The Iron Yuppie

Yahoo! News - Suicide Bomb Kills 125 Near Iraq Marketplace

I was actually looking on some of my favorite blogging sites for coverage of this brutal bombing today, but I could hardly find anything. I must admit I'm surprised, especially from a lot of the bloggers who I read with daily coverage of the activities over there (before you send me an avalanche of postings, just assume for a second that I looked through my blog roll (on the right) and did not see the coverage).

Anyhow, I've been thinking about these events for a long time. My conclusion is that the lawfulness of our society basically depends on the ability of people not to be able to do math supported by a moral system. I know that many many people have stated opinions like this before (Hobbes would be one of the most well known), but the only reason that people are not out committing crime all the time is that people are generally afraid of getting caught. I do not believe beneath our chewy exterior we are all sociopaths just waiting to murder at the earliest opportunity, but minor, and even major, non-violent crime seems only to be deterred by the thin blue line of police enforcement. If just 2% of the population decided to commit a crime, there is no way the police could prevent it, let alone catch a significant amount. In Iraq, where there is effectively no enforcement, some vanishingly small percent (less than 2%) actually are out there committing crimes. Most are not the type of this terrible suicide bombing... most are stealing wire or taking bribes or other corruption. And, as a result, a lawless culture is born. I believe that this lawless culture then engenders the acceptability of more severe crimes like the one from today. Unless you turn EVERYONE into police officers or create wide spread vigilantism, crime will continue to be wide spread until the population begins to police itself through social norms. I'd like to think that creating this sort of self-enforcing culture would have been far more important than elections and certainly would have been possible sooner had we done a bit more sensible planning up front.