Kill The Messenger

We’ve got Justice backwards, and the Gun is pointing at Us

Imagine a thought experiment, where one “average, middle class, consumer/spectator” citizen is carefully analyzed to determine every crime their complicity with “convenience”, consumption, and opinionated spectatorship was directly responsible for. Every injury or death (including all life forms and life systems affected or wiped out) associated with each automobile trip, meal, action, work activity, tax investment, habit, and ‘comfort’. Every use or application of a product, every disposal or burning of fuel. All of them. From the moment of their birth to whatever moment they currently inhabit.

A complete accounting of the actual results of their personal existence and choices. The effects that occurred ‘at a distance’ and were thus invisible, or intentionally ignored.

Nearly every single one of us would be culpable not only for murder, but an array of dedicated murderous agendas that had been producing new victims (and new kinds of victims) daily. In some cases, a single automobile trip may cost hundreds of human lives, and produce millions of ecological impacts or deaths. Effectively, most of what we do casually and ‘without a care’ is openly and aggressively omnicidal as the effects relate to living ecologies (like our own bodies and communities). And this kills everything. People, first. But it hides them far away, in place, time, or social class.

Most of our common activity is like aiming a shotgun we have chosen not to see… at the history and future of humanity and life on Earth, and just pulling the trigger over and over again, all day, every day. And this is so exciting that we just keep inventing new ways to do this; endless seething swarms of them, and celebrate it madly as ‘progress’. Every time any trigger is pulled, the damage lands in everyone and everything. Forever. It’s just that we prefer the species of damage that is not ‘immediately and locally obvious’. We like to ‘hide the damage’ far away, in person, time, place, or ecology. Ecologies and nonhuman organisms cannot speak or even be heard. So they can be wiped out without so much as a ‘by your leave’. We do not realize that our own bodies and minds are their fingertip.

Imagine then, if we were ‘tried’ for this. Any one of us. Just for the effects of our own, personal ‘convenience’ and compliance with the prisonistic, paramilitary consumer/owner culture that ours has openly become. Imagine if all the accounting were carefully done.

In some cases, a single meal would cost seven human children. In others, redecorating the house would obliterate an swath of forest millions of years old. Owning a car over five years has killing power unlike anything one can imagine, because the car doesn’t even have to be operated to wipe out living things and places. The processes that create and maintain automobiles, and the ‘cash’ we spend to celebrate this comes out of the bank of living beings, and cannot be put back in. What is lost is an asset we do not account and does not fit in simple arithmetic: the conserved potential of living ecologies and minds collapses into a manipulable commodity such as c-ash. The result is waves of death whose echoes never cease. What is taken away is infinitely generative (and universal in scope), and what was derived from it is falsely localized, momentary and expendable.

So if we actually do the math, we will have to all execute everyone. Kids too. Grandmothers. Everybody. Nearly nobody will not be guilty of crimes so horrific as to defy ordinary imagining. And, of course, if we did that, this would merely magnify and concretize, extend and explosively advance the entire situation. Wrong would invent new domains of wrong to act lethally in, and we would just expire in a mad frenzy of endless courtrooms, waiting prisons, and execution paradigms. You cannot argue insanity if everyone else is just as insane. Nor can you argue compliance: ‘I was just doing what everyone else was doing and telling me to do’.

Although we all pretend to be unaware of what I have been orbiting here, our psyches are. And so are our minds and souls. Occasionally then, this broiling atrocity we are calling civilization produces a signal from within that should act as both a ‘tracer’ and a ‘wake up call’. The signal usually comes in a form we find offensive, for good reason: we are determined to ignore its actual sources, functions and implications. Our habit and culture incline us to ‘magnify and reproduce’ the crime and all of its affects in a grand-mal seizure of human intelligence that we call Prosecution. We isolate the ‘perpetrator’ from their history, culture, experience and circumstances… from our own activity and influence and its actual effects upon them, and ‘bring them up on charges’. Meanwhile, we intentionally ignore the signal, its origins, imperatives, implications, and all possibility of intelligently discovering, admitting and resolving them.

Why? We pack all of that into the messenger, who becomes the scapegoat, the ‘perpetrator’ — then kill or imprison it. This action ‘links us in crime’ and expands all modes and domains of damage. It resolves absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with Justice, or humanity, civilization or intelligence. No ledger gets balanced, all ledgers just start bleeding: cash, lives, futures, histories and potentials for actual progress.

It is a disease within a disease that perpetuates the disease it is masquerading as the cure for. This process is the source of criminals and terrorists. Literally: the womb from which they are born.

Punishing the signal is explicitly the least useful, intelligent, humane, and effective response imaginable. One might as well run head-long into a brick wall, and then demand that all the others of your state and nation join you, every time anyone does something that is ‘against the law’.

