral debt? and paid the aggrieved party with their vengeance, perhaps even replaced the lost cookie, and now Mom is carrying the thieving child’s moral debt, ha! – compounded with her own, for hitting a child?
LOL, no, this is tricky enough, must we begin compounding immediately?
Let’s go with holding the child’s debt – after all, Mom’s not me, she’s probably normal, she doesn’t think her slap is wrong, like I do. I mean, you know, slapping people is wrong, but punishment is not, it’s complicated. But it happens. So let’s try it with simple interest first.
So, child borrows some rights to property from their sibling, incurring the moral debt until Mom demands “payment,” with a slap, this payment being suspension of some of the child’s rights to bodily safety and autonomy and now the parent is carrying this breach, this moral debt as part of their general moral accounting, I guess we’ll just say moral debt, for who is rich in this sense, where is the resource of moral money mined? I expect the whole scheme is a deficit financing one, it is all certainly secondary economy stuff, there is no mother lode of goodness to exhaust. Just like the money economy, the system ultimately runs on nothing. Wait – OK, maybe there is something there –
what if when capitalism looked good for one minute when all the Turtle Islanders had been wiped out and there was a motherlode of resources for it to fake its success with, but also, this was when the euros discovered entire continents full of goodness to exhaust along with the forests and everything else, I mean of course this is the case, it is people we mine for this commodity, and I said it before I saw it – our rights are the commodity. The resource.
As we were saying, where we left Mom, mining the more powerful or aggressive of her children for it over a cookie.
When I describe this, the champagne fountain of abuse that is human life, I’ve coined a term, and Antisocialization Theory posits it as emotion, that there is a great public reservoir of bad feelings, of resentment and pain and frustration that the group maintains, to unleash in times of war or such, that our leaders can aim at a target and fire like a gun, and this is an odd mixture of psychology and economic imagery, isn’t it. Perhaps this idea is a better fit, not about the feelings we have when our rights are embattled, but about the rights themselves, or the economy around their acquirement and distribution, that is to say, the theft and resale of our rights.
Were I some sort of a moral economy police detective, and our mother here had committed some awful crime, I would have to note her moral indebtedness and ponder some kind of redemption as a motive. Sorry, never mind, too much Agatha Christie.
But on a less individual scale, this is the case and what I’m always saying that we all have this sort of motivation, we are pretty much all compromised in this way, every spanked person feels the truth of it, knows intuitively that it is they who feed the system, that it was their rights that they had stolen from no-one else, their born-in rights that were taken.
We are born pat and exploited into dearth immediately, and doomed to mining our own children for a resource we all need, some rights. Of course we try, we’re decent people. We wouldn’t just take what we needed from an innocent baby. Of course we wait until they take an extra cookie or something.
OK, I’m moralizing, I’ll try to stop.
But this is working, I think, our moral world is a facet of, a side of our economic world, isn’t it? The inner and outer technologies of resource extraction and speculation are all one, yin and yang, and they surely rose in the world together, but my point is, economy first, morality second. Morality uses all the terms and processes of economics, “paying” for your crime – with more crime, the abuse of punishments, like paying your line of credit with more credit.
Morality is modeled after debt, it’s no surprise if debt is treated as a “moral matter,” since it is the original moral matter, and the situation would be more accurately stated that humans have applied a (toxic, sure) model of economics to deciding how they should live, that we use economics in lieu of morality as a model for life.
Ah, damn. Pithy. Sorry.
Jeff
Sept. 6th., 2023
Abuse with an Excuse 