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Here's a problem I have trying to explain to people why I want to abolish police, abolish prisons. No matter how I phrase things many people hear a moral argument. That police are evil, prisons are evil. But this isn't at all what I mean. In fact seeing the issue that way, as a matter of good and evil, completely obscures the explanation. It brings it into the realm of opinion. It lets people nod their heads and stop listening. Of course people can disagree over things like this!

Dichotomies like that, good/evil, moral/immoral, work this way to cover up truths about the world that are impossible to face and still go on normally. The two poles of such dichotomies immediately conjure up a continuum between them. If something is evil or immoral it can be made less evil or less immoral and that's some kind of progress. Not accepting this kind of incrementalism makes one a moralist, a perfectionist, an idealist, a purist, someone who can ultimately be ignored, someone they can agree to disagree with, like we all do in order to get along with people with so many matters of opinion. There's no need to listen any more, it's just another extreme theoretical position among all the others.

Imagine buzzards eating corpses on the road with their heads deep in the guts of a rotting deer. The stench of death, the slimy putrid ooze on their bald heads. It's not evil, it's how they live, but it's not how human beings live. Being seen by other people willingly, joyfully, smearing one's body with corpse juice, reveling in putrefied rotting dead goop, eating gobbets of rotting flesh, would be shameful, inhuman. It's beyond good and evil. It's not the kind of thing that invites accepting, polite disagreement. No one wants to hear that person's explanations about why wallowing in rotten corpses is good, actually. We want to run far away.

This is what the police are like, what prisons are. They thrive on the bodies of murder victims, they blossom on fields soaked with human blood, rotting corpses. Cops, jailers, their supporters, are willingly swimming in pools of rotten stinking death, joyfully breathing its vapors. This essence is very, very well- hidden inside whitewashed mausoleums by ideologies, social narratives, cultural handshakes, and so on.

I saw this all of a sudden a few years ago and I can't unsee it, the corpses swinging in the wind hanged by the tens of thousands and left to decay, but it's not so easy to explain to people. It's not a matter of stating the right facts, measuring the right statistics, it's a way of looking at the world. It can't be explained quickly, which in practice means often it can't be explained at all.

#Abolition #PoliceAbolition #PrisonAbolition #WhitedSepulchres #BeyondGoodAndEvil