I forgot to write yesterday, and I didn’t do anything interesting or even leave my apartment as penance I’m going to write the serious entry I had planned. As soon as it’s done I’ll go out to pick up prescriptions and take my Donut Walk™. I should have done both yesterday and lacked the will to do so. That’s not good. The human mind is complicated and that might be a symptom of depression, it might also contribute to depression; it might be both and it might be neither. The one thing I have control of is going out today even if it’s raining. How bad is not being able to will myself to go out? The baseball gods punished me by having the Mets lose. Gods are so capricious; they punish the innocent along with the guilty. Sometimes it’s not even punishment for a sin, God punished Job to win a bar bet. To make it worse he killed Job’s wife and children and somehow that’s OK as Job got a new wife and new children. What about the old ones that died? I suspect that this was all a con by Satan. He made a bigger wager with other angels that he could get God to torture innocent people. Satan is such a scamp. Couldn’t you see Loki do that? If I were writing the Disney+ show I’d work that in there.
That actually work as an intro into the next section. Our main story tonight is Punishment. Can you tell I was just watching John Oliver? His main story was on prisons; we are on the same page. Remember I promised to write this on Saturday, so I had the idea before John Oliver’s show streamed. I deserve full credit.
On one of my Donut Walks™ last week I encountered one of the scourges of humanity, a driver that blocks the walkway at a red light. As all too often happens, it was not an accident, he didn’t get caught there when the light changed. I saw him keep driving after it changed and deliberately block the crosswalk. I do what I always do in that situation, glared at the driver as I passed in front of his car and then walk along the side of his passenger side door until I was opposite the curb cut instead of making a bee line for it. Good thing he can’t read my mind. Maybe that made no difference as my glare made my thoughts quite clear. Maybe he was just afraid to confront me.
I have written before that crimes of inconsiderate drivers deserve the death penalty I know longer do that as capital punishment is barbaric and so immoral I don’t want to even fantasize about it. Now that I’m a kinder and gentler god of vengeance I fantasize about lasers or a giant blade coming up from the ground at the edge of the crosswalk and severing the offending front of the car. Capital punishment is an enormity, Carpital punishment is justice. Have you ever considered that the prefix “cap” I capital means head? Capital punishment originally meant beheading. We stopped doing that because it’s came to be considered inhumane, even though death is instantaneous while current methods of the death penalty, usually lethal injection, are considered fine by over 60% of Americans. I came across that in a Pew Research Study, Most Americans Favor the Death Penalty Despite Concerns About Its Administration.
What I want to discuss is not the death penalty but people’s desire to punish others. I started with the story of the car because that triggered my own desire to inflict punishment. I’m not immune to it. I enjoyed the mental image of the front of the car being sheared of as I wrote about it. When I see mistreating others, or I’m mistreated myself, my mind goes in the direction of punishment. I don’t feel guilty about that. I work on feeling it less and got myself to no longer think of executions as the answer, but sins in the heart do not count, just ask Jimmy Carter.
I know I’m not alone in having these feelings, hey 60% of Americans want to kill people as punishment in real life, not just their imagination. The thing to consider is that thinking about punishing those that make transgressions gives us pleasure, we are rewarded with endorphins when we do, and the parts of our mind that we are in control of should take that into account in choosing our actions and our words. We are not unbiased.
This is the essence of puritanism, the desire to prove our virtue by punishing the wicked so we thrown them in the stocks and hang the witches. Yes I said hanged; in Europe witches were burned but in Salem they were primarily hanged. One was pressed with stones. Historical accuracy is important. Today the ire of the religious puritans is directed at what they consider sexual transgressors, women having sex outside of marriage, gays, with a focus now on trans people.
Now comes the part that’s going to be hard for some of you to hear. This pleasure from the thoughts of punishment is not the exclusive domain of the right. Progressives are people too and we have the same feelings. What I’d like is for us to think like progressives and resist those feelings. Do we want to see Donald Trump punished? Of course, we do, and that’s fine as long as it’s for his crimes, not for being what we consider a terrible person.
We see the same thing for those that make economic transgressions, we want them punished even if what they did was legal. Often we want them punished because something bad happened and we want someone to suffer for it, even if we can’t prove it’s their fault. I’ve had discussions with people where I’ve favored changing the economic regulations so as to remove incentives for doing things that are harmful for society in general. I’ve too often had pushback on that as discussing economic incentives takes away our incentive to punish them. They favor punishing sins over promoting economic justice. People think that way all the time, it’s why they object to putting criminals in drug treatment plans instead of prison. If we look at underlying causes we don’t get to punish people.
The desire for punishment is so great that we are seek people to blame for tragedies even when no one is at fault. People get plague? Blame the witches or the Jews or the Chinese, or the people that look like that might be Chinese. Never consider chance or honest mistakes or inherent complexity that makes decisions difficult, blame someone’s malevolence. If we do that we can make things better by punishing them. This is behind so much evil in the world. As John Oliver pointed out in last night’s show, it leads to us killing prisoners with oppressive heat. It’s accepted because they committed crimes, so all punishment is justified. I know it’s easier for My Gentle Readers to see in cases like that. It’s easier to see in others. I am sure many of us fantasize about making the people that are responsible go through the same suffering. Fight that feeling. Understand that it’s acting not to make the world better but to make ourselves feel better. It’s being a puritan.
Now I am going to force myself to get dressed, get out of the house, and walk five miles to make up for not walking yesterday. That’s not punishment, it’s to get the benefits of exercise. That brings up one more point. What I said about the allure of punishment goes for punishing ourselves too. Do unto yourself as you would like others to treat your friends, not yourself. Even if you think you deserve it, resist punishment. It doesn’t cleanse yourself of sin, it just scars your psyche.
Wise Madness 