Ruminations on excerpts of research papers, blogs and books

True Crimes

Imagine you are a benign observer, and are able to observe every event happening in the world, at the same time (maybe through a crystal globe or something). You can not only objectively see what's happening, but can also accurately interpret the humans emotions that the people (basically everyone) are experiencing. Your observation is linear (A -> B -> C -> ...).

Now a crime, as defined by the people in that specific part of the world, has occurred, at say time t. Which would put it, in your timeline, between other events: ... -> Rt -> Crimet+1 -> St+2 ->... Was it a crime ? The people have judged it as such. Immoral, ruthless and objectively wrong. But you ? You know everything, events that those people would never know, events that people in general, can never know. What's your judgement ?

This little thought experiment would not stop you from calling out the crimes, but would really shine a new light on a majority of criminals/crimes that we've seen. Most of the times it's as if lighting a torch from your hand into a dark room, and claiming to know the entire room, without considering the highly restricted and narrow region your torch can show you of the room. Morality is not subjective, but an inter-subjective phenomenon, where humans together give birth to it, and only by relying on others to believe in it, does it survive.

What if a crime happened at A1 ? Again, that's the beginning of your perspective and narrative, wherein causes for the crimes have already occurred before you stepped up to be the Observer. To mitigate this, we have to go back to the beginning of time itself ...

Most people view the world as such: Kt -> Tt+2 -> Wt+n ... Their view is incomplete, inconsistent and full of misinformation. People aren't misinformed due to being exposed to objectively wrong information (in most cases), but are due to being exposed to a different perspective of the information (like a game of Chinese whisper, but with millions/billions of people over centuries and across the globe).

Despite all these points about perspectives, the nature of reality and human emotions and everything, there seem to exist pure crimes, or True Crimes. Such crimes are independent of any past events that have occurred before them, have zero connections to anything about dilemmas and humans emotions, and everything to do with a person being self-centred, self-absorbed and unempathetic, a true criminal. Mind you, I am NOT talking about psychopaths, since it's a biological condition. A common yet scary fact ? A True Criminal, capable of committing a true crime, is your average person.

Not all average people are true criminals, but all true criminals are average people. Who are they ? What crime am I even talking about ? I think we all know the answers to those questions. The thought experiments, though at first seem to provide some very good points about having a diplomatic view of the world, cannot shield us from True Crime. It happens regardless of what the situation was, what the person was going through and society at large.

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