Whatever else it may be, crime is mostly neither glamorous nor mysterious. A quotient of antisocial behavior has figured in every known society. In the Denmark of the human soul there is something eternally rotten. Some have peered into the dark heart of criminality and found, not inscrutable evil or anguished reaction to an oppressive system, but untrammeled self-interest. “All the lofty talk about the ‘root causes’ of crime,” writes social thinker Thomas Sowell, “fail[s] to notice the obvious: People commit crimes because they are people—because they are innately selfish and do not care how their behavior affects other people, unless they have been raised to behave otherwise or unless they fear the criminal justice system.”
In his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions, Sowell identified this outlook as part of the “constrained vision” of society and human nature, in contrast with the “unconstrained vision,” whose adherents find it hard to fathom how anyone could commit a crime “without some special cause at work, if only blindness.” But perpetrators always have causes aplenty: profit, prestige, revenge, assertion of self. In the true-crime classic In Cold Blood, a quadruple murder in Kansas baffles local law enforcement: the heinous crime seems to have no motive. In fact, the motive is simple. The killers break in because they believe the man of the house has a safe holding $10,000 or more; finding none, they murder him and his family in anger, and to leave no witnesses.
People who subscribe to the unconstrained vision argue that crime is, if not exactly unnatural, at least rare when unprovoked. In truth, however, natural incentives to commit crimes abound. In the absence of counter-incentives, they are widely acted upon. Crime remains, indeed, eternally tempting, taking many forms; and few crimes are truly victimless. In what kind of society do we want to live? One where order matters? Or one where, cloaked in faddish language, wearing the righteous mask of reform, lawlessness reigns?
R&I – TP
ConservativeChick
Article URL : https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-element-of-crime-part-two/