Youth crime is failure of political economy, not law and order

 

Peter Strempel, 29 March 2024

Youth crime is once more in the news, with riots in Alice Springs leading to calls for curfews and troops, and the LNP’s Queensland electioneering policy calling for more police and stiffer penalties.

Yet we know from decades’ experience that policing is no answer in itself.  Not even if special squads of gang police were authorized to shoot suspects.  That’s because root causes remain unaddressed.  Most likely even unrecognized.

All major parties, and the people who vote for them, have assumed for decades that the increasing monetization of every aspect of social life is accepted as casually by everyone as it is by the bourgeoisie—those who have bought into and structured their lives around neoliberal political economy, with its built-in and ever increasing concentration of wealth and inequality.

Those who have no money have been progressively and deliberately excluded from the most basic of social activities and rituals.  They cannot buy the clothes they would like to wear.  They cannot go see, buy, or even play the kind of music they want to.  They cannot go to sports matches, and in many cases, not even play sports themselves.  They can’t go out to cinemas, bars, clubs, or restaurants.  They can’t afford laptops, or scooters, or cars, or other status symbols.

But they are continually bombarded with advertising messages reminding them just what pathetic failures they are for not being able to participate in an entirely consumption-driven society.  And when they look at their parents, and grandparents, they know it’s a generational exclusion with no hope in sight.

So, they adopt a nihilism that is expressed in disrespect for the lives and property of others, lashing out and destroying what they have been denied, and knowing that even if they are caught and punished, that punishment is likely no worse than their everyday lives are already.

Worst of all, they can see by the example of politicians and business executives that crime at that level is never punished.  That it is only the poor and disenfranchised who are criminalized for breaking laws.

No policy devised by people blind to their own bourgeois subjectivity will ever address youth crime.  If you cannot see past your own biases, problems which are caused by them in the first place will appear impossible to resolve, and a cycle of persisting with policies that have already, demonstrably, failed will begin or continue.  Bourgeois assumptions have to be recognized for what they are: class prejudices. Such a recognition might lead to the revelation that reversing the most demeaning effects of neoliberal political economy could work much better than policing in stemming crime of any kind.  A process of de-monetizing socialization at an early age, even if that means subsidy for all children to participate in their societies.  Allowing especially the most underprivileged to develop a sense of belonging, of being part owners of their societies, but without placing impossible financial pressures on their parents or stigmatizing the kids for being subsidized.

How to fund this?  My inclination is that banks, the big consulting firms, wage thieves, and other white collar criminals should be levied in lieu of neither board members nor executives ever being charged with the crimes they have committed, let alone sent to gaol.  And levied in a way that makes it impossible to pass on the costs to consumers rather than taking the hit in profits and executive bonuses.  Start with banks; we already know they are run as criminal cartels through the evidence gathered by the royal commission of 2017-2019.  We learnt recently just how corrupt the big consulting firms are.  And wage thieves are exposed so regularly these days that it seems reasonable to suspect it’s an endemic practice, especially in franchise and other big business operations.

But none of that will ever happen.  It is the nature of the bourgeoisie to believe quite blindly, almost religiously, that its own subjectivity is in fact objective reality.  Almost everyone in that class is clueless about how people excluded from it live their daily lives.  Every now and then we get direct evidence of this class divide when a politician can’t answer questions about the price of a loaf of bread, a litre of milk, or the cost of petrol.  I would guess most senior executives would be similarly divorced from the political economy of poverty.

So, more police it is.  Stiffer penalties it is.  More and bigger gaols it is.  More and better trained gangsters leaving those gaols (occasionally) it is.

Perhaps people who vote for tough-on crime policies, and the politicians who deliver it, get exactly what they asked for.  More and more youth crime.  That message sells well, doesn’t it, in our monetized society.

Why there can be no respect for religions

 Peter Strempel, 13 March 2024

A sincere young man said to me the other day that people with no religious faith ‘forget’ that those with religious faith actually believe in god.  How can you forget something that was never more than a dubious claim in the first place?  I conclude only that this young man may be quite gullible.  And casually discourteous to rational humanists in presuming that they need to collude in accepting dubious claims on zero evidence.

Meanwhile, it’s that time again when we are all supposed to respect and even participate vicariously in another religious festival in this nominally secular society.  Why?

Religion is in itself an irrational commitment, but more than that, it is an abstract practice, not a living creature, nor even a distinct ‘community’ rather than an indeterminate number of sects with intra, inter-sect and inter-denominational disputes (or even open hostilities).  It cannot be respected, because respect is a human attitude about the qualities of other humans.  (Must it be stated that ‘respect’ for inanimate objects, forces, or animals is always only a simile or metaphor?)

More fundamentally, however, the people, in aggregate, who profess a religious faith cannot be respected in aggregate while any part of their chosen faith acts as a tyrannical, bigoted, criminal cartel.

What does that mean?

Let’s take tyranny.  And let’s pick an Australian example.  The recent push for ‘freedom of religion’ legislation was an unashamed attempt to provide legal protections for bigotry (including especially hatespeech), employment discrimination, and overt political campaigning on such issues as abortion, censorship, and health services for non-heterosexuals.  That’s tyranny.  The overt ambition to impose authoritarian constraints on people who don’t share the faith or faiths in whose names such tyrannies are pursued.  This example also teaches us that religion is almost always also politics, and that some politics is religion (all the isms that rely on faith in unprovable outcomes, like fascism or communism).

