I have blogged on Dr. Spock before, but did not connect Terrorists and Dr. Spock. Well, they are connected and this blog will explain how.
First, a review of Dr. Spock. Spock wrote his book back in 1947. Spock earned a degree in Psychology from Columbia University in New York City. Spock was a Jew raised in an urban area and his wife was a social activist, or what we would consider an ultra liberal today. How he could give good advise to people who he had zero relationship too is hard to understand. His main message to parents on how to raise their kids was that they should, "...be their kid's best friends.." and give kids, "time outs" in their rooms as punishment rather than the pain of a spanking. Many young parents took Spock's advise and raised a whole generation of kids by his formula, rejecting all the thousands of years of prior traditions. I think that you now can see the results of the abandonment of how kids had been raised since the beginning of time.
Now, terrorist. Terrorist are people who live outside the norms of typical people. They have been around a long and have a single trait in common. What is that? They have zero fear of punishment. They are willing to carry out their actions against society without any fear of an eventual punishment and this includes death. I have blogged on this point before too and the conclusion is that "fear of punishment" has little affect on the actions of terrorist. Think about a person who is willing to strap a bomb to themselves in order to kill people and kill themselves in the process. Our legal system, that is based on fear of punishment, has zero affect on preventing terrorist from killing people. When the Attorney General states that, "...we will bring them to justice.." it impresses normal people, but has zero affect on other terrorists. In the case of a regular bank robber, the fear of punishment does have an affect of reducing the number of bank robbers. Bank robbers are not terrorists.
Now, let's see how Spock and the terrorists are connected. In the case of Spock, when your kid does something bad, Spock tells you to make the kid stay in his room as a "time out". The kid plays in their rooms rather than playing in the back yard. What kind of punishment do you think the kid feels? Do you think that young people are better behaved today than they were 75 years ago? Do you think that your kid has any fear of punishment if that punishment is spending extra time in their rooms? I don't think so. Some people might say that we send bank robbers to jail and that works, so why doesn't sending kids to their rooms work? Here is the reason. When we send a 25 year old bank robber to prison for 20 years, when the bank robber gets out at age 45, they have lost most of their desire to rob banks. If you send a kid to their room for a couple of hours, being an hour older does not have the same affect on the kid as the 20 years in prison had on the bank robber. The bottom line is that kids today respond like terrorists with no fear of punishment.
In the case of our kids, they need a real punishment so that they have a fear of punishment and in the case of terrorist, since they have no fear of punishment all we can do is to "prevent" them from doing bad things in the first place. I think it is clear that how we have to deal with terrorists is totally different from how we deal with our kids and bank robbers. Spending millions "bringing terrorists to justice" is a waste. We have to deal with terrorists "before" they do something like robbing the bank.
