Criminal acts

Criminal acts

Criminals often inculcate their children with criminal behaviour setting up vastly different sets of fretworks than law abiding decent families. Our destinies are cast to some extent. Freewill is based on the fretworks set up in our heads. We can off course rearrange the fretworks. Something might spark a desire in us to live a more virtuous life than our dreadful parents. Or we can learn from our parent’s mistakes and generate a belief that we will not be so stupid as them and won’t get caught. Fretworks expand through exposure to the world around us. Lots will become involved with small misdemeanours before embarking on much bigger ones. Criminals form habits, they may steal from shops regularly. Some move on from relatively minor crimes and find themselves propelled towards armed robbery. In theory freewill allows for someone to shift from a law-abiding decent citizen to a gold bullion vault plunderer overnight. However, the fretworks pertaining to robbery are not in place, so this is improbable. At the very least they would need to generate a seed and build on it for a good while before they went out and did such a sordid deed. Freewill is governed by the creation and organisation of fretworks in the mind. Creating and organising fretworks takes time, days, week, months, sometimes years.

Rich people have robbed a thing or two simply for the thrill of it. They have absolutely no need for the item they have stolen. The idea of having some excitement in their life along with the notion of being a little deviant is formed in their present fretwork. Alternatively, we build justifications for our unlawful ways. Justification fretworks that lead us to develop habits which aid our decisions.

We can choose to change. At any time, but our predisposition counts significantly. Most folk walking down a street will be thinking, humming maybe, reflecting on the day ahead. Whereas a burglar will notice all the open windows, the opportunities to gain easy entry and flee afterwards, unchallenged. They will always be on the lookout for such opportunities as their fretwork contains so much knowledge relating to these acts. Gardeners notice the flowers. You and I might be identifying the breed of a dog or noticing the colour of the cats. Burglars will see animals giving off tell-tale signs of whether someone is at home or not. They are not predetermined to carry out an illegal action but care little about the victims, understand nothing of what it is like for those to suffer, and weigh the option of giving into temptation against the risk of getting caught. Any punishment and humiliation will alter the probability of committing further offences. More connections in the fretwork. The memory of being held down during arrest, hours in a prison cell and the loss of liberty and so on. Fretworks are built in relation to that.

Some may propose that free will provides us with the means to act at random. In theory yes, but in practice we tend to start with the seed then build on it before proceeding. We can throw a dart upon a map and journey to where it lands. We can change our mind at any point but this itself is inspired by earlier dealings in life. For the most part we are moving about fairly autonomously with little real regard of the ultimate reasons. A small thing can alter the size of competing sets of decision fretworks. This makes us believe that we can exercise freewill so readily. The straw that broke the camels back. The camel needs to be loaded close to the brink for that straw to break its back. A criminal is a loaded camel.

Our minds can be chemically interfered with. What punishment do we hand out to someone that consumed alcohol voluntarily compared with someone that unwittingly inhaled an industrial substance? The actions of the two might be quite similar, but the intention quite different. Someone with physical damage to the mind may act in a violent way. There is no freewill intention in this case, as the fretworks were physically disturbed. Sober people can act very dangerously. Some want to show off, and they need no dis-inhibitor like alcohol. People can defer responsibility to someone in charge. We are much more likely to hurt another when told to do so by someone in authority.

To find answers regarding someone’s present behaviour we need only look at prior habits. Those accustomed to violence will use aggression with less forethought. Some see red and begin lashing out, acting wholeheartedly animalistic. People react automatically with little thought and little inhibition. They will have acted this way on past occasions. They justified it in the past and will find it justifiable now too. The lack of control today stems from the development of someone’s character over time. We can become more cautious if someone we take on turns out to be adept at fighting back.

Seeing red. An aggressive heated state we can get into. Ideally, we would find a way to release the build up without being violent towards others. In practice, many find that very challenging once a certain threshold has been passed. New habits can address the problems relating to seeing red.

Seeing black. A sexually heated state we can get into. The flood of chemicals and emotional hyper frisson destroys patience. Where one can generally perform a sexual act calmly and in harmony with another, seeing black blots out everything bar what one wants. The will to wait is tested, often beyond someone’s limits. Imagine going days without food then smelling a fine plate of food. Seeing it, salivating, and being asked to wait ten minutes before touching it. That only goes a little way towards getting the gist of it. An amplified sexual desire wants to be sated immediately. Rational thinking is temporally overridden. Those that understand free will understand the effect of biological chemistry. They appreciate how powerful chemistry can unbalance carefully crafted fretworks, quashing their usefulness. We know what state we can get into. We know what is likely to cause it, and what helps and what does not.

The gravest error one can make is to stick to a belief that things ought to be so. They are not. Humans are stimulated. That stimulation can be such that they act in a way that differs not from the way a mosquito detects a target, pounces and then pushes its trumpet through the skin to draw blood.

We might appear to be roving complex animals with determination and individual freedom to do what we want. Yet more often than not, we are driven by routine and habits. We can of course change our mind whenever we want. We can alter our plans on the spot. Then alter them again moments later for reasons that appear hard to fathom. However, seemingly random behaviour would have been evident in the past. Doing things on the hop, if that is what we are familiar with, is what we continue to do. People do not change from a rigid way of life to become easy going free flowing wanderers overnight. It is a gradual shift. We do things that we are acquainted with and only embark on new ventures after learning about them in depth beforehand. Your attitude stems from a long learning journey.

There are many ways to break certain habits. We can wean ourselves off something. We can stop, full stop. We can replace one habit with another. Reward is powerful. Reward addiction, in whatever form that takes, is best dealt with via a weaning off process. A gradual reduction. A bit-by-bit reduction is less difficult than a full stop. When the process is complete, the habit will be dealt with permanently whereas the full stop method is prone to relapses. Identify each time, place or trigger and choose one in turn to forgo. Stick to it until it is embedded then move to the next.