Joshua Roberts

Environment versus genetic predisposition, is there any doubt that ultimately its like 90% conditioning? I tend to favor the school of operant conditioning as a framework for behaviorism – while there are an exceptional few who tend to do what perhaps their genes suggest, it seems to me that the environment of the individual is paramount.

What is our criminal justice system today if it is not a pit into which we throw the wretched of the earth? The one’s whom our machine-society finds no use for, the one’s who are so systemically crippled with regard to their behavior that we can find no recourse but to incarcerate them? Was not the stated goal of our criminal justice system penalization, does it make sense under any other dynamism? Is warehousing people an acceptable methodology for treating of one’s fellow humans? Or is that merely a weak ass excuse of a solution for a society which makes people useful and then uses them up when dealing with those whom it cannot form into round pegs for round holes or who are so broken with regard to their acceptable operational parameters that we must sequester them out rightly?

But ask yourself if penalization or, more properly, Reform is being achieved by the system. Recidivism rates alone across the board as well as a statistical breakdown of population, income and educational access against incarceration or arrest rates indicates that my suggestion about environment is accurate. And yet there is still so much debate! One might ask why there is any debate at all, but allow me to dispel that myth immediately: there is still debate because it is forcibly injected by a culture of domination for which the criminal justice system, precisely in its current form, is the surest hedge and whip against an unruly populace.

What is needed for the criminal in the vast majority of cases is a change of climate, a change of condition and a change of company. But in most cases this approach is adopted far too late in the life of a person and is therefore inefficient. Would that we saw it as our duty to take care of Every Human Being Born, we might avoid the glut of crime. And yet the people accept the forced insinuations, like mind control subjects that passively accept the forced injection of psychological arguments that hold no water. Well, I’m not going to leave you alone, you’ve got to get mad.

One might suggest that there is a tendency to ruin people of a certain type, an intentional system of ruination aimed at those who m ay one day pose a threat.

But enough digression, my goal is to get you to gentle thy disposition, to accept all humans as being part of your tribe and yet to reject the form of globalization put forth by corporate capitalism. Capitalism is just a system, and some form of it must exist yet for we are not sophisticated enough to do away with it, just as some form of metaphysics must exist yet for we are not strong enough on the average to do away with the psychological need for gods and afterworlds. Even I, a quantum dualist, have some faith in a unified field whereby one might argue the existence of a sort of “over mind” that could be likenable to the concept deity.

So when you see them hauling away an outspoken youth, who has been arrested for saying things that people do not want to hear, remember he is your son or brother. When you see a person commit an act of barbarous inhumanity, remember they are yet human, and reflect on the nature and condition of our civilization that has produced that person before you jump to the conclusion (as if there were a mat with squares on it that you could Jump to) that they are broken and useless. Ask yourself how the pot was fired, and before you doubt the clay, the composition of its substance ask yourself if it is perhaps not the handling of the potter or the structure of the kiln in which it was fired.