I believe in rehabilitative justice first and foremost because I was in a cult.
Yeah, I talk a lot about my liberal pacifist upbringing and my community’s condemnation of Middle East invasion shaping my relationship to the Evil Other. All of that is true and salient. But the most formative element by far was the experience of being seduced by incorrect beliefs and finding my way out the other side.
(decently long effortpost below cut)
I used to be a fascist and endorse this post.
People, even very smart people, believe in those kinds of lies because it is what seems to make sense at the time, and various social conditions can make people more vulnerable to them.
If that figure is to be believed, that’s about ten per cent of the country’s population dedicated to drug dealing, extortion, and mayhem—so what do you do? Again and again, I heard the same solution being offered, sometimes blithely, sometimes through jaws clenched in rage: kill them all. Kill their girlfriends and their families. Kill their children. One man apologized as he proposed this solution—he found it unseemly to be advocating genocide—but most did not. One young woman, soft-spoken, exceedingly polite, detailed her life in a gang-ridden neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital. It was one terrifying encounter after another, each delivering the same dispiriting lesson: she was helpless in the face of the gangs and their malevolent power. She had done everything she could to avoid them, and still they found ways to control her life. Her father was forced to pay extortion money to one of the gangs—she wouldn’t say which one. By the end of our conversation, she was almost weeping with fury. “I’m a Christian,” she told me, “but those people aren’t my brothers. I would burn them all.”
(Quote from this article.)
In my country of birth, many people have given up on rehabilitation and want to try death squads, mass executions, and dictatorship instead. I was one of them, and so were my parents.
Sacrificing the idea of mercy and rehabilitation pushed us, and many others, to accept such authoritarian and dangerous measures for the sake of punishing bad guys. This was all driven largely by anger, empathy for the victims, and a desire for justice.
At the same time, it’s important to note that I changed. I’m as far as you can get from pro-genocide now, and I’m not a special case either. People can change.
It’s not easy if they have become fanatical and suspicious of information that contradicts their beliefs and what they have observed about reality, but it can be done, and I would say that it is the best outcome.
Thanks for this. I find that having undergone a big change in beliefs really boosts a person’s epistemic humility. You’re a great example of that.