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Something I've started to notice lately is that whenever some news comes out about a crime taking place, there's always those people saying something along the lines of the criminal involved should be stripped of their rights and beaten to death. And I say to myself "no, we have a justice system for a reason." But it seems like people now adays would rather enact some sort of revenge or frontier justice instead of letting the justice system that was made for this very reason do its work.

What happened? Why has society picked up this kind of mentality? What has made us want to see someone who no matter what people think is still a human being be treated as lower than one? What happened to wanting to see the criminal own up to their mistake and become the better person? What happened to "being the better person?"

This is just some thoughts that have been on my mind lately and only now is it really starting to piss me off. But even that doesn't stop me from looking to see if there's someone out there who also believes in justice over revenge, or "being the better person". I guess you can call me insane.

Chances are it's because people are sick of seeing the justice system fail. Which it does, more often than anyone would like.

So, in response, people have decided it's better to beat down criminals than risk them going free with a good lawyer.

That has always been a false face for many people. The thing that people forget is that the reason why society used to be so violent, and still is in some parts of the world, is that people would solve every problem through physical violence.

Because saying stuff like that gets more attention. And we live in a culture that values ones ability to gather attention over ones ability to be smart or good.

Except common criminals almost never go free when they actually did it, mostly because they can never afford good lawyers. The likelihood of a justice system failure is directly proportional to the wealth of the person on trial.

I think personally think it's just "brainwashing". The powers that be have pushed for authoritarian tough on crime bullshit and a general culture of fear that people have internalized and now except, even support. It's all part of a system of control.

If you wish to know, just take a look at the psychology of the human species. Humans process information in their immediate environment by projecting into that environment. They sense an object in their environment but never the entire thing. There is always a "hidden" or "back side" to the object that they cannot sense, but which they "fill in" by projecting internally to complete the object. This is metonymy. In a metonymy a part is used to represent the whole with the expectation that the person hearing the phrase will "fill in" the missing parts. "Washington spoke to Beijing regarding the antimissile system yesterday" uses "Washington" to represent the US government and "Beijing" to represent the Chinese. The actual city governments of Washington and Beijing said nothing to each other regarding the antimissile system.

Now when faced with a problem a metonymic thinker projects into the immediate environment and picks the "obvious" solution. If the criminals are getting away (a perception of the immediate environment) then the "solution" is stop them from getting away by immediately "punishing" them. The worker is not earning, at the current minimum wage, a "living wage," raise the minimum wage. The drug dealers are getting out of jail to easily, make mandatory minimum sentences. The list of these metonymic inspired solutions is almost endless.

The way you are looking at the situation is metaphoric. In a metaphoric analysis you project "out of" the immediate environment and build upon cause/effect, temporal and spacial implications, historic trends, and systems of thought whose existence is linear and more rational. Your view that "justice" must be served properly through a deliberative process is not present in the immediate environment, so it takes a back seat to the discussion. In fact, if a discussion occurs at all it is usually predicated upon the idea that the metaphoric is more stable as a basis for rational living than the metonymic.

To see the earliest discussion of these concepts look to Roman Jakobson's discussion of the two poles of human understanding. His observations were over 100 years ago and form the core of my analysis of human psychology.

AJ