If I kill you over a $2K catalytic converter, my sanity is gone.
I could never sleep at night without thinking about what I have done.'
A life is worth a lot more than $2k for my sanity.
If I kill you over a $2K catalytic converter, my sanity is gone.
I could never sleep at night without thinking about what I have done.'
A life is worth a lot more than $2k for my sanity.
I was once beaten senseless by a group of 3 young men when I decided to take an early-morning walk to get some smokes from the store down the way, in a sleepy small city in Ohio.
There was nothing that I was doing that was wrong in any way. I was quietly minding my own business when they came up from behind me with other ideas and one of them hit me in the side of my face, from behind, with an intensity that I'd never really experienced before in all of my years.
I lost hours of my memory and years of my mental health. I gained years of occasional intense neck pain that consistently put my mind in very dark places, and thousands of dollars of medical bills.
They gained two unopened packs of Camels and the pocket knife that I apparently failed to effectively utilize. I still had my wallet and my phone.
The police did nothing of any productive impact. A report was taken, and it was taken poorly. When 3 guys were arrested a couple of weeks later for robbing someone with a baseball bat and I recognized their pictures, they didn't care. I walked the local law-enforcement ladder all the way up to the city prosecutor, and also through parallels in the sheriff's department.
Nothing was productively done on my behalf.
It made me feel so angry and powerless. A follow-up that I requested came along with the cop that took the first report, and resulted in such profound and obtuse stonewalling that I became tremendously and irreverently furious. I left the room, while demanding from the other side of a wall that he get the fuck out of my apartment.
This all conspired to make it clear that it was my cross to bear. Nobody of any influence was going to help me along the way.
(I'd probably have a very different story to tell if I'd shot the attackers all dead, but I don't have that story. I was not equipped to do that so there is no direct comparison here for me to make. It is definitely my hope that I never have any opportunities to make such a comparison.)
Interesting dichotomy. I think a lot of people would have no problem.
I think I would consider myself in that group.
I think some lives are worth negative, and everyone is better off with them dead.
It's not just $2k lost here. There's a lot to be said about the immeasurable value of a high-trust society.
As another commenter said: It's incredibly easy to not get shot; don't burglarize someone's home the same way you wouldn't jump in front of a moving train.
Holding the threat of death over people isn't the way to a "high-trust society." Maybe you think it's the way to something similar, but you have to give up the word "trust" because it doesn't apply here. If the only reason I think a man isn't going to rob me is because I will shoot him if he does, I don't trust that man.
A society which only has low crime because everyone is able to use lethal force to defend themselves and their property isn't one I would call higher "trust" than one that maintains the same crime levels without that threat.
I think that is the wrong way to think about it.
The end state is you can trust others because nobody even wants to or considers it.
Punishing violators is being proposed as how to build the norm that no one wants to steal.