What are people’s opinion of these acts amongst human society?
I know that one would say that these acts are wrong from a moral perspective but can we deduce anything more deeper on these issues beyond the understandings of morality?
We could talk about issues of motivation, or pragmatism I suppose.
Rape, murder and theft are an integral part of the capitalistic society in which we live. Indeed, one could go so far as to say thay these are the ’ three main elements ’ of capitalism; but ’ men in suits ’ are cowards, and street criminals, at least, have the courage and decency to get their own hands dirty.
These things happen in all societies. some more some less.
Laziness and ego would probably be the base for these actions.
I have never murdered anyone.
I am a firm believer that corruption or malice only exists in civilization and that beyond civilization it is nonexistant.
I believe individuals who murder,rape and steal to be people caught in a twisted desperation of the man made enviroment that creates the very corruption they themselves have succumb to.
What do other people think?
So the impulses that we feel which cause us to murder, rape and steal are results of our organizations into societies? As in, the organization of a society and that of an individual are distinct and thus in some sense at odds with one another, and the imposement of societal structure onto this individual structure creates the conflicts of interests between the two which the individual attempts to reconcile by acting in defiance of the rules of the society?
Yeah pretty much if I am understanding you correctly.
[b]As Rousseau would say:
" Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains."[/b]
Criminals get tired of being in chains so they do the only thing they know and that involves smashing the chains that bind them breaking every constructed law around.
[b]I am reminded of another quote by a anomynous author:
" When a conflicted individual is left with the choice of enslavement or death he will often choose the later."[/b] The criminal will often choose the risk of death out of self preservation in comparison to a life of enslavement that defies all accounts of self preservation.
corruption exsists on all levels of socioty then, even in tribal communaties there are people who rape murder and steal, they just occur less often.
Often rape is an expression of control or power, particularly from someone with no real power of their own, but that is only one take on it. the vikings raped many wemon and they were far from powerless.
murder can also be an expression of simmilar power, or it can be a means to an end for some, depending on the situation.
theft is usually a means of self preservation, most of the time when someone steals something it’s because they feel they need it, though sometimes it’s done as a right of passage though such situations are fairly rare.
People generally serve their own best intrests, even morality is part of this since it shows how helping others helps ourselves, but there are often instances where it seems to serve our best intrests to harm others, though I do not beleive this is ever truly the case unless to defend oneself.
unfortuantly I am no advocate for human nature, or at least no more of one than any other human, peace.
Here is somthing to think about:
Is not sexual selection of the animal world where a male ( Or female depending on the animal species.) chases the female into submission just like what we call rape?
When a lion kills another lion out of starvation why don’t we see it as murder?
When a animal steals food from another why don’t think of it in terms of actual theft?
These questions have always perplexed me in comparison to what we call human behavior.
If you’re dating a girl, and the two of you have an arrangement where you are to pretend as though you’re raping her, while she fights as hard as she can to stop you, biting and clawing and kicking and punching, except you have a safe word which when uttered lets you know to stop, is it still actually a rape?
Either way…What does the phenomenon of recreational rape tell us about things like gender roles and how norms are formed and reinforcement of social roles and other things of that nature?
If it is consensual then it isn’t rape but I do feel that sexual recreation does seem to mirror the animal kingdom where the male centers himself as the assertive sex even against the female’s interest.
( Sexual recreation seems to mirror the primitive setting.)
What if the same girl, the next day, was to tie up the guy and poop on him then insult his genitals? What would that say about the couple? Are they social deviants? Should they seek counseling? What if neither of them has a problem with it?
Chimpanzees have been known to do things with feces as retaliation other than that I am not sure how to reply to this post. If neither of them have a problem with it then it would still consist to be a consensual nature.
( I am sure our moral societal judges would say somthing about it in their infinite morality.)
There is no such thing as normality and I view social therapy to be the practice of the weak.
The problem of murder/rape/theft/et cetera is that they’re moot, and localized to specific environments. It’s pretty easy to tell someone they shouldn’t do something, but then you try to breach the confines of the human paradigm the lines don’t become blurred – they explode – which is why you’d be hard pressed to try and show an Lebanese man about our conception of respect for women. What I’m really getting at is that it’s all social instruction.
The problem here, despite all this I have said, of aberrant goings down, yo. I will tell you what it is that is up: people sin because it is in them to want for themselves. When you outmode a class of people they no longer have (in our case in the western world) the American dream, so they go to great lengths to draw themselves into surroundings familiar to them only in the ideals your society has presented them with.
Perhaps further elucidation is now required:
When a man commits and anti-social act he is playing against his ego. His ego says “I am dissatisfied,†so the man responds with attempting to sate it, which leads – directly or indirectly – to immoral, often amoral, action and thus we have our criminal.
To break it down further, this is what accounts for this triarchy Joker has presented us with:
Rape – It’s not about power any more than any other sexual discourse is about people… in fact, it probably has less to do with power than regular sex does. When a rapist does what he does he does because it is the way he is programmed (during even the gestation phase, rudimentarily) and he is acting on the desire to sexually fulfill himself; perhaps if our society wasn’t (among other things) bent on sexual fulfillment he might not have learned that he needs to get in on the action. Admittedly this is moot, and the rest of my depositions probably will be.
Murder – This is a tricky one, because there are a lot of different mentalities that may hold one in regard culpable to murder. Crimes of necessity: obviously something is standing in the way of them achieving the cultural normative, and that must be removed. As in crimes of passion: something exists which threatens to foil the balancing act which stands stead in the middle of preserving the normative and the ego, striking out and finding you have done the wrong thing is common; and this is often a case of mistakenness, seeing as these people are wrongfully removing their social fixation.
One more and then it’s time to move on to theft: someone chooses to kill someone in the name of their convictions – this is more paradigm preservation than any others listed. And it probably the most important one, being as it is almost courageous, if done for the right reasons.
Theft – This is probably the simplest fucking point of all to make. People want what they have been told they want (or they are a kleptomaniac, woo WOO) and they have not been bequeathed this with any expedition. It’s quite an average thing, and probably the most sinister one of the three, because it calls out for direct acquisition of what is stifling and killing all of us… or Johnny is just trying to impress the rest of his teenage friends.
I think a lot of is down to what we need, it’s just a case of what we’re being told we need. If survival were the only issue, these things would still happen, but they would not be problematic, because punishment would be swift, and without mercy and administered by an appropriate agent. These things are never right, but neither is the way we deal with them.
I think in general you have to be selfish to cause pain and loss to other people for your own interests. You have to think your interests are more important than theirs, or even their life. Is it ignorance, or betrayal?
Is selfishness in and of itself a bad thing?
Touche, ariellowen. You could have spiced it by attaching “yet.”
Joker is perhaps encouraging us to find the fundamental moral differences between the three. If we can understand the moral difference, than we can treat them all appropriately rather than as a crude lump of immorality.
People find me a little off the rocker at times for assuming this, but I honestly believe to deep fibres that rape is the only evil act of the three. Before I can even begin to justify that I have to justify my belief in evil, the quickest route being that anyone stating “I do not believe in evil” can be somewhat fallacious, because they speak of the concept and thus acknowledge the concept’s existence.
Regardless, it’s not a matter I can fit and force with cookie cutter play so I’m not going to stretch for some logical reasoning for my belief. I suppose it’s largely a matter of faith.
An easier matter I’d consider is between murder and theft. These differences are fairly selfevident. Either one leads to another in some way, but their direct motives are very different. I could add some unique situations that seem to confuse the matter further . . .
*A stockbroker invests in war-related products and then invests in a political forum to encourage war.
*A nuclear weapon is stolen from a [i]rogue[/i] nation.
*A terrorist infiltrates and kills a brigade en route to hold the terrorist’s family hostage.
Western justice obviously seems to acknowledge a difference between all three concepts. Theft generally influences your credit rating, and only by implicit repetition leads to prison sentencing. Murder is almost a mandatory prison sentence, but may be completely invisible to your credit history and to labour. Meanwhile, sexual misconduct will probably be invisible to credit rating, might give you a prison sentence, and will probably be revealed in any conduct with any people.
Of course . . . the justice system doesn’t always appropriate these verdicts so purely as I’m laying them out.
Can’t they be explained simply as the use of people as ends?
First off, we (here in America) don’t live in a capitalist society. We live in a mixed economy. Secondly, in a true capitalist society these things are some of the only things that are outlawed. In a capitalist society the governments role is to protect individual rights from the initiation of force. Those three acts certainly fall under that designation. So fundamentally a capitalist society rejects these acts, although there are criminals in any civilization, the would be dealt with rather harshly under true capitalism.