Hopefully posting video later today or tomorrow! Here’s some..

Hopefully posting video later today or tomorrow! Here’s some thoughts I have on how we should continue to advocate for prisoners rights. I send books to people in prison and they actually read them. I like to believe people shouldn’t be defined by their worst mistake and they are capable of changing and becoming better. Feel free to like all my posts to increase engagement 💕 🌟 In The Murderer Next Door: Why The Mind Is Designed to Kill, David Buss explores the evolutionary origins of the human instinct to murder. From where do these homicidal impulses evolve, and what purpose did they serve our ancestors? In the past, murder was the solution to certain adaptive problems — in the evolutionary arms race, it’s not simply about who survives but who reproduces and allows their genetics to flourish past their lifespan. One psychological adaptation men developed was aggression and jealousy in response to the prospect of infidelity or mate poaching. Violence can act as a deterrent to a potentially unfaithful lover or the sexual advances of a reluctant suitor. Similarly, women too have evolved certain psychological mechanisms to counter male violence such as fear and intuition of a possible threat. An example of this is the fear of strangers. Although this fear may be unfounded as most murders are carried out by an individual known to the victim rather than a complete stranger. Modern society has changed the way we interact with the world and other people, and so we have not quite genetically adapted to these new developments and still maintain much of the same instinctual psychological mechanisms inherited by our ancestors. Every individual is capable of murder, we like to believe that these homicidal feelings are limited only to a “crazy” minority but that is not the case. Most people admitted they would have acted on these murderous impulses if there were no chances of getting caught. In our ancestral environment, there were no court of law abdicating justice and punishments. We have descended from the violent individuals who survived and reproduced at the expense of those unlucky few who became genetic dead-ends. Step fathers have the highest probability of murdering their step children, which makes evolutionary sense if we were to view this in terms of them eliminating another’s offspring in favor of their own. Homicide and homicidal ideation was an evolved psychological adaptation that aided our ancestors’ survival whilst living in a hostile natural environment and socializing among antagonistic neighbors. In reference to human cruelty: calling certain individuals “evil” or “monsters” establishes a moral distance between us and them, “otherizes” them. There’s also a contradiction in this attribution of evil — for a person to be evil, they must be morally culpable, as in they made a decision to do this act and are therefore responsible. However, along with interpreting the criminal in terms of agency, they attribute “evil” to be at the core of their essence, they’re viewed as innately evil, beyond saving. Basically, the individual is both bad because they made a decision by their own free will to do such AND there is evilness inherent in their inner being, and so for this reason, we should not have mercy on them because there’s no use attempting to change someone who is fundamentally wicked. We justify our actions of violence toward punishing these individuals by claiming retribution or self-defense. Moral agency is attributed to this individual YET they ascribe evilness to being part of their nature, as well. As I mentioned before, this is an example of the fundamental attribution bias where our judgments of an individual’s behavior and whether it is characteristic of them is dependent on if we like them or not. People call these individuals evil or a monster in order to avoid their own demons, they prefer the illusion that monsters are other people, not them, never them. They refuse to understand these individuals because it may force them to face these aspects of themselves. Labeling a person as “evil” is basically legitimatizing their dehumanization, thus providing a moral rationality to annihilate it without guilt. People refuse to understand these prisoners’ circumstances because it would provide a rationale for it, which they could then see themselves in and that is what they do anything to avoid, they don’t want to see their own flaws — they just highlight them in others and claim it’s something that affects them, not outstanding citizens like us. They are the monsters, not us humans. I can understand these people because I can understand the same in me. Murder and cruelty are trademarks of humanity, we like to say it’s just monsters that are capable of such things but that is only to give us this false peace of mind. Regular citizens in Nazi Germany committed state sanctioned atrocities, which I’m sure they wouldn’t have called “evil” at the time. Hannah Ardent covered this which she refers to as the “banality of evil”. When Eichmann was placed on trial for the Nazi atrocities, she was shocked by how normal looking he was, there was no demonic horns sticking out, no signs of evilness, just an average guy you would see at a pub or something, “I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous”. The question she posed was whether people can commit evil deeds without themselves being evil. Everyone is capable of committing these same evil atrocities, they are in brazen denial to believe otherwise. The fact that they wish for retribution and punishment instead of compassion and rehabilitation demonstrates what type of people they are, they are no better than these “monsters” they condemn. No one is beyond saving or beyond forgiveness. We cannot comprehend what we would have done in their position because we really don’t know. Our judgements are inevitably filtered through the biases of our personal history and so we have no way of truly understanding what we would have done in a hypothetical scenario we project ourselves into. I know there have been many moments in my life where I felt all hope was lost and given the proper resources, I would have been equally capable of atrocious actions. Why is it so hard for people to see certain groups of people as people deserving of the same human rights? Here’s a quotation from another book titled the Anatomy of Evil, “but with aberrant killers, people resist the concept of a shared humanness. That’s because US and THEM is far more comfortable. It is recognizing this sameness that allows us to most accurately predict violence. When we accept that violence is committed by people who look and act like people, we silence the voice of denial, the voicle that whispers ‘this guy doesn’t look like a killer’.” 💕 Just a poll to have a better idea of the demographic here: Which age range are you in?