JF

Humans have an innate urge to punish that is highly irrational. We believe it can somehow fix our problems and restore justice, when it does neither. We seek to punish because it feels good to not be the ones suffering: any belief in its merit is a post-hoc justification.

We feel that our own suffering is meaningless and that, in order to give it meaning, we must persecute others. We believe that punishment is intimately connected to the existence of a rational social order, and that the absence of it invalidates this entire order.

So we make an association between punishment and justice. But nothing could be more absurd than this. They have no association at all. Punishment does not deter, reform, or restore: it maims. We need to transcend the limited nature of punishment. We need a nurturing society.