Elena: Posts on crime

I'm including all these posts on crime because I'm interested in all of them although I can't afford them presently. Even the abstracts tell us a lot and when I can concentrate on more thorough research, there'll be a place for them all.

It's interesting to note that criminal organizations choose the same basic structures to function than non criminal organizations: a leader, an inner circle and an outer circle and the "rest of the world" that doesn't matter. If we make the parallel between how social organizations and individuals function, a criminal organization is to society what the malfunctioning of any particular center is to the individual. "Center" as in instinctive, moving, emotional, sexual or intellectual. Organized crime is the equivalent of a cancer in an individual. It uses the same tactics and techniques as those in "legalized" power and acts against the status quo, subverting it.

But it is also interesting to note that for those in power, the masses of people don't matter either. The recent collapse of the economy and its ongoing effects have simply revealed that those in power were working only for themselves and their profits without the slightest concern for the rest. Those in power or the banking elites that are in fact so much in power that the governments bail them out. They were, after all, allowed to exist with their consent.

What I believe we are witnessing is the collapse of legitimate authority and frightening as that might seem to so many people it is not nearly as frightening if we can trust each other and our ability to resolve problems and difficulties as human beings. What is happening is that the possibility of others choosing our destiny is coming to an end whether we like it or not. Each individual is to be confronted with the fact that he and she has to respond for herself and others and not expect the governments to do so. There might be tremendous chaos for some time but we'll be better off when the crisis is over. In the long run what is fearsome to many is that the goods of the world can no longer belong to a few in particular but need to be shared amongst us all if we are to survive. Arms are too lethal for us to use them and although some states might take that road down to destruction, they'll be as damaged by it as the rest. It's another form of suicide.

The question of authority has become the question of who owns what whether they have the authority or not. The economic shift from those in power to those in economic power simply presents a crisis of authority but the fact that the "institutionalized world" is so "dis-institutionalized" reveals that the crisis is not only economic, that is, instinctive, but political, that is, that the sphere of social identity, the "I" of society, is in a deep crisis. People are beginning to realize that no "leader" can respond for the whole of society and that what is required is the consciousness of responsability of each and every individual. Everyone everywhere is so disconnected to the whole that everyone is acting out his and her personal fantasy in isolation. People are living out the "programming" without thinking about it and the fact that it is conducing to destruction not only of the Earth as a livable planet but of human beings as humans. The drug cartels, the way wars are perpetrated from a helicopter full of military shooting civilians, shows how, at both ends of the spectrum, those in power have absolutely no human conscience of what they are actually doing. Both feel equally justified to kill innocent people for their personal advantage.

The programming is: individualism: you must fend for yourself and only yourself and as long as you can do that, you're O.K. You can have and do everything you can as long as you can get away with it at no matter whose cost. That is the dark side of individualism. The light side is that each individual is mature enough to care and protect himself, that individuals don't have to depend on the state or family to support themselves. That the world is an open venue full of opportunities for individuals able to take them.

But what we don't seem to have taken into consideration is that the success of a few independent individuals in the capitalist system is the exception to the rule and not the rule. They are the "gaps" that the system cannot control and as such they are used to justify the system but the system is actually against the individuals en masse. Nature acts under the same laws, only one sperm out of millions reaches the goal but human beings can act counter to nature and benefit the whole if the few don't have the power to appropriate what belongs to the whole. To act counter to nature does not mean to act against nature, it means to act not like animals or cells but like human beings.