Hacker News Reader

"Restore morality and revamp the idea of punishment to actually be a deterrent in the 21st century and these things will go away."

If's funny to say that after admitting that we're animals driven by instinct.

Making morality and punishment a priority won't change a thing when people have to choose between making rent/eating lunch/buying meds or committing crimes. The easiest way to prevent criminality, is feeding people, housing, healthcare, and education on a longer timeline.

Also people tend to underestimate punishment and overestimate rewards, especially desperate people, people everywhere are routinely risking years of jail for a hundred dollars.

Animals, or at least most mammals and birds, can be trained. Human animals that haven't been trained with a morality system or something effectively similar have only a relatively straight-forward cost/benefit analysis as their decision calculus.

Most humans have a morality system to the extent that they'd rather starve to death than engage in cannibalism, for example. It requires more effort, but they can also be socialized to endure reduced access to drugs in exchange for not stealing.

It is a fundamental question of the nature of man. People are fundamentally evil and need to be thought to do good. Religions including Christianity have a way to address that but what is a secular society's way to address this?

If you disagree with this please let me know why. Most people are raised to believe they are fundamentally good which causes a lot of harm and suffering. Challenging that preconception and learning to do good is the best way to defeat evil and let justice and equality prevail for all in my opinion.

Secular society has been so busy deconstructing the concept of God and religion, on the premise that it's useless if it's not provably true, to come up with an adequate replacement for the positive things God and religion provided. They seem either completely disinterested or completely incapable of the task.

What evidence do you have for "People are fundamentally evil". Personally I have found it useful to get new acquaintances to tell me their opinions on this one. A lot of the rest of their behaviour can then be inferred.

Like all of history and the cruelties of modern society in any country. Even toddlers have been shown to be selfish,racist and cruel towards other toddlers before they can even speak a word. If you can't find relevant research I would be glad to oblige tomorrow.

> Restore morality and revamp the idea of punishment to actually be a deterrent in the 21st century and these things will go away.

This would be much more effective if we start with crimes of educated, wealthier segments of the population. Starting the "Operation Restore Morality" with the poorest sections of the public is where things come off as hollow.

Elite corruption seems like an entirely separate problem to street crime. I don't see why we wouldn't want to solve both, nor why there should be any "you first" here.

you don't see why? really? Please ask one of your poorer friends if they see why.

Literally everybody I know would want to see both street crime and elite corruption addressed. Are you advocating for addressing one of them but not the other?

Did you ask one of your poorer friends before putting words into other peoples mouth?

I know my friends and family very well, so… yes? Certainly well enough to know that they do not subscribe to the extreme fringe idea that we need to solve elite crime before we can prosecute shoplifters.

By the way, the branch of my family that would count as poor are uniformly much more conservative than I am.

This type of article may help you understand:

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/05/why-working-...

Most companies affected by shoplifters are breaking the law everyday, so yeah corporate crime should be addressed before shoplifting.

Address the worst crimes first.

If you're making 6 figures and breaking the law because you're greedy, you should go to jail before the desperate unemployed street kids living one day at a time, risking their lives and freedom to make rent and buy groceries.

But stealing $10,000 worth of product from your local corner store is worse than embezzling $10,000 from a megacorp. And aren't most of these thieves using their ill-gotten gains to pay for drugs, not rent or groceries?

Because going after the vulnerable first in your quest for restoration of morality as a solution to societies problems seems like just another way to punish the poor/ lower classes.

Elite corruption is also directly responsible for creating circumstances that foster street crimes.

I wouldn't call members of organized shoplifting rings who earn enough to support a drug habit "poor".

I think it comes down to "leadership by example". If your boss comes in an hour late to work each day, are you going to turn up on time? Similarly, if you're poor, and see privileged rich people getting away with (albeit different) crimes, are you going to make yourself poorer and shy away from crime due to morality?

I would think that people care more about things that directly affect them rather abstract financial crime and high level wrong doing. Low level administrative corruption like government officials "fast tracking" applications if you pay them off, doctors asking for "extras" to operate on you and your kids being mugged or stabbed on the way to school affects people's lives in a way that Nancy Pelosi's insider trading probably doesn't.

> "Punish a criminal? How unacceptable. Who are you to say what is right and wrong?" It seems we'd rather society fray apart into nothing than re-establish any kind of order

We live in a society where the rich and elites - the ones running our governments and corporations, are all greedily exploiting and cheating the entire populace. They’re all getting away with it too, with ever increasing wealth gaps and wages that don’t match inflation.

So, when people display such ire for low level petty theft by people with nothing in their lives, and claim they’re the ones “fraying apart society” - I find it hard to take seriously.

>people with nothing in their lives...[are]...the ones “fraying apart society”

You misread. The ones who are letting society come apart are all of us who let ourselves be apathetic enough to be deceived by people who think a total lack of morality is the way to run society.

To the rest of your response, my post could be generalized to any social level. No need to whatabout wage gaps and inflation. Everything I said applies there too: lack of morality and lack of deterring punishment.

If you truly believe that lack of morality is the issue, then we should immediately start prosecuting rich/elite corruption. It harms everyone, it eats away at societal wealth and trust, and leads further to facism.

Yes, we should be punishing rich/elite corruption. Is this a trick question?

Yours is a trick answer, because we aren’t - at least not on the same scale nor with the same public outcry.

It can be both. It's not one side or the other. Elites are exploiting the problem for political points.

Both yes but there is a matter if degree, which they are not same.

Yes, but if you only willing to ”fix” the poor people and let the rich elites continue, then it is like picking sides.

> We live in a society where the rich and elites - the ones running our governments and corporations, are all greedily exploiting and cheating the entire populace.

this is just a plain old run of the mill conspiracy theory.

reality unfortunately is never black and white, and that’s because modern societies are extremely complex systems:

https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_th...

What’s the conspiracy theory? You’ve literally just linked to the Wikipedia article about socioeconomic mobility (which I never argued can’t exist) and an incomplete income inequality dataset. Neither of which disprove that the elites are exploiting the poor.

It's easy to cheat and exploit people when they constantly cheat and steal from one another. Such behavior becomes the norm, and bad behavior by elites is perceived as in line with convention. Maybe getting a handle on street crime could help break this norm, and free up popular mindshare for engagement on more-abstract structural issues.

Most would say the same of politicians and elites who are constantly robbing us. Worryingly, in public discourse, it’s expected and accepted that they will do so.

So, is it /really/ just the poor crime that creates this culture?

I agree that it goes both ways. Fixing one should help fix the other. It's easier to start small.

It takes significantly more effort to constantly catch hundreds of small time unknown criminals versus the handfuls of elites in the public limelight or government positions.