Human connectedness, systems, coersion

As I think about solutions to global problems, the way people think continues to be at the forefront of my thinking. It seems to me that we don't need better systems to govern people, we need people to think better and govern themselves.

We have these systems in place which are supposed to protected the everyday common person with an objective means of coercing those who violate the agreed-upon rules. One of the problems with this approach is that, once a person has violated a rule, we don't know what to do with them. There are those in the mass who scream for punishment according to the crime, and this appeals to the vengeance in each of us, perhaps.

But when we "punish" them, what do we, as humanity, lose?

Samba, an linux tool to connect to windows file sharing clients is one I find invaluable. I was reminded of another tool which I find valuable which has been hurt by our societal law system. ReiserFS is a filesystem, that is, it is a specification and implementation of a set of rules for just how to write the bits of data to the hard drive. There are a bunch of different filesystem types, each using different pattern of writing data and logging where they put it, indexing it, etc - each for different purposes. So this guy Reiser (along with a team of folks, but the fs bears his name, so who knows) came up with such a filesystem which does some really neat things. He's (I guess) in jail now with a conviction of killing his wife in a (I think) first-degree manner.

Now, I'm not prepared to say whether he killed his wife or not, but I do believe that society suffers because he is now behind bars. Granted, if he could be expected to go on serially killing people, then it may be a different story, but perhaps (assuming he did kill her) it was a singular act of rage (or whatever), then there has to be some better way of dealing with the situation.

Long example of a point I find simple to say, hard to do: to realize a humanity that we all affect each other. I think, perhaps, that many stand behind the auspices that it is a system which was put into place which does good and bad things, so they're not responsible.

But it was people who put the system in place, and I will argue that they did this in order to not be personally responsible for their personnally-held beliefs.