Thought Control

Every single person has an internalised mental state.  This state changes over time.  The things we see and do will inevitably lead us to learn new things adding to our knowledge and experience, and in some cases wisdom where it can be found.  This process of personal development is individual by nature, and although we may share the same experiences, how we react to those experiences and what we learn from them will not always be the same.  You can raise two people in the exact same environment and treat them exactly the same and they will still turn out differently with unique thought patterns and their own views on life, the universe, and everything.

While this is intriguing by itself and it does encourage diversity, it does however pose another question.  How do you exercise control over thoughts?  Now you may immediately react negatively to the idea of controlling someone's thoughts at all and while I do agree to an extent there are moral and ethical issues to be considered, there are however instances where it is beneficial to condition people to act in a given way or behave in a given way.  While you will still be fighting this idea you will likely not argue if I was to say it is beneficial to teach a child that killing is wrong and that murdering another human being is something they should never do.  While you can teach a child the difference between right and wrong, you can't control what they think of what you teach them.  For example theft is something we are taught is wrong from a young age.  However many people, who will conform to the expectation that they should not steal, will continue to think they should be allowed to and that they would do it if they believed they could get away with it.  This is dangerous as complacency of this nature often leads to confidence that they can commit these crimes and get away with them.

Most criminals are not idiots.  Most criminals are aware that their actions are seen as wrong, both by other people and by the eyes of the law.  However they continue to commit their crimes because they believe they are justified in their actions or believe they are deserving of the ends they achieve or quite simply they believe they can get away with it.  The question this raises is whether or not thought control is something that would reduce this type of crime.

There is something I have said many times in reference to LGBT activism, and that is that legislation is only a fraction of the problem.  Homophobia does not magically disappear when it is made illegal, it becomes more obscure, hidden, underground, and in some respects a lot more dangerous.  A homophobe's mind and their thought process does not miraculously change because their view has been deemed offensive and the law prohibits them from expressing it or acting upon it; they still think the way they did before.  Education is important in this regard to raise awareness of homophobia but as we have already shown above with the examples of theft and murder, teaching someone that something is wrong, will not necessarily stop them from doing it.  You could even argue with some personality types telling someone that what they are doing is wrong will make them much more likely to do it but I digress.

What this all boils down to is the simple question, how do you change how people think?  Is it even possible to exercise that degree of control at all?  While classical conditioning can instil certain behaviours there is no evidence to show that the thoughts of disobeying ever disappear.  In short, they may increasingly do what you say to a T, that does not mean they have stopped thinking the way they always did - it only means the reward they will receive for acting in the way you conditioned them to is deemed greater than the reward of pursuing their own thoughts; this is akin to behaviour through bribery.  In many ways you can compare that to hypnotism - in that deep down the subject has to be willing to do it for it to work, if they really don't want to be hypnotised they will not be hypnotised.

With all this being true then the natural conclusion to draw is that prosperity should inversely correlate to levels of crime.  In other words the more prosperous a place becomes, the lower its crime rate will become.  Not because the citizens have found any great revelation of altruism or virtue but simply because the potential reward is not enough to warrant their actions.  While that is a case of controlling behaviour, it does not control thought.  When a great enough reward comes along the individual in question will commit that crime.  The problem with that, if we use murder as an example is to say that every single person is a murderer for the right price - all you need to do is find the price.  That's a little unsettling.