Every day evil in the form of criminals, bombings and shootings has the ability to take away the lives of innocent strangers going about their day. Evil is not intimidated by laws, power of officials, loud demonstrations and harsh arguments online. All evil cares about is completing the mission being set out to accomplish whatever the weather. It is literally realising the quote "actions speak louder than words". On a calm Friday afternoon (19th January 2017), a male in his 20s deliberately drove into pedestrians on Bourke St and erratically doing burnouts near Flinders Street Station. 6 pedestrians including a young child were among the deceased and many others were seriously injured and psychologically traumatised and scarred for life. As usual, the response from social media and news outlets is nothing short of rapid and our feelings for the victims are no doubt quite sorrowful. Before I proceed I want to pay my condolences to the families and friends of the deceased, I’m truly sorry for your loss and I wish you lots of love. Whilst everyone are ferociously and illogically debating on the comment sections regarding the reasons for this terrible senseless act, including the person’s motive, position in society, mental condition and irrelevant links to his cultural background and on another matter, the actions of emergency and police services, I’m more concerned about matters far more sophisticated than a sole act of evil that inflicted upon the most liveable city in the world, Melbourne. Why does evil exist in human society? Why do random people have to suffer as a result of evil? How does natural selection choose which people specifically will commit crime and acts of evil?
In this day and age of serious drama and heartbreak, I wish all the superheroes from Marvel films like Superman and Batman, and all the Pokemon I caught on my 3DS weren’t fictional. It would be handy for them to assist our emergency and police authorities to ensure the protection and safety of every innocent well-behaved citizen in this society. Although we don’t personally know the deceased, we instinctively feel patronised and saddened to see them unconscious unable to move. This is our human instincts taking over our minds. When one of our species falls to its haunches, we do everything in our power to save them before we realise they are gone. When they suffer, we also suffer. We feel sad and sorrowful then frustrated, angered, anxious, hurtful and confused. Initially we ponder why fate chose to end the life of the person walking nearby instead of ourselves? Unfortunately no one can answer this question because the way chance, odds and probability functions on Earth is unpredictable no matter how mathematical and analytical we get because we illustrate everything is a possibility but not a certainty. Only the outcome that has already occurred confirms a possible event a certainty but by then we realise it’s already too late to save their life. I think that humans naturally empathise with every other human when they are suffering or experiencing the brink of death. When you are born as a human, you naturally seek to make as many connections as you can from your parents, grandparents, siblings to your peers at school in order to stimulate the hypothalamus in our brain to release Oxytocin that exerts happiness. It may be that evolution has taught us to believe that connections is one of the key factors of survival. When you’re lost, injured, abandoned, or unable to solve a problem, it is only a matter of time that someone within a crowd of anonymous people will come to your aid and then provide the necessary tools to resolve the issue you’re experiencing whether it be physical, mental, economic, academic or social. However, if they don’t have the skills to help you they will take note of your problems and will immediately bring up their connections who may have the expertise and experience to resolve your problem once and for all.
This might anger a few religious figures but I don’t believe blaming the death of someone on God’s hatred and random selection of a new victim is a plausible reason for why evil spreads terror and fear to the people around them. I feel that those who think God is the cause of everything on Earth is a fiction for anti-science groups to passionately believe in. This is what the earliest Christians want people in future generations to think as an alternative to science and logical facts. Science and technology back in those days weren’t as developed and weren’t generally accepted by society as true due to lack of understanding and the shabby apparatus early scientists had in their labs to prove the many theories of the universe. I also notice everyone is criticising Australia’s justice system as being lenient and not as intimidating as other capital punishments around the world like the death penalty by sitting on the electric chair (USA), facing the firing squad (Indonesia & China), toxic injection and hanging. It’s understandable that with a person having the adrenaline rush and motivation to inflict evil within their society, everyone will seek to eliminate the threat as soon as possible. The threat doesn’t just affect whether we will live tomorrow or not, but it also affects your mentality of whether you're feeling safe within a society expected to protect you from any danger, and the arduous processes of changing your casual lifestyle habits that follows in order take into the possibility of evil arising into account. By this stage we begin to lose trust with the authorities who we thought have the power and knowledge to remove evil from society. This may explain why we are inherently selfish and natural selection designed us as individuals to enter a competition to be the fittest without our signature of approval. I feel what evolution is telling us that our lives are the most important things to us. You, yourself are the most valuable treasure on Earth. Your life is priceless and invaluable and your experiences cannot be created then sold to social media without risk. If you feel putting a bullet to the head of an evil person or banishing any killers even if it's your own race and culture behind bars for eternity is the solution to eliminate all crime, I’m sorry to say but that only solves half the problem. In jails people don’t just rot and become unhygienic and overly smelly, but you aren’t aware of the mental affects these jails have on people, let alone our worst criminals.
