Dao of the Death Penalty: on Punishment, Rehabilitation and Retribution.

[silent thunder]

9 hours ago, rideforever said:

In this society there is far too much talk about forgiveness compassion and feelings.
And far too little about one bad apple rots the whole barrel.

Human beings are capable of being insincere.

While I understand the mindset and you're not wrong, no one in this conversation is.  No one person knows the correct response to a tragedy or a crime.  Your response is your response.  But it is only yours.  You don't speak for all and your words echo the sentiments spoken often by my wife's father.  Whenever I encounter them, I now pay close attention to see when the justified actions creep in...

 

The character of a society is seen in how it treats the least powerful among them.  The animals, the slaves, the destitute, the transgressors.

 

The next step once this level of certainty was arrived at is 'justified retribution' for perceived transgressions or strong corrections for 'lack of proper vision', or 'inability to see "the truth"... and once this has been established, then the real harm begins to flow and we enter the territory where the punishments for perceived crimes being 'justified' often become crimes of their own in my experience.  Often far worse than the crime they are being dealt out in retribution for... such is life.  The punishment becomes an obligation.

 

His (my wife's father's) words reflected his mindset and belayed an inner torment, born of deep trauma, pain and fear.  He utterly rejected healing.  He was too tough for that.  It was a weak man's business.  He was out for blood and correction.  I was too for a good portion of my life.  The Viking in me is ancient and raw, visceral.  When I was certain about something, I could utterly dissolve into justified rage.  It nearly killed me, rotting my body.  Itself the very core bad apple you speak of.

 

That which rots us, I find, comes from within, not without.  For as Sadhguru says so poignantly.  "if someone outside of you, controls you, you are a slave... is this not so?  How much more a slave are you then, if your inner state, is controlled by someone outside of you?  If your inner condition of life is manipulated by someone other than you, then you are truly the slave of slaves."

 

Hate is not healed through hate.  My take on hate now, after long experience with it is 'be very mindful what you allow yourself to hate, you will surely come to emulate it.' 

 

But not all are interested in healing at this point.  For many years, there were times I would sense a softening of my rage that arose naturally and I would rise up and reject it, re-establishing my anger to keep the ball rolling.  Some have a pressing need to carry and nurture only that burning seed, it's what defines them, keeps them going, becomes them.

 

While it saddens me, I'm not of a mind to even attempt to remove it for anyone any longer, I used to be... now I see it's not my place, nor within my abilities, nor my job.  I'm not the world police.  I have no idea what path processes will provoke awakening in others.  I recall at an exhibit on buddhas at the Bower Museum some 20 years ago, being stunned at encountering the 'Buddha of Rage'.  A buddha who woke up in the midst of his rage. 

 

I once bathed in justified anger, resentment and rage filled fantasies of retribution, it's part of my path.  So I understand it.   Though it caused such harm in me, it was not sustainable for long without manifestations in the body that debilitated.

 

Whenever I hear this tone in folks, I prick my ears and put energy into paying sharp attention and watch them closely, if from a distance.  For when this tone arises, harm is often shortly to follow and when I witness this harm, I have no compunctions to action. 

 

My wife is firmly for the death penalty.  I have no energy for it.  I'm not against it per se...  but there seems no longer any point to it.  Isolating the damaged, the violent is enough for me.  Their rot cannot spread from isolation.  And I don't inflict rot on myself from holding and nurturing a desire to inflict harm more harm for something already passed.

 

[rideforever]

34 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

I have no energy for it. 

 

I have a lot of sympathy for what you say ... and for the situation in general.
My feeling is that various factors are making the Western people more distant from reality, and so they lose contact with what is right and wrong.   

This is caused for instance by the degradation of the arable soil and the food supply that grows on that soil.   It is also caused by living in a virtual mental society, rather than learning practical skills on a farm where you see with your own hands what is wrong and right.

And so today people no longer know what is wrong or right, and they start saying there is no wrong or right.

But that is not correct, because an orchard with 20 strong trees is better than an orchard where half of the trees are diseased, and learning how to create healthy orchards is critical to the survival of society, or the entire society will collapse.

In this society people want to be compassionate and tolerant, which is fine, but unfortunately if people no longer know how to create a healthy orchard then everything will die.

Compassion cannot heal a lack of competence, a lack of intelligence, nor a lack of experience.

 

So if what I say is correct then you can see that there are no bad guys, but that we are caught in a difficult situation, and being blind we lead ourselves over the cliff.

 

Edited April 27, 2019 by rideforever

[silent thunder]

Well said.

