fatvegan

Libby, Tom and I watched Wolf Creek the other night. It was really quite brilliant. Although I'm still not sure that I'd tell anyone to watch it. It could be the best Australian film, and the best horror movie definitely. That I've seen at least. Although it's neck and neck with The Proposition, which is far more worth watching.

It has made me think a lot about stuff. Stuff like evil, and punishment and pain. I read a bit about Ivan Milat and the Snowtown killings (not that the people were killed in Snowtown). People really do some profoundly awful things to each other. I thought about institutionalised violence, like capital punishment. It repulses me, but it's in a completely different league to the kinds of things that happened to those people. I think I can understand why people want there to be good people and bad people. If those men are just more extreme versions of ourselves, the world begins to seem unworkably terrible. A whole lot of things like lynch mobs and assassination, which normally seem like the worst side of humanity, suddenly take on a legitimacy.

The solution obviously isn't punishment. Even if it made the families feel better, or whatever, it's not actually solving the problem or even targeting it. Punishment is about socially optimal behaviour, not individually optimal behaviour. It's not trying to save the few individuals from horrible suffering. It's trying to ensure that abuses of power like that don't become the default. They will still happen, but they won't last very long, and they won't come to dominate.

I wonder if it's simply about engagement. Engagement means there are fewer alienated people floating about. And it means that the people who just have messed up DNA, or however you explain people who appear to be unreachable, will be identified before things go really wrong. Or at least they will some of the time. It's that same arguments as for reducing pedophilia. Eliminating opportunities is the best way of reducing all sorts of crimes. Ivan Milat must have wandered off a lot, over many years and no one even noticed.

I would be willing to make sacrifices in my own life, and my own right to privacy, if it meant we could reduce the likelihood of that sort of crappiness happening. I would be willing to spend my life in a protective sort of institution on false charges, if it meant that someone else was there too unable to do that kind of harm.

We need to blur the lines between punitive custody and protective custody. We need to reduce the moral costs of putting the wrong person in "jail", although not necessarily put more people there.

How would people feel about wearing locators? If you trusted your government enough, and were willing enough to give up privacy and anonymity, you could basically eliminate serious crimes like this. Do we say that it happens so rarely that we don't need to worry? Or that it is an overreaction? Do people have the right to be anonymous enough to be able to kill people over many years without anyone realising? I really don't know at all.

I think the right to privacy is a new idea, that would have been completely foreign to human societies in the past. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's necessary. Maybe we've come to simply believe it's necessary from our long history of bad governments. We seem to have some interesting laws, like the right to bear arms and the right to privacy, that are basically there because we don't trust that the system will work.

Perhaps in a 100 years, after 100 years of good government (if we're that lucky) we'll completely change our attitudes.