Chapter 21: Law, Order, Crime, and Living Together in Ways that Make Sense
How does the modern feudalistic socioeconomic paradigm impact the nature and prevalence of crime? This question doesn’t have a simple answer, but some dynamics are clear.
Let’s start by defining “crime.” A good working generic definition in a truly healthy society might be “any deliberate behavior that knowingly causes harm.”
In most current societies, the definition of crime is much more complex.
For example, in the United states, it’s a crime to be on land owned by someone else, even if the owner isn’t using it for anything. In some cities, it’s a crime to feed the homeless. In some states it recently became a crime to pass out food or water to people waiting in line to vote. Growing tobacco is legal but growing marijuana isn’t, in many countries.
In past and present times, definitions of “crime” have often been capricious, arbitrary, and directly harmful. There are places and past historical times where it’s illegal to marry outside of your ethnic or religious group, to use a language other than the official language, to practice certain religions, to go out unaccompanied by a male relative if you’re female, to teach a slave to read and write, to hide and aid an escaped slave, or even to just be a member of a certain group. In medieval times, it was a crime to deny a member of the nobility anything that they chose to take, or even to fail to kneel or prostrate one’s self. It was not a crime for nobility to kill, rape, beat or otherwise abuse a peasant or serf.
Thus, the definition of what’s a crime has a lot to do with prevalence and nature of crime.
Under the dominant paradigm, there are four basic kinds of crime:
1) Crimes causing harm to living beings, which will be defined as crimes in the new paradigm. 2) Crimes of indirect harm to people or their property, such as fraud, theft, vandalism, discrimination, and breach of contract. 3) Financial crimes such as insider trading, counterfeiting, illegal gambling, smuggling, and money laundering. 4) Arbitrarily and capriciously defined crimes, such as failure to pay a fee, renew a permit, fill out a form, or wait a specified time. This category also includes laws such as those that cause an intimate relationship between a seventeen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old to suddenly become a serious crime when one of them turns eighteen. It includes the criminalization of technical information sharing between engineers working at two different companies. In some places it even includes laws illegalizing same-sex relationships or voluntary relationships between more than two consenting adults. In some countries it’s a crime to criticize or satirize the monarch or ruler.
Crimes in category one will remain crimes in the new paradigm. They will probably never disappear from human behavior; but it’s likely that they’ll become a lot less prevalent after the Transition. Crimes of passion can happen in any paradigm; but violent crime will certainly diminish dramatically. More on this later.
In the new paradigm, crimes of categories two through three will disappear almost entirely, partly because the definitions of crimes will change, and mostly because the whole context in which such crimes occur will be eliminated. You can’t strike out in football, or end up in the penalty box in basketball.
In a socioeconomic environment where currency is obsolete and irrelevant, where each of us has direct access to all that we need and desire, the current fertile soil for financially-motivated crime will become barren. Why steal your car, when I can go to the automotive distribution center and pick one up to my own specifications, no questions asked? Why steal my computer if you can go to the electronics distribution center and get one just like it or better? Crimes such as vandalism may still occur, or someone may grab someone else’s stuff rather than go get their own, but the majority of category two through four crimes will cease to have meaning.
Where there are no banks, no need for currency, or stock markets, there will be no financial crime.
Where everybody can get their own goods and services for free, there will be no reason to run cons, rob, steal, or cheat. Jealousy between haves and have-nots will disappear because all will be “haves.” This will massively reduce the incidence of greed, despair, desperation, and nihilism that underlie most category two and three crimes, thus reducing the current mutually antagonistic emotional states borne of socio-economic inequity.
Under the current paradigm, the stresses induced by the constant individual struggle against the default denial of access and rights, to keep coming up with currency to pay for literally everything, take a frightful toll mentally, emotionally and physically. People in such a situation are much more predisposed to act out violently.
Category four crimes will have no place in a healthy, synergistic, symbiotic society after the Transition. That change will have to come, like the Transition itself, from the bottom up. The more things we define as crimes, the more criminals we’ll have. Eventually we could all become criminals if we’re not careful.
The current prison system in the United States is glaring symptom of the dysfunction of the current paradigm. The increasing prevalence of for-profit prisons creates conditions approaching slavery, where prison companies profit from inmate labor while paying little or nothing. Many inmates are guilty of victimless crimes. Prisons are well-documented crucibles where “soft” criminals are forged into harder criminals, and hard criminals into harder criminals. Because so many acts are defined as crimes, many of which harm no one, the United States has the highest percentage of its population imprisoned, in the world. The prison system consumes vast resources and has a very low rehabilitation rate. Contrast this with Norway’s prison system, which is in many ways nearly the exact opposite of that of the U.S.
In the new paradigm, we’ll see human trafficking, prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, sweatshops, cons, swindles, robbery and many more crimes of harm against people plummet and go extinct or very nearly so. Things not defined as crimes under the current paradigm will become crimes: strip mining, dumping toxic waste, strip logging, and more will become crimes, but their driving motivation of profits will not exist. With currency irrelevant, there’ll be no profit motive, and so such crimes will have no existential underpinnings. There’s no point sacrificing lambs (or people) to mythical gods that nobody believes in any more. The new synergistic paradigm will see a sharp and sustained drop in nearly all categories of crime. There will be no psychological reinforcement for them.
Of course, there will still be a small percentage who will still be bullies, psychopaths, sociopaths, and other people prone to destructive, harmful behaviors. Their harmful behaviors will not be reinforced, even indirectly. They will have the full range of existing treatments freely available to them. People who act in ways that harm others will still need to be restrained so they can’t continue to cause harm; but the impetus will no longer be punitive. Restraining people with those behaviors is a practical measure for safety, not a punitive, purposes. Where treatment is effective, offenders will be able to re-enter the community. Where it isn’t, they can be kept away from the community but treated with as much dignity as possible.
While the number of activities defined as crimes will shrink dramatically, some new crimes will have to be defined. It will become a crime to attempt to withhold, block or interfere with any person’s access to and use resources or venues to which everybody needs and has a right to access, or to force someone to do something for them in exchange for not blocking their access. Stockpiling goods or “robbing” distribution services for the purpose of smuggling them out to countries still using currency in order to make profit, will be a crime. Stealing someone else’s stuff will still be a crime.
Decriminalizing behaviors that harm no one, will be a hallmark of the new functional, empowering, symbiotic peer-based paradigm.