6 Comments

Thank you for your post about the topic !!!

In communities of size below the Dunbar's number, this kind of sentencing is appropriate and successful.

Imho, it is highly doubtful if the described kind of "justice" would ever work even in mass-societies counting millions of individuals.

Expand full comment

Glad you liked it!

Yeah, that's something I try to acknowledge. I don't think that we're about to start singing Kumbaya anytime soon... but I think that we must be guided by an understanding of what justice might be like... I think that the logical thing to do is to look for examples of solutions that could be practiced on a smaller scale within the existing society... and ideally scaled up over time.

Expand full comment

Most "advanced" Western societies are rotten to the core, and beyond remedy ...

American aborigines and nature-folks in general knew since centuries that you cannot eat money, but in the West, almost everybody just ONLY follows that ...

Every human interaction is commodified and a price-tag attached to it with genuine human values having no place left in this kind of metrics.

- Their politics is a laughable scam and hoax, and as Mark Twain already said: "If voting could change anything, they would have banned it long ago".

- Their ever-growing, hyper-technocratic approach to ever-growing, severe problems caused by former technique is just insane. As Einstein already said: You can't solve a problem with the same mindset you had when you created it in the 1st. place".

- Their medicine does not cure, just doles-out chemo and radiation, (and now, assisted suicide) making diseases chronical and keeping them that way (with the exemption of acute cases where it has achieved formidable results).

- Their economics .... see last two points combined.

- and, and, and ...

High-time to "let them go and dump them high up on the trash-heap of history" !!!

There's a song by Deep Forest with lyrics that go: "Deep in the jungle, there live some little men and women, they're our past and maybe, maybe, they're our future".

See you in the Amazon, 54th. river-bend to the left ... 🤣🤣🤞🤞

Expand full comment

According to the corporate propaganda media's (MSM) usage of

"Domestic Violence" it's implied definition is 'violence' by males

against females... ('violence' being undefined, as is usual)...

The implied definition does not include adult male 'violence' against

the kids, nor adult female 'violence' against the kids, nor adult

female 'violence' against the adult male...

"Family Violence" would cover 'violence' other that 'violence' against the

adult female by the adult male - a can of worms to be avoided ?

Anyway, everyone knows that if the mother whacks the kids it's all the

father fault !

Expand full comment

Is there a reason you prefer "Family Violence" to "Domestic Violence"?

One thing that I didn't get into was corporeal punishment and the permitted use of spanking and other discipline in traditional societies, because that would have muddied the waters further.

For the record, I live in Mexico, where mothers definitely hit their kids and no one seems to have a problem with it (most of the time). Kids are healthier and have less behavioural issues in Mexico.

The traditional Mennonite view is "Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child", by the way. I'd rather parents spank their kids than put them on pharmaceutical drugs. People don't seem to realize that Ritalin is a substitute for more traditional forms of discipline, including corporeal punishment. They don't need Ritalin to keep kids from acting up in Mexico. Just saying.

Anthropology teaches us that corporeal punishment is not necessary to produce healthy adults, however.

Expand full comment

That all sounds eminently sensible. I like that traditional view of seeing anti-social behaviour as a kind of mental illness (temporary or chronic) or a lack of balance. I have a story somewhere on my bookshelf about this being the way they dealt with 'crime' in Atlantis. Except they had some technology to help rebalance the offender's brain (presumably it used some kind of electromagnetism perhaps, or sonic resonance maybe).

I am certainly an abolitionist when it comes to locking people up in cages. If you have to remove (ostracise) a serious/violent offender from society then I think it should either be open air prison camps, or just dump them on an island somewhere. Or Manhattan perhaps. (yes, I'm a big John Carpenter fan).

I think there is a limit to the rehabilitation approach, though - some crimes are simply too horrific (like child sex abuse) and if it's not possible to 'cure' the psychopath/monster, then ostracism seems to me to be the only option. So I think those ancient and indigenous communities survived and maintained a good level of social harmony by a combination of rehabilitation and ostracism, depending on the circumstances of the case.

I also agree with Klaus' mention of Dunbar's number of course. No need to elaborate there. Maybe this simply goes to show that human beings were never really meant to live in massive population centres. They did, after all, evolve with those small communities, so that's what their brains are wired for. I think a lot of modern social/criminal problems (and mental health of course) are entirely down to the fact that people are not living in the natural environment they are supposed to.

That's probably a bit obvious to us though, eh.

Expand full comment