 

I no longer see things as right and wrong.  Right and wrong, normal and crazy is little more than what we were exposed to from the ages of 0-8 and shift radically from society to society (and even within one society they shift drastically according to individuals).  Look at the range of opinions in this one conversation.  All across the range of potential reactions. 

 

Individual reactions are not right or wrong to me, they are reflections of the ones who convey them.  All facets of a gem are as they are, yet they don't all refract and reflect light the same, while still all are part of the one gem.  We move collectively as a society.  All input is equally relevant, though in action, some causes strife and other's bring peace.  Such is the way of the manifest.

 

So, though I can no longer experience things such as right or wrong, I do experience things quite clearly as tenable and untenable.  Sustainable and unsustainable.  Tolerable and intolerable.  While I don't have energy for death penalty, I will not stand and allow actions I find reprehensible or harmful take place.  I interfere when I see abusive behavior toward children and the elderly for example.  It's just that once the violence has been stilted.  Once the harm has ceased and the perpetrator isolated, I no longer have energy or desire to heap more harm on an already damaged individual.  To me, society grows stronger and more tenable if we can rehabilitate and return to functioning society, healthy whole individuals.  There will always be those who are beyond shift and change.  These were I making the decisions, would be relegated to isolation indefinitely, but not harmed further.

 

Sweeping notions of ridding disease by mass culling of the herd smacks of throwing the baby out with the bath water and overreaction to me.  At times surely some surgical means are required to deal with disease.  But our 'modern medicine' approach to cancer is a good example of this overreaction to me.  The notion that we will irradiate the entire organism, banking on the organism's ability to out heal the poison and survive the radiation while the cancer cannot abide, seems a result of the oversimplification of our notion of our own bodies.  The Cartesian model of the body as a machine that can be taken apart and put together again and understood is vastly out of focus in my experience of a fluid interrelation of systems all interconnected and interfeeding.

 

Many behaviors in society are untenable in the long run.  In my experience these fall away under their own unsustainability before long.  My actions seem better spent in healing my self and those I come in contact with, from isolating and then trying to heal those damaged ones who cause problems.

 

Bucky Fuller put it very succinctly back in the 50's when he spoke of how to approach sweeping change in a large system...  Paraphrasing he said "you never change the sytem effectively by fighting it directly, that only brings greater resistance and reinforces the system.  (this is deeply reflected in the daoist cannon btw).  To change the system, create a new model that renders the old model irrelevant and then wait.  As the next generation arises, they will see the irrelevance of the old system and it will fall away effortlessly as they adopt the new model, no fighting needed."

 

My uncle worked as a homicide detective for decades.  The vast majority of violence and harm is caused by a small group of damaged, angry and rageful folk.  Things are not as bleak as they may seem.  Our human nature is not worse than before in my exprience.  Things are not worse now, than before, but in our age of instant information, we hear about so much more than we used to, it lends an ease to the assumption that we are spiraling in disease.  So my approach is a softer one now.  No need to irradiate the whole.

 

Just as great rage is not sustainable for long, poor farming habits, poor mental processes bring small yields and nature culls in authenticity.

[silent thunder]

The Power of Connection and Yakuza Noodles.

 

Upon their release from prison, these friends form a path that alters the direction of their life, away from crime and imprisonment and toward connection with society.  They open an Udon Shop.

 

While the change of the individual it seems must be a drive from within in order 'to stick', yet the help or hindrance of society overall seems a mighty influence.  How where and when are felons allowed to be redeemed and reenter society as full accepted members?

 

 

How to integrate again into society after prison?  Most avenues of business close to a released felon, including the ability to vote, which seems to be a conversation that's currently being broached again recently.

 

When is it time to let go?

 

My line of work is one where felons are not dismissed outright, as a result my industry employs quite a few.  Each day I work, I work with convicted felons, former gang members, etc.  In twenty five years of working with convicted felons, I've witnessed two fights, (both by non felons ironically).  Among the most aware I encounter of the consequences of violent actions are those who perpetrated them and were able to self observe and shift from that path... and those who suffered them and cannot imagine ever inflicting similar on others.

 

If you can perform consistently and get along with folks, there is work with us.  But hearing from folks who genuinely seek to shift their lives and how challenging that is, I'm reminded of the abiding resonance of stigma over past actions.

 

When is it time to let go?  For those who served their time as deemed by our system.  When to fully reintegrate?

Edited May 1, 2019 by silent thunder

[silent thunder]

on second thought... na.

Edited June 8, 2019 by silent thunder