By Steve Sailer
03/05/2014
From Handle’s Haus, an interesting theory of the war on drugs:
But there is a much deeper and more sinister aspect to the drug issue that is both very complex and very dangerous to discuss openly. It is indeed a dire problem on many levels.
The problem is that while ‘poverty’ does not cause crime, idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and a heavy-concentration of young men who are either not willing or able (or both) to hold down a job and get busy raising a family is a well-established recipe for disaster that was known to the ancients since time immemorial. This problem exists in our pockets of crime, no one has any good and politically-palpable idea of what to do about it, and the accelerating three legged stool of immigration, automation, and globalization is making it increasingly worse.
Without employing some drastic measures that are incompatible with the current norms of our society — that we aren’t even allowed to talk about without severe social sanction because they are so taboo — this situation practically guarantees the generation of all sorts of criminal activity, for kicks and for cash.
If you are a police chief, prosecutor, or politician, then tou want to prevent crime, especially violent crime, and especially violent crimes like burglaries that will spill over into your wealthier, safer neighborhoods whose inhabitants can get you fired very quickly, but who also make excellent targets for theft, muggings, or aggravated robberies because, as with banks, that’s where the money is.
Or is it? Because burglary is risky, and burglars don’t get rich. But what if there were some alternative draw, some other — necessarily criminal — way of making vast sums of money — the stuff of a young thug’s dreams — and that particular way was demonstrably irrepressible no matter what you did, so it might as well be made useful.
What if, furthermore, it was glorified and celebrated endlessly by your young thug’s subculture? And what if the violence that emerged out of that traffic — of a thing the sale, possession, and consumption of which arguably needs to be prohibited anyway — was almost entirely geographically contained in areas with zero political clout and mostly between the thugs themselves?
Why, it would act as an ideal honeypot! Your thugs will all converge on conducting that particular species of crime, and you can easily arrest, prosecute, and imprison the worst of them and then incapacitate them for long-durations so that they can’t get up to any other (more politically destabilizing) kinds of criminal activity during their youthful years, which, again, you believe they are certain to do and which, really, can’t be prevented.
And this is how the drug war works. There are very, very few people who actually, consciously think like this, putting all the pieces together into one extremely tragic but coherent picture. But the glue that holds certain lasting social institutions together is often unconscious and buried beneath some protective psychological firewalls.
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