Crime is our failure as a society

I woke up this morning to the tragic news of a mass shooting at a Brooklyn Subway Station this morning. My heart truly goes out to all the innocent people involved — I'm sure it's an extremely impactful and destabilizing experience to be involved in such a terrifying ordeal. But the tragedy doesn’t end with the physical harm and emotional trauma directly caused to the victims, because little substantial will change about how our societies operate deep down to prevent these kinds of events from continuing to occur.

A shooting sends a chill down America's collective spine and makes everyone feel just a little less safe walking in public, but it's also demonstrative of the sad state of affairs in our country today in that these events merely reignite the same old debates about crime and gun control and end up only acting as fodder for hurling at political opponents. Republicans will use this event as an opportunity to denigrate their Democratic opponents as being "soft on crime", and Democrats will once again try to blame gun violence on weak gun control laws, as if the goal should be to limit access to weapons, rather than understand why someone would use a gun in such a manner in the first place.

The reality is that almost no one is looking in the right place because people's understanding of causality is so shallow. When most people see a person commit a crime, their only thought is to label them as a criminal and see it as a problem with that individual — as if they are an unexpected oddity of the system. Few take the time to reflect on why the individual decided to open fire on strangers in a subway. This mentality is reflective of the growing problem with our cultural obsession with individualism.

Individualism assumes people are wholly in control of their own fate, and this shapes our institutions and social policies in harmful ways.

I will write on the failures of individualism in depth in another article, but I'll offer a primer here for the uninitiated. If you are not familiar with individualism, you may have hopped over to read the Wikipedia article on it to become more informed, and from that you might be inclined to believe it sounds like a reasonable position. An ideology that "emphasizes the intrinsic worth of the individual"? Sounds good to me. However, this description neatly and conveniently sidesteps the primary criticism of individualism which is that it is a philosophy in which one believes that only oneself and one's own desires matter, and the needs and desires of everyone else are secondary.

Roger Scranton, in A Dictionary of Political Thought, offers a similar description: "The attitude which sees the individual human person, his rights, and his needs, as taking precedence over all collectives (whether family, corporation, civil society, or state), in moral and political decision making".^[1] Nearly 200 years ago, at a time when individualism was a nascent ideology in America, political philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville already saw it as a growing threat. He described individualism as "a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."^[2] He said that eventually, Americans would "form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their destiny is in their own hands" and this isolation would ultimately be our undoing. He could not have been more prescient.

Indeed, one of the biggest issues with the individualistic mentality is that it assumes everyone is wholly in control of their fate. In other words, it fails to appreciate the larger-order, systemic influences on people that shape their decisions, actions, and ultimately their lives. Where many see a gunman as a deranged criminal, an aberrance in an otherwise healthy system, I see a gunman for what he or she is: a byproduct of the system, a system that routinely allows people to fall through the cracks and become the next criminal on the news. No one is born a criminal; no one starts off wanting to be a killer, or wanting to destroy the lives of those around them. People only end up that way because of the various influences in their lives — parents, peers, institutional pressures, cultural pressures — that we are not paying close enough attention to. When you're told the world is a dirty, competitive place and you can only rely on yourself, when you're surrounded by systemic and racial injustice, when you're backed into a corner financially, when you're working day in and day out in a system that is designed to keep you in debt to enrich others, when you're not trained how to properly handle or express your emotions, when you grew up with years of abuse or neglect because your own parents and peers were themselves not given the skills to be a good parent or friend, when you are told your entire life that you alone are responsible for your fate but no matter what you do you feel stuck… it's no wonder we see people lash out. It's no wonder we see crime increasing.

Individualism fails to appreciate that it is our responsibility as a society to shape our institutions so that they create the kind, loving people we want to live with. Our schools focus on churning out the next generation of wage slaves to feed our capitalistic, consumerist economy, but perhaps we should recognize that it's far more important that we educate people on how to be a good person, how to handle and express one's emotions, how to communicate effectively, etc. Similarly, our prisons shouldn't be seen as places to punish people but as places to rehabilitate people — to help people understand why we think whatever it is that got them in prison is wrong and to provide them with the support (financial, mental, emotional, etc.) they need so they don't feel the compulsion to do it again. And yet, because the individualistic mindset sees the individual as solely responsible for his or her fate, people view prison as punishment and thus we don't design our prisons to help people, we design our prisons to control people. And so guess what happens when most people leave prison? In America the recidivism rate is around 50%, which means 50% of people who leave prison commit further crimes. This is an absolute tragedy in itself, but it speaks to a deep failure in understanding: A failure to understand why people commit crimes, and a failure to understand our responsibility as a society to help show people a better path, and this failure can be laid at the feet of individualism. This mindset which shapes so much of our social policy is why our societies continue to churn out people who engage in criminal behaviors, and it won't stop until we accept that it is our individual responsibility to look out for the greater good, rather than just ourselves.

There is no concept of "the greater good" in individualism, which is why crime exists.

Perhaps the most pernicious by-product of individualism is not that it shifts blame to the individual for how they turn out, but that it dismisses the value of the collective. In an individualist society, it is assumed that when taken together the actions of every individual looking out for his or herself will result in favorable outcomes for humanity. However, we can clearly see this is not the case. Whether you realize it or not, the way the world is today — that is largely the result of individualism. The gross inequality, abject poverty, mediocre healthcare, political stagnation, unending world conflicts, the growing threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and numerous other issues — these are all issues that are the result of a system in which the focus is on everyone only looking out for themselves and/or their family and close friends, rather than the greater good. When people only care about themselves, it's easy to see how someone would have no issue in hurting other people, whether directly by shooting into a crowded subway, or by exploiting others financially and economically.

If instead we fostered a wiser and healthier mindset, the mindset in which you care about the well-being of the collective before ourselves — as we love to portray in films with our heroes making a great sacrifice for the greater good — crime would be non-existent. This mindset comes by fostering the empathy inside all of us, a mindset many (but not all) have experienced in a very local way vis a vis love. If you've ever truly loved someone, you know what I'm talking about. The hallmark of a deep, loving relationship is that you care about that person more than yourself and you elevate their needs above your own. It is this feeling of unconditional love applied not just to our family and friends, but universally that is what we are so desperately missing in our society today. What's important to recognize here is that it's not that you have an obligation to put anyone else's needs before your own, but simply that you ought to in every decision you make consider the needs of everyone rather than merely your own, and in doing so everyone — including you — will be better off.

It is especially evident in the case of crime that we cannot continue to behave as though we are the sole engineers of our lives and maintain the mindset that all that matters is our individual desires. In order to eliminate crime, we must recognize that it is a deeply rooted systemic problem, solved only by relentlessly advocating for a society that supports everyone’s needs. We must not settle for band-aid solutions like increased policing or gun control out of fear and uncertainty of criminals who are simply a byproduct of our society’s failures, and we must not return to our individual lives hoping that the rest of society will sort itself out. For the betterment of everyone — and perhaps even for the very survival of our species — it is critical we identify and address the problem at its root.