Punishment, Coercion, and Revenge
<p>Because I&#8217;m both both a libertarian and famous for conducting a<br />
successful propaganda campaign, libertarian activists sometimes come<br />
to me for tactical advice.  During a recent email exchange, one of these<br />
criticized me for wishing (as he thought) to &#8220;punish&#8221; the Islamist<br />
enemies of the U.S. and Western civilization.</p>
<p>I explained that I have no desire to punish the perpetrators of<br />
9/11; what I want is vengeance and death.  Vengeance for us, death for<br />
them.  Whether they experience &#8216;punishment&#8217; during the process is of<br />
little or no interest to me.</p>
<p>My correspondent was reflecting a common confusion about the<br />
distinctions among coercion, revenge, and punishment.  Coercion is<br />
intended to make another do your will instead of their own; vengeance<br />
is intended to discharge your own anger and fear.  Punishment is<br />
neither of these things.</p>
<p>Punishment is a form of respect you pay to someone who is at least<br />
potentially a member of the web of trust that defines your ethical<br />
community.  We punish ordinary criminals to deter them from repeating<br />
criminal behavior, because we believe they know what ethical behavior<br />
is and that by deterring them from crime we help them re-integrate<br />
with an ethical community they have never in any fundamental sense<br />
departed.</p>
<p>By contrast, we do not punish the criminally insane.  We confine<br />
them and sometimes kill them for our own safety, but we do not make<br />
them suffer in an effort to deter them from insanity.  Just to state<br />
the aim is to make obvious how absurd it is.  Hannibal Lecter, and his<br />
all-too-real prototypes, lack the capacity to respond to punishment<br />
by re-integrating with an ethical community.</p>
<p>In fact, criminal psychopaths are not even potentially members of<br />
an ethical community to begin with.  There is something broken or<br />
missing in them that makes participation in the web of trust<br />
impossible; perhaps the capacity to emotionally identify with other<br />
human beings, perhaps conscience, perhaps something larger and harder<br />
to name.  They have other behavioral deficits, including poor impulse<br />
control, associated with subtle neurological damage.  By existing,<br />
they demonstrate something most of us would rather not know; which is<br />
that there are creatures who &mdash; though they speak, and reason,<br />
and feign humanity &mdash; have nothing but evil in them.</p>
<p>On the behavioral evidence, Saddam Hussein and his now-deceased<br />
serial-rapist son Uday fit the DSM-IV criteria for psychopaths<br />
exactly; by contrast Qusay, the other deceased son, appears to have<br />
been a merely ordinary thug.  But it would be a dangerous mistake to<br />
dismiss Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their ilk as merely<br />
psychopathic &mdash; they don&#8217;t have the deficits in impulse control<br />
and other areas that would imply. I fear they are examples of a<br />
phenomenon even more troubling &mdash; neurologically normal<br />
<em>non-psychopaths</em> who speak, and reason, and feign humanity, and<br />
have nothing but evil in them.</p>
<p>Osama bin Laden is a religious fanatic, not a psychopath.  He<br />
suffers not from lack of conscience but from a particular kind of<br />
conscience, principles that drive him to plan and execute mass<br />
murder.  Like a psychopath, he apparently lacks any capacity to<br />
identify with his victims; but rather than being neurological, his<br />
disorder is possession by a killer idea.  He is a memebot.</p>
<p>Fanatics of bin Laden&#8217;s intensity are like psychopaths in that<br />
reason cannot reach them and punishment only fuels their rage.  We<br />
have seen bin Laden&#8217;s like before in Hitler, Savanarola, and a<br />
thousand pettier examples.  Their belief systems are closed, circular,<br />
self-justifying, bordering on if not becoming actually delusional.<br />
You can confine them or kill them, but they cannot be re-integrated<br />
into the ethical web of trust by the measures we use on mere<br />
criminals.</p>
<p>The attempt to fit the treatment of fanatical terrorists into<br />
a &#8220;criminal&#8221; frame, as though they were shoplifters or second-story<br />
men or even ordinary murderers, is symptomatic of a deep blindness<br />
in all too many Westerners &mdash; often a willful blindness.  It<br />
is as though, by denying that these people are irredeemably evil,<br />
the tender-minded think they can edit evil out of the world.  The<br />
rest of us, if we ever had that illusion, lost it on 9/11.</p>
