2013/04/07

David Hoffman: The key to Armageddon!

While doing research for this article, I began to review some old textbooks from my teaching days, and happened across a theory, initially developed by some sociologists, to explain why and how crime exists: the Social Control Theory. The fundamental underpinnings of the Social Control Theory. The fundamental underpinnings of the Social Control Theory, are that the inclination towards deviance, meaning nonconformity to social norms and crime, is actually a normal part of human nature, consequently crime prevention programs should not focus on why some people become criminals, but instead on why others do not. Critics of the Social Control Theory, contend that its almost fatalistic embrace of biological determinism, not only undermines the concept of free will, it also fails to explain, why people often feel guilty or remorse, after committing antisocial or criminal acts. In response, Social Control theorists argue that, while guilt and remorse may indeed be present during early stages of criminal activity, human beings have a remarkable and, as this article contends, dangerous ability to neutralize any guilt they feel about their wrong doings through the use of rationalizations. Soon I began to realize that the Social Control Theory supports a maxim of mine, that I've frequently proffered in many Pravda Ru articles over the past ten years: Human nature is basically inclined towards evil. Therefore most of the world's conflicts are not caused by clashes between good and evil, but between what degrees of evil are considered to be acceptable, and what degrees are not. There is some historical evidence to support this maxim. America's founding fathers, having fought and won a war against a monarchy, saw how easily evil can manifest, when too much power is concentrated into too few hands. Thus they created a government with three branches, legislative, executive, and judicial in the hope that each branch would check and balance the power of the others. By contrast, theoretical communism was created, on the belief that human nature was basically good, that people would be willing to labor not for their own benefit, but for the betterment of humanity as a whole. That human beings will act communally, and share their resources, would be based on one's need, instead of one's abilities. Logic naturally dictates, that if human beings are fundamentally good, no check and balance system is required. The result is that communist regimes, or perhaps more accurately, regimes that claimed to be communist, produced some of history's worst dictators.  

No comments: