Crimes Against Reason

          Crimes Against Reason

          By ‘crimes against reason’ I mean two things. On the one hand a crime against reason is an irrational crime; a pointless misdeed that does none any good, including the perpetrator. This is the criminality of passion and vandalism.

          But on the other hand, a ‘crime against reason’ is an offense against rationality itself. There the perpetrators attempts to destroy, not just the victim’s possessions, but the victim’s will to thought; for thought can lead to resistance. This is the criminality of propaganda.

          Crimes against reason in the first sense are characteristically ‘lower-class’; the prole lashes out, to perverse effect. Crimes against reason in the second sense are characteristically ‘upper-class’; the tycoon deceives the people.

          Crimes against reason, in the second sense, are like what I call corrupt incompetence; when a bureaucratic functionary fails at his job, but in a way that is to the advantage of the system. In a corrupt system, the corruptly incompetent tend to rise until they reach their level of incompetent corruption, when the system doesn’t even do wrong right. That is a crime against reason, in the first sense.

          The trouble with crimes against reason, in the second sense, is that they tend to turn into crimes against reason, in the first sense. Everyone lies to a liar; therefore a crook eventually becomes a fool.