The Crucifixion of Paul Kearsey: The Merits and Misdemeanors of Vigilantism

  The Crucifixion of Paul Kearsey: The Merits and Misdemeanors of Vigilantism

After love and hate, revenge is perhaps the most romantic topic one can write about. What's more, it is also more versatile; while love and hatred deal solely with the feelings deep in one's heart, and need not affect one's actions (at least that's what the Stoics seem to say), revenge, in order to exist, requires action. If love and hate are the prime movers of the human spirit after hunger and thirst, which is what the poets, Gothic and Romantic alike, would have us believe, then the thirst for revenge must be the greatest motivation after love and hate.

So great is the human desire for revenge that and entire institution of Society, nay, one of the pillars of Society is founded upon vengeance. We call this pillar “Justice”, because due to centuries of Judeo-Christian indoctrination, vengeance just sounds too immoral. But what is justice, if it is not the avenging of wrongs? For most crimes, the perpetrators are imprisoned for years, forced into a cell so that they can suffer. This is meant not only to remove them from Society for a lengthy period of adult time-out, but also to give some solace to those who are wronged. Let the virtue-signallers do as they must when they say “I forgive you” in the court of law so that they may feel Christlike, but rarely do we see them demand that the criminal be forgiven by justice. Indeed, their words are those of Jesus, but their in their hearts they pray to the Goddess Themis to plunge her sword deep into heart of the wrongdoer.

Some crimes are considered so heinous that simply spending time in prison is not enough to satiate Society. In these cases, the criminal is put to death. No matter the attitudes of the Christlike fools who want their words to be broadcast on television as they say such nonsense as “I have forgiven you, and I hope God will as well” while there is almost never a call for Society to forgive them and reverse, or at least suspend, the death sentence, we all pray to Themis when a criminal is brought to court. So certain are we of Justice, this euphemism for social vengeance, that there is always outrage at the acquittal of murderers and rapists. Consider the acquittal of O.J. Simpson or Darren Wilson and the subsequent outcry of the public. In the case of Simpson, fame and the race-card were blamed. After all, he was acquitted in court, and this was an act of injustice. In the case of Wilson, white supremacy and a rigged system were blamed, because he was acquitted in court and this was an act of injustice.

Perception is reality. What the individual perceives is real to them. So, when some one sees such an act of injustice, when the courts appear to fail and the wicked are allowed to walk free after acquittals for one reason or another, to what can they turn? The pillar of Justice which upholds Society has failed, and thus Society has failed, and so they perceive a breach in the Social Contract! The contract is breached, and so it is apparently void. So, in these cases, can those wronged themselves take vengeance, with the Social blessing of it being called “Justice”? That is what we must ask ourselves, and what I have been asked to ponder here. Is vigilantism Justice?

We must first distinguish between regular revenge and vigilantism. Should an individual have been a victim of a crime and the perpetrator be freed for some reason or another, and the subjective individual take revenge by killing the perpetrator, then this is merely revenge. Indeed, this plays heavily in Romantic fiction, but it has faded as the decades wore on. Today, we are asked by artists and philosophers alike, is it Justice for one to enact revenge for another? To complicate the question, we are given situations where Society is failing. Bruce Wayne dons the disguise of Batman to do battle with crime in a city where the police are either incompetent or corrupt, and the mob rules all. Paul Kearsey of Death Wish (the good version with Charles Bronson and not that torture porn trash I refuse to watch) does battle with thugs in a New York where the police are hampered by bureaucracy and, arguably, political correctness.

Let us first rid ourselves of the myth of Batman. He is a Thor, one of the elites who descends to protect the common people of Gotham. Like his hammer wielding equivalent, he risks his life doing battle with giants that the common man cannot possibly contend with. Originally he battled the mob, but as police forces became more competent and mobster culture started to fall out of style, Batman's foes became as over-the-top as he. The Penguin, Bane, and The Joker are all foes who, in some manner, rival Batman's skills and wealth. None of these characters would exist in real life.

