A couple of
days ago a friend told me about a criminal act. Her friend, an
elderly woman who was returning from work at night, was beaten up by
a group of teenagers apparently for no reason. This fact made me
think that nowadays, crimes seem to be inevitable, like illness,
death or pain.
Under this assumption, I would like to present the following
argument: If all societies impose systems of norms on their members,
these rules would comply to the attempt to serve the purpose of
normalizing behavior and prohibit deviations that society condemns.
However, since human beings are very different and have tendencies to
be original and creative, some of the forms of behavior they
undertake will be among the prohibited ones. These prohibited actions
range from prophetic statements condemning the existing society to
antisocial behaviour classified as "criminal".
As long as a society imposes regulations, it will necessarily condemn
actions that ignore those rules. If the punishments against for
certain acts, for example -murder, is very hard, the violent crimes
in that society can be reduced. Nevertheless, once this has been
achieved, attention can be diverted to deviant behaviour that had
been particularly tolerated. To illustrate this idea, we could think
about a developing society where there is a lot of violence. In
this society, differences in the norm of conduct are probably
tolerated. But in a highly regulated society as in a class, where
violence has been completely eliminated due to heavy punishments, the
actions that are considered infractions would be whispering, chewing
gum, using the mobile and similar things. In this way while there are
rules, there will be infractions. Consequently, these deviations will
be considered as regrettable and will be classified as deviant or
inappropriate behavior. Therefore, wherever there is a system of
norms, there will be deviant behaviour.
Considering the previous reasoning, there will be people who can
affirm that human beings are educable and that antisocial tendencies
can be eliminated over time. Others may say that as long as the
differences are not eliminated, that will be useless. As I see it,
all that is needed is for people to learn to be more tolerant of
interindividual differences. I just wrote this and the following
paradox arises: if, assuming an extreme position, it could be that
the real origin of the problem is in the rules themselves, and/or if
all of them were abolished and people could manage their free will,
would the the antisocial behaviour disappear? .... Humm I just could
not find an answer ...
