Crime

When most people think of crime, images of terror erupt from their meager minds. They see rape, theft, drug use and abuse, they see evil. The concept of a crime is forever ingrained as a fixed evil - far, distant - sharing something intangible with the famines of the third world in its surreal separation from every day life. Never questioning their own actions, as if anybody is truly free from the only prosecutor that truly matters - themselves.

The belief in a universal power - God, spirits, karma, the District Attorney's Office, is a fundamental safety mechanism that allows humanity to stay adrift in the sea of endless violence. Somebody, somewhere, somehow must not kill, or there will be nothing left to kill in a very short order. Such regulation is non-obvious, and far from clear. After all, nobody wants to admit that we exist solely for the sake of perpetuating our violent behaviors. We do not.

The fatality of the finite mind is a topic most healthy finite minds avoid with a passion. After all, it is not logically possible to imagine what it is like to cease to imagine. It is not like anything, it has no capability to be. Infinity is a folly of mathematicians - it does not exist in the realm of our mind. We can only know the non-infinite. Specifically, when something ceases to be, it is not infinite. That is the beauty of intellect - we cannot know infinity, yet we cannot come to terms with our lack thereof. Everything that is will cease to be, but we're never quite sure where that leaves us.

Unhappiness is a disease that we catch from the outside. True happiness can only come from within. No prison, no punishment is a serious threat to the one who is truly happy. We find that a social threat, and with good reason. As a result, our entire society is built around success and failure, a contrast that perpetuates itself and infects us with sadness. When this contrast is established, it is easy to scare people into compliance with a threat of miserable failure. However, those who shed the idea of failure become enlightened and do not care for our meager threats no more. They are immune to crime, for it does no harm, and they are immune from taking part in crime, for they have no reason.

As a result, it becomes clear that crime is a human concept, a side effect of our fear of those who know no sadness. An attempt to make oneself happier at the expense of others. Punishment breeds criminals and criminals breed punishment.