The Penguin could grow his fortune simply through business dealings, and has no need to be wicked due to his wealth. Men like Bane are often sought out as mercenaries, and the most idealistic of them do not take over cities in suicidal bids to prove a point, but rather join militias (these militias being labeled, as George Carlin famously observed, Freedom Fighters or Terrorists, depending on your perspective). And The Joker could never operate such intricate plots without being found out by either security guards or some of his cronies spilling the beans to some one. Furthermore, no criminal who operates at such levels, whether it be mafia godfather or a serial killer, brags on television. They prefer to keep their actions a secret from their person. The closest Society has ever come to The Joker was the Zodiac Killer, who gripped the San Francisco area not through elaborate games of Sophie's Choice, but by simply shooting a few teenagers. And he bragged by coded message, again trying to keep his actions and his person separate.

And Batman, like Thor, can never exist. The sheer amount of resources one would need to be Batman would break the billionaire Bruce Wayne. The physical cost of comic book heroism would kill an ordinary man due to skeletal shocks alone. There could be organizations that do what Bruce Wayne does, but we will consider this subject a little later.

So, let us discuss the kind of vigilante presented to us in Death Wish. The man who goes out at night searching for criminals and, having appointed himself judge jury and executioner, kills the wrongdoer in the act.

There are two things I must posit here. First, we must disregard anyone like Bernhard Goetz, who killed muggers trying to attack him directly. Such an act must be considered self-defense and has nothing to do with the Justice-obsessed vigilante, who defends others from crime. Self-defense is not revenge, it is survival, and thus cannot be in any way connected to Justice.

The second truth I must point out is that for the vigilante to patrol the streets, on his own, as Paul Kersey does, he would not come across the great criminals. He seeks to stumble upon crime, and would most often find the small time mugger, maybe an occasional drug dealer, and an occasional (and I do mean occasional) serial killer. He would never come across the real gangs, the organizations moving the drugs, or the infamous serial killers that litter the cultural zeitgeist.

His actions would be impotent. He would knock out a little bit of crime which would quickly be replaced the next night. At no point would he really pose a threat to the intricate criminal organizations who employ intelligence and skill in their operations and have, undoubtedly, devoted some time planning for the case of capable vigilantism.

There is an anime called Death Note. We should consider its premise before continuing further. Discarding all supernatural elements, say an individual was to come into the knowledge of every criminal currently in operation in a given area. Add to this individual the ability and drive to kill each of these criminals. Let us go even further and say these criminals, from muggers and dealers to godfathers and serial murderers, are completely powerless to resist his justice. Let us consider this vigilante a cross between Bruce Wayne and Light Yagami. What would the deadweight loss be?

It is simple. There would be emulators. Batman has copycats who try to do as he does and Kira has a cult completely devoted to his sense of Justice. Our hypothetical vigilante would inspire much the same behavior. The problems coming from this are plenty. Here I will address only a few.

The first problem being that the government, a socially recognized arbiter of Justice, will become moot. Rather than trust in the police, who are can be resisted by crime and also capable of being corrupted, people would turn to this vigilante. This would give to our hypothetical hero, whether he be an individual or an organization, too much power. He was not elected, he was not even appointed. He merely assumes power. Between him and the Mongol warlords of old, there is little difference. He rewrites the Social Contract, for now he enforces it, totally independent of the General Will.

The second problem created by this hypothetical and omnipotent vigilante is the punishment met out to criminals. It is an extension of the first problem. He is not only the police and the judge and the jury, but he also passes sentencing. He needs not always be an executioner, as the threat of becoming a cripple is just as frightening as death. Or he can somehow imprison people. Whatever he does, he is the only entity which decides the sentence. There is no need for precedent or law regarding the punishment. Even the smallest crime could be corrected with an execution. This gives too much power to one social entity; he answers to no one except his own conscience. He cannot be voted out, and thus his word is law. The people he seeks to protect become his subjects, no longer citizens.

The final problem is the issue of emulation. Others will feel a call to action should such a vigilante appear. They will head out onto the streets to do battle with wrongdoers. Of course, there will be those who redefine wrong by their own sense of Justice, just as the omnipotent vigilante does. They will avenge perceived wrongs, whether due to a personal vendetta or just a moral compass, and those who do not even violate the law, merely social and religious mores, will be the victims of vigilantism.