Explaining bigotry to a bigot is always difficult.  But it is self-evident that pushing as ‘public policy’ or ‘personal choice’ an irrational prejudice that directly harms other people is not just bigotry, but outright chicanery.  Whether it’s hatespeech, violence, or the restriction of other people’s liberties doesn’t really matter.  Nor is there any excuse for all those ‘good’ people claimed for all religions, who may say they don’t openly practice such bigotry.  If they tacitly support others in their sects who do, they are not ‘good’ people of faith at all.  There are no ‘good’ people of faith who don’t speak out against perversions of their faiths for worldly political reasons, or just to pursue sociopathic crimes in the name of whatever deity the criminals may call upon.

When I talk criminality, I mean by it all the acts of intimidation, sabotage, rape, violence, murder, and theft not permitted by common law, but committed under cover of religion, or sought to be exempt from law by reason of religion.  (In this context, the USA may be regarded as more theocracy and/or tyranny than democracy.)

So, for example, the support for ‘dominionism’, or Christian theocracy, is in fact fascism, defined simply as any movement allied to the cause of imposing doctrine/ideology as state policy.  This applies equally to Hindufascism, Islamofascism, Judaeofascism, and so on.  Yes, such ‘extremist’ sects may be sub-sets of wider denominations, but they couldn’t very well exist without those denominations.  Not as religious movements, with all the exemptions from rationality we are all supposed to grant to people who tell us they have religious faith.  And here lies another conundrum for rational people: we have only the word of the faithful that they actually have faith, rather than, say, claiming faith for other reasons and purposes.

If religion is by its nature an irrational undertaking, requiring faith without proof, people of different faiths and none at all must always be concerned that the faithful of one sect will find ways to justify the most irrational of acts, including horrendous violence, against other sects or people of no religious convictions at all.  It requires little effort to find endless historical and present examples of exactly that.

This is particularly the case since no faithful persons are guided by their nominal deities; they all listen to clerics telling them what their faith should mean, and how they should think, speak, and act.  Or they have no real faith at all, but use the cloak of religion for purposes of social, economic, and political power over others.  One must particularly suspect people who claim god speaks to them directly of being the most egregious charlatans in this latter category.  That, or clinically insane.

Why would anyone still argue that the faithful deserve to be treated as sincere and virtuous after so many centuries of internecine warfare, tyranny, and pogroms in the name of religion?  Weren’t we forced to end all of this ‘sincerity’ and ‘virtue’ with the notion of the secular state?  In a desperate attempt to prevent the horrific bloodshed and destructiveness caused by all these sincere and virtuous people of faith?

Not quite.  We still permit special status in our democracies for, predominantly, Christian churches and sects, but extending today to all the other major religions, and to almost any kind of social behaviour describing itself as religious, even if some such sects are plainly for-profit, tax evading, predatory ventures.

It occurs because millions of people support baleful undertakings by directly or tacitly supporting their chosen denominations.  Tacit support is the cowardice or malice of not speaking against their fellows’ hypocrisies and crimes.  Such people might as well wear their own versions of the swastika lapel pin.

And that’s why it’s impossible to respect the faithful merely on the basis of claimed faith.

One can respect only individuals who talk and act in ways that are worthy of respect.  People who do this consistently and longitudinally, not merely when it suits, or when the spotlight is on them.  And definitely not people who argue virtue is necessary only because of the threat of punishment in some imagined afterlife.

The genuinely virtuous few, if they exist at all, are such a small minority that they have almost no effect on their sects, denominations, or world affairs.  How do we know this?  Because all the world’s major religions profess to be comprised of peace-loving, fraternal, and well-intentioned people.  Yet, in all the known history of the world, there has never been an outbreak of peace and fraternity congruent with such claims.  Today, of eight billion people, it is estimated almost seven billion profess one of the major faiths.  That’s quite a large majority of the world’s population choosing in everyday words and deeds not to pursue their professed virtues.  How else could there be staggering poverty, disadvantage, wars, preventable famines, and avalanches of discrimination and heinous crimes?

There is another point often overlooked by the ignorant and the deliberately devious.  If we are sincere about religious freedom—the freedom not to be persecuted for one’s religion—then there must also be a freedom from religion.  Christians must be free from Islamic doctrines (or those arising in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on), and vice versa for every non-Christian denomination.  By extension, Australia’s largest ‘denominational’ group—those who subscribe to no denomination at all—must be free from religion altogether.  And that’s plainly not the case right now.  But it’s a coming legal conundrum, and a nexus for a renewed and bitter struggle to push back against irrationality, bigotry, hatred, violence, anti-democratic and anti-civilization movements.

The very question in the Australian census that makes of rational humanism or atheism a ‘religious affiliation’ sheds light on the power of religionists to define reality according to their own doctrines: people are not rational humanists or atheists, but those who do not believe irrational nonsense.  It is the ultimate stigmatization to be defined by what you do not believe rather than by who and what you are.  Why would anyone in that outcast pariah group be inclined to respect those who make of them outcast pariahs?  Is this like a demand by slaveholders that their slaves respect them?  By criminals and tyrants that their victims respect them?

Let’s have no more talk of respecting people’s religions.  Let’s have some talk about forcing religionists to be respectful of others.