On Crime, Laziness and Means, Motive, and Opportunity and Rationality

Life Lessons, Truthiness Comments Off on On Crime, Laziness and Means, Motive, and Opportunity and Rationality

“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” -Abraham Lincoln

One may say humans are inherently lazy and when faced with obstylces we tend to take the lesser path. This reasoning comes from the fact that we evaluate things according to their benefit to us. When reason fails, passion takes over, a lower brain function. Passion drives us more than anything else, and yet, it requires this passion to push us past the the “bleh” stage.., the Heart we so often claim someone needs. It turns out with a lot of things we do, means, motive, and opportunity can account for much of it, including destructive tendencies.

As any criminalist knows, the means, motive, and opportunity tree is necessary for crime. And passion accounts for 1 half of the “murder” double. Passion also accounts for 1/2 of the suicide duality. Both groups of death are directly decreased by removing means, weather that is a bridge barrier as over the duke Ellington in Washington, or changing to cleaner forms of gas as in Briton or removing guns from the home, all these examples have clear and unambiguous empirical evidence that even about killing, humans can be lazy. The instant anger or pain that causes decisions to turn on a time can’t be stopped, but the lethality of action can be driven down.

What about the “they will find another way argument?” Well, for suicides there is even greater evidence this is not the case.

In the late 1970s, Seiden set out to test the notion of inevitability in jumping suicides. Obtaining a Police Department list of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 – an astonishing 515 individuals in all – he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently “completed.” His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.
NYtimes, 7/6/2008 

90% of the people didn’t try again. That’s is fairly signgficatnt. I bet not allot of people get as angry as they did before to try and attack someone. The means, motive, opportunity triangle is prevalent in other crime also. OTher studies on theft are just as glaring. Petty theft is an impulsive crime. But unlike a passion filled act, (passion first, action second) it sometimes generates passion, when the opportunity presents itself. Means and motive are actually generated at the instant of the action. One may steal a wallet, not because one needed the money, but because one could in essence, shoplifting is often for the thrill, the passion.
What stops any of us from doing the things we do? Mortality, our sense and society’s sense of what’s acceptable. It creates the rationality and reason to ignore our base impulsiveness and think with higher brain functions. In this i suppose it’s good we are lazy and chose the second path because we are smart. We evaluate in almost all our decisions the triangle of action, and selfishly relate it back to ourselves.
I imagine we like to settle for second best, because we forget the past, and we think too much about the here and now.   Wouldn’t it be sad if it’s our higher brain functions that keeps us this way? This does not give me much hope for the future.

 

OceansOfThought @ July 7, 2008