Let us examine a real example of something tangent to this. Bill Cosby was convicted this past year of rape. However, before being convicted in the Court of Law, he was convicted in the court of public opinion. The story of many women, who were aspiring actresses and comediennes, who met a famous actor and comedian at a bar, who were speaking to him late at night and well into the morning, who consented to go home with him (no doubt to try his chocolate cake), and who were then and there, decades ago, drugged and raped. Of course it is too late to test for the drugs in their systems, conveniently there are no rape kits, and the media declared him guilty. There was no mainstream mouth piece pointing out that these women willingly went home with Cosby, late at night, from the bar. After all, these facts don't matter. Late at night, at bars especially, people are discussing business and never will you see men and women, especially older successful men and younger attractive women, flirting. And women never go home with men they meet at bars, especially if they think that by providing some sexual favors they will get a career boost. To suggest otherwise is to be a misogynist sexist misogynist, you sexist.

And so, Bill Cosby was not allowed a fair trial, because for more than a year prior to his day in court, the man was declared guilty by the mass media. The MeToo movement has only enhanced this mentality. The social morality had shifted to the simplistic model of the Feminist Harpy: “Man Bad, Woman Weak”. And it is not the first time people have used their own personal feelings as a metric for Justice, and so tainted the General Will with their opining that they manage to corrupt the once impartial courts of a Republic. The Satanic Panic, the Red Scare, Prohibition, and every other sort of moral panic has been a kind of vigilantism. People who were guilty only of transgressing some social more, but violating no real law, ranging from talking to a woman to listening to Slayer, were declared criminal by the vulgar masses. Why would vigilantism be any different? A single moral panic and Society itself collapses.

It is now I feel it appropriate to address those rare instances when crime and corruption have so saturated Society that one cannot depend upon the Courts to mete out Justice. I dare to say there has never been a state like this in the recent history of the United States. The last time criminal behavior was essentially institutionalized resulted in the Civil Rights Movement, which was a sort of peaceful revolution. Before that, vigilantism took the form of Bleeding Kansas, which culminated in the American Civil War.

But, if we leave American history alone, the recent history of Colombia offers us an example of vigilantism.

In the early last two decades of the Twentieth Century, Pablo Esocbar rose to power through crime. A drug trafficker by trade, Escobar became one of the most powerful men in the world, placing a drug lord on the world stage alongside presidents, prime ministers, and tyrants. Of course, he was technically still subject to Colombian law. So when he killed a good number of civilians in what was little more than a vulgar display of power, punishment had to come.

That punishment came in the way of having a private prison built. This prison was to be guarded by men hand picked by Escobar himself. Escobar was permitted to have guests visit and his personal possessions brought into his confinement. To guarantee that one of the richest and most dangerous men in the world was not too inconvenienced by his prison sentence, Pablo Escobar was permitted to come and go from this prison as he pleased. Yes, he was punished with a free mansion, courtesy of the Colombian tax payers, many of whom had lost family members to what amounted to Escobar's shadow rule.

So was it any wonder when the people of Colombia organized and began killing members of Escobar's family as well as agents in this criminal empire?

I do not wish to dwell to long on what happened in Colombia in the early Nineteen-Nineties. So let me simply state here two facts about it: First, the people of Colombia did bring down Pablo Escobar. Second, the country was essentially in a state of civil war while Los Pepes (the vigilantes) and Escobar fought each other. This was vigilantism.

So, if we can examine this extreme form of vigilantism, what conclusions can we make?

The first is that there are times when vigilantism is called for. To be exact, these are times when it is so obvious that the government, that neutral arbiter of justice, is undoubtedly in the pockets of the criminals. And what's more, these attempts can be successful. History demonstrates again and again how the common people can overthrow their governments, and it is even more littered with examples of how law-abiding citizens have defeated powerful criminal empires. Yet, we must also take notice of how this war between Pablo Escobar and the people of Colombia was a civil war. It cannot be described in other way, if we are to be honest.

So, to be a vigilante is to accept several things. First of all, one must accept and know that one not only risks themselves in taking the law into their own hands, but also the lives of their fellow law-abiding citizens. To be a vigilante is to attempt to establish one's self as an alternative government, thus presenting a challenge to the current established powers. This results in civil war, regardless of how it manifests. Even a small band of vigilantes means civil war.

 A more thorough and thought out examination of this concept is provided by the great philosopher Albert Camus in his essay “L'homme en Revolte”. I highly recommend that read.