"Sure," they say, "the kid was abused very young. But he needs to learn some respect. He needs more discipline. They need to be more strict on him and start punishing him with more harsh methods."
This is the traditional view of crime and punishment. That men are free moral actors and that if they act out then they must be met with enough force to realign them with society's interests, or neutralized or obliterated completely. Individual by individual. Perhaps in stable times this principle can hold at least somewhat decently, however misled it is. But these are not those times. It is telling that this principle seems to rear its head more prominently the closer we approach matters with just our emotions.
But all I see when I hear about and interact with damaged people like this is a deeper, more complex, more deliberate force that is running underneath appearances; this degradation cannot be reversed with brute force. Sheer reliance on force displays to me a crude understanding of not only human nature but of the deeper mechanics of how general reality works.
No, damaged people like this seem to me to be part of a sort of social erosion, a geological process who's causal chains extend far beyond mere individuals. And now, as this erosive force is accelerating under the disintegrating effects of a declining empire, and we are seeing more of these damaged individuals even in supposedly stable households, those with less of an understanding of life itself seem to want to apply even more brute force to counteract these disquieting trends, resulting in an aggravation of the problem.
So the less wise of us grow vaguely uneasy when pieces of rock begin to break off of the edifice. But instead of investigating the causes of this erosion, we pick up the crumbling pieces of this foundation and toss them violently aside so that we don't have to worry about them, or we try in vain to shove them back where they came from, even as the fissures splinter their way further upstream.