We have recently tried and convicted a young male of an act of terrorism that apparently involved the intentional detonation of an explosive device in a crowd. The immediate results of his actions were, indeed, horrific and inhuman. But I am afraid that the idea of taking him to court and ‘punishing’ him is not only absurd, the actual situation is too ironic to imagine: we, who ‘kill from afar’ a million times a day, in domains he will never dream of affecting, we who obliterate whole histories and futures in an eyeblink — for sport, for convenience, for ‘entertainment’, for zealotry, for commerce, fictions and ‘personal entitlements’… we who have committed every one of his sins without the slightest degree of interest or concern… will now sin further and execute a signal that our own activity assembled amongst us.

A signal that demonstrates, however wrongly, precisely the nature of our own culture and activity, and exposes us directly to its results. In real-time. Local. Personal. Up close.

We cannot ignore this signal. We cannot afford to pretend that our offense at its form and effect entitle us to ignore its actual origins, and they are not in the person who has emerged from the crisis of our own pretense and tyranny as a flare. The person is crucial to the resolution of the origin of the signal, and it origin is not in that person. It cannot be ‘punished out of them’. It is in the context, our culture and its fictional mimicry of culture — the ceaseless and glaring lack of humanity, intelligence, authenticity, mutuality… or survivability.

This young man is, in inconvenient fact, the perennial resurgence of the Nemesis we assemble and send forth from the ‘civil dungeons’ of our own hubris, ignorance and failures — to insist we awaken. A living mirror, empty of himself and filled with the poisons we have so passionately and extensively produced. What we ‘do with him’ says nothing of him, or his crimes.

Instead, it instructs us what to ignore about our own necessary complicity in his gestures. And the result is more horrible than any single crime can ever be, because it is the result of an entire culture that is stridently, actively stupid, inhuman, mechanical, and knee-jerk prone to attack the signals it produces while ignoring their origin, focus, import and urgency.

So what would intelligent response look like? We would, after identifying the signal and its messenger, unpack it to produce schemas with which we could understand and explore the forces and situations that produced the flare. Rather than spending unnecessary time, resources and attention on punishing anything, these resources would be spent to both resolve the origins and ameliorate harm to victims.

The ‘criminal’ would be isolated from the lethal cultures that produced the necessity of their emergence, and intelligently rehabilitated. As they are only partially responsible, and we cannot punish the context that is complicit in producing their responsibility punishing them is like punishing an injury. It is stupid, costly, inexcusable, and inhumane.

In most cases they must have a chance to be or become human again. In ways that actually enrich their life, our lives, and our society. Creatively and humanely. Ironic that such a chance should be extended to prisoners, for few of those we imagine to be free will experience this. Nonetheless, it is the obvious and humane solution.

In every case, we would intelligently modulate our social contexts and agreements, relationships and expectations, so as to expose and actively, creatively address the origins and toxic schemas that produce the messenger.

In our bodies there are cells, part of the immune system, called macrophages. Their activities are complex. One of them is to ‘engulf’ a threat that has been identified as ‘non-self’. When they do this, other cells ‘read a profile of the threat’ from the surface of the mPhage. These cells then assist in the engineering of molecular ‘responses’ that can disable the invading element or dissolve it.

What we are doing is, comparatively, insane: when a macrophage (one of us, a human being) has ‘acquired the non-self threat’ and begins to signal, we mistake the signaller for the threat. And we attack and ‘punish’ the signaller, all the while doing nothing at all about the threats — which are the toxic social, relational, informational and ecological forces that produce both the necessity of the signal and the messenger.

If our bodies did something like we do even one time we would not survive it. The response would fail to address anything even vaguely resembling the threat (thus producing more of it), and … the moment our immune systems attacked our macrophages? We would explode. Literally. Boom. Pus everywhere.

What we are doing is the biological equivalent of an autoimmune disease, we are attacking the organs of our social ecologies that, under extreme stress, compression, and constant assault, finally have to signal desperately about what they were doing nothing but signalling about for years: the entire context has turned to poison, and since everyone is conveniently complicit in this ongoing catastrophe no one is inclined to notice. The few signals that reach the surface are assaulted, denigrated, raped, killed or imprisoned.

This is an autoimmune disease. We are not attacking criminals, or even punishing them. We are attacking ourselves in the mirror of a kind of lethal public religion. The result is not Justice, but disease.

With 1/100th of the effort and expense we use to trace and prosecute, imprison and punish persons, we could completely transform our communities, cultures, and imperatives into something so incredibly human, humane, intelligent and caring that we would stop producing 90% of the activity that demands the emergence and intrusion of Nemesis. Most of crime would simply disappear. Literally.

Our criminals are signals. We need to follow them to their sources, and resolve them. Those sources are in us, our activity, and the fictional imperatives that overstand our humanity, community and mutual interest. Let us prosecute those, and leave the children who have succumbed to them to re-invent something like their humanity, creativity, and promise.

No other Justice shall suffice.