Happiness and Criminals
It is apparent to me that crime is a direct result of unhappiness. The reason that people commit crimes is that they are unhappy. People commit crimes because they think angry, depressed and fearful thoughts. If no one in the world could think negative thoughts there would be no crime and we would have world peace.
Many people believe that external circumstances like poverty and injustice cause people to commit crimes, this is not really true. There are many examples of poor people and people who are subject to extreme injustice who do not commit crimes. In fact, there are many who purposefully make themselves poor (e.g., priests and their vow of poverty) and many who subject themselves to mistreatment as a means to spiritual enlightenment. Indeed enthusiasts of BDSM experience sexual gratification from mistreatment. The cause of crime is not poverty and injustice itself, but rather it is how people think about poverty and injustice. A useful analogy is the relationship between spiders and fear. Spiders themselves do not cause the feeling of fear in people, there are many people who when confronted with spiders do not feel fear. What causes fear is how people think about spiders; how one might be injured by a spider or how “scary” a spider looks. It is not the spider itself, but rather a person’s belief about spiders that causes fear. Entomologists believe that spiders are curious and interesting. This principle can be expressed concisely by the phrase, “reality has no meaning except the meaning that we give it.”
Criminals are people who tend to give negative meanings to value-neutral facts in their external reality. For instance, a person’s 1973 Chrysler LeBaron may not simply be a car, but rather a symbol of repression and injustice. This belief coupled with ideas like “violence solves problems” is a recipe for criminality. People who commit crimes are simply confused, and they are innocent in their confusion. If a potential criminal learned the truth about meaning and reality, then I am conviced that their likelihood of commiting a crime would decrease. Unfortunately nearly all people in general have confusions about meaning and reality. The good news is that people all around the world are beginning to learn about happiness and take conscious control of how they give meaning to their reality.