I watched a video from VSauce called “Isolation - Mind Field (Episode 1)", where Michael Stevens himself risks his life to take shelter in a small room for 72 consecutive hours. Although the atmosphere within the room is not as dark and stinky as a normal jail, but the conditions of a locked door, no windows, restricted space, limited water and food supply, a toilet and a small bed form the basis of a criminal’s new home. You might say that all criminals already have a mental illness and deserved to die no matter the cause. The reality is that criminals will start to experience boredom which to you people sounds like nothing but as a matter of fact, it is the sign their mental condition much worsen if nothing is being acted upon. With no time-keeping devices, your brain will start to guess when perceiving time and it often gets it wrong. Furthermore this environment of isolation removes many of the things that helped stimulate our brain keeping it interested, alive, excited and healthy like our phones, Internet, our friends’ smiling faces and the books we read. However if all this stimulation is removed, it won’t be long before criminals start to become restless and begin to self-stimualte themselves with things they previously experienced before. It is only a matter of time before criminals will begin to run out of ideas to make their lives somewhat interesting in a terrible situation and they will begin to feel disgusted and miserable. This is a sign criminals will gradually experience brain damage and there is evidence to suggest that jail sentences make criminals worse off than they started mentally. The symptoms of anxiety, depression, hallucinations and schizophrenia will begin to exaggerate with cognitive dissonance, decreasing sense of wellbeing, loss of awareness and euphoria. All this happens after 3 days, now compound that to years or a life sentence (100+ years). Imagine what these people will be like once they do come out of prison. With every slam of the judge's hammer (gavel) on the sounding block, we waste countless opportunities to reform or cleanse a criminal’s deluded vision of fulfilling life in a society he was born in. Instead of exiling them, why not give them a second chance at life? I don’t mean release them on bail, what I really mean is to help them distinguish between right and wrong. Allow them to learn the basics of survival for themselves, let them laugh at themselves and feel shame and regret at their criminal actions, give them the wake up call they have been dreading to find. Community service in rural and jungle areas around Africa like South Africa, Kenya and Uganda are the best places to start rehabilitation and the path to reforming and polishing up their lives. Although society has rehabilitation programs and chemical treatments available to our mentally ill criminals, I don’t think they are just as effective in curing the poison that is clogging up the logical regions of their brains.
This is where I start to enter treacherous debating territory. Even though you don’t know them personally, but critically judging a criminal’s position in society based on the harmful and dangerous actions they inflicted is not adequate to label them as evil. Do you think they can abide by the rules and satisfy your expectations of how youths should progress through adolescence the same way you experienced it? The truth is no one on Earth is born evil. No one is born with the thoughts to make everyone around them suffer because babies don’t have the conscience to think. As you grow up from birth, your subconscious receives sensory information of the world around you through your eyes, mouth, ears, nose, fingertips of your hands and balls of your feet. As an innocent young child, you perceive everything your parents and peers share with you as crucial to survival and fulfilment of life. As children, you may think that everything your parents, relatives and peers share with you in the form of personal stories is right and you believe following the same pathway as your parents will guarantee you the success they achieved. However what they don’t tell you is that your parents and peers may need to kill their opponents in order to achieve their dream goals like building a financial empire, a legacy for people to remember or forcing people to share their opinions and views and then perceive them as correct without question. Most children in their youth don’t have the brain capacity and awareness to distinguish persuasion from logic which may explain the presence of food advertising in children’s TV shows. We cannot change these natural psychological processes that occur privately in the family home. Given the possible circumstances of what may come about of future adolescents, using their parents’ or peers’ personal experience as a fortune-teller for their children’s future is no guarantee that they will follow the same pathway as their ancestors and/or peers because we don’t know the limits of their sense of logic and reasoning and awareness of the situation they are entering. Only they, the children themselves, can control what they want their future to be. In reality, you are helpless but to sit back and let fate do its job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TyMygZ4G_s
Here is a video of featuring an American judge coincidentally recognising a burglar standing before the judge.
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