With regard to cultural issues like those discussed by @theunitofcaring here –
– which I am not reblogging, because I’m quite sure that no one would benefit from my thoughts being incorporated into that thread –
– and with the explicit proviso that this is just vague emotional from-the-gut what-feels-right talk, not any kind of argument for any cohesive position on anything –
– is it just me, or is there something really creepy and wrong about the idea that someone might find valuable soul-affirming “closure” in an act of punishment undertaken by the administrative state?
Leaving aside any abstract question of whether vengefulness is good, bad, potentially-justified, whatever: if you have a need for vengeance, and you’re willing to stand by it, go take vengeance. Yourself. Like a man, as they say, even if you’re not in fact a man, because that’s not even slightly the relevant part.
Or don’t, because you value the rule of law and you have wise concerns about the merits and the consequences of vigilante justice. Then you live with the outcome that society deems best, because that’s the most important thing. That works too.
But there’s something very childish, very whiny and entitled, about expecting the Authorities to salve the wounds of your heart. Why the hell should that be their job? What could possibly make them qualified to do it? How could that mandate not warp their universal priorities beyond recognition?
And that’s not even the worst of it, or so says my gut. The worst of it is the idea that – to call on @bambamramfan‘s Lacanian vocabulary for a moment – you accept the administrators as a legitimate mouthpiece for the Big Other. That you believe in your soul that an administrative state decision can actually communicate anything about whether or not the offense really was serious, or about whether some important abstract entity like Society or God regards it as such. Your soul should really not give a shit what the administrative state thinks about anything. The administrative state can’t possibly be worthy of that.
What? The government is supposed to do justice. It makes sense to want it to actually do justice.
people want that kind of affirmation from /society/, and that ‘do it yourself’ and ‘ignore it’ both fail to offer that. in a democratic country the govt gets a lot of its emotional+moral weight from its claim to be the voice of society on law and order.
I understand, abstractly, that people want these things. I do not, in my heart, understand why. The fact that people think that these things are achievable, even in theory, strikes me as profoundly and unsettlingly wrong – like a Zalgo-text glitch in the workings of the mind, or something.
The government can’t possibly “do justice.” It doesn’t have any of the relevant information. It doesn’t have the slightest clue who you are, what matters to you, what kind of injury was done to your spirit and your story, what makes the offense so inappropriate and so heinous. At best it can reduce you to a one-dimensional bureaucratic caricature, and the crime to another one-dimensional bureaucratic caricature, and make some pronouncements about the relationship of those things that will have no real reflection on the actual meaningful facts of the case (which are certain to be wholly individual and mostly psychological or spiritual).
The government can make things better, in a broad-brush social-policy kind of way. It can provide good incentives, and deterrences, and useful restitutions, and whatnot. But there won’t be any justice in it, not a shred, except maybe by sheerest accident.
As for people wanting “that kind of affirmation from society”…“society” doesn’t exist in the relevant sense, it doesn’t have a mind to conceive or a heart to condemn. There are a bunch of people, who will presumably have a bunch of varied opinions as people do, and even if you particularly care what they think – which you shouldn’t, unless you know them personally or something, that way lies social-media-style madness – you really shouldn’t care what some random jury thinks, or something.
I don’t understand why anyone believes the government’s claim to represent society on matters of moral import. Even in a democracy. How could it possibly? How much does government policy reflect the desires of anyone you know, on anything?
Sigh. I gather that I’m some kind of outlier on this, or something. But it all seems so weird.