My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system. Though there are always going to be people that just don’t give a fuck.
My feelings move towards the ultimate responsibility is on society (all of us) for not creating a better system. Though there are always going to be people that just don’t give a fuck.
A little bit of each. Society ultimately structures how we interact with each other, it creates the motivations and incentives that we work under. We all want money because that’s what society has told us we need in order to live the kinds of lives that society tells us are worth living. This creates the incentive that money is more important than almost anything else in life, it can be worth more than other people’s lives. Then the individual makes these sorts of decisions everyday, “What am I willing to do to get more money?” You’ve got some people willing to injure, kill, and/or destroy in order to get more money to live lives of luxury. You’ve got billionaires and executives willing to make thousands/millions of peoples’ lives horrible and suck up every available dollar just so they can increase the digits on their net worth in their eternal pissing match with each other.
Ultimately it’s “society”, but who decides what “society” will prioritize? We’re all wrapped up in all of this, but we’re also all prisoners to it as well, so I’m not sure how you can separate out the individual from society. Certainly the people at the top play a big part in the whole thing, and they don’t really have much incentive to change anything, since it’s all working pretty well from their point of view.
I don’t want money because of some illusion about what others expect my life to resemble; I want it because it’s the most effective way to meet my basic needs of food, housing, and healthcare.
I like this viewpoint. Out of curiosity what would your response be if someone asserted that individuals shape a society and as such crime is the fault of individual for either failing to align with society or failing to influence society to change thus making the crime unnecessary/or non-existent?
Individuals shape society to a degree, but alot of society has been imposed on us from the get-go. We were born into this world and our morals are drilled into us by our families, our schools, our churches, and our social circles. An individual can attempt to contradict that, but they’re facing a steep hill to climb to affect change. Society changes super slowly and it kind of just moves on its own from sheer historical inertia at this point, so just because an individual wants to change something doesn’t mean they’ll ever be able to get enough momentum going to get it changed. There’s definitely alot of crimes that should be unnecessary, like “vice crimes” where it’s mostly just people enjoying themselves. I was just reading another thread where somebody had asked about “How would you survive if you were homeless with no job, family, or means of support?” or something similar. And one of the best comments was from someone who went through listing alot of the survival tips they had for what you needed to do to live as a homeless person in America. Some of the tips seemed to rely on crime (shoplifting), people in extreme situations like that have to do whatever they can to survive. I think without a proper support system, we as a society are forcing people into situations like that where they don’t feel like they have an option. If people have to choose between committing a crime and eating or starving, they will do what they need to and that’s more society’s fault there.
That’s in extreme cases (though not as extreme a case anymore as the price of living has gotten so much more expensive lately). For other crimes, like spouses murdering each other or high-income executives committing fraud or politicians doing bribes or whatever, those crimes may be more on the individual. Certainly society influences these things (like high-stakes marriage relationships or company stock prices or whatever the crime is about), but often people in those situations probably have actual choices in the matter, they’ve specifically chosen to do a crime with full knowledge of what the consequences are.
Well put! Thanks for the thoughtful comments