THREAD: One of the core recurring problems in our society and in our media is focusing too much on individuals and not enough on systems. When something bad happens, we (and the media) want to find "bad" people to blame for it. This is dangerous.
For example, the petrochemical industry created the largely useless idea of plastic recycling to get individuals (starting with children) to feel moral blame and praise re: recycling just so that everyone would stop asking: why do we have all this plastic? theintercept.com/2019/07/20/pla…
When there is an act of police violence, many people's first response is to blame a "bad apple cop." It's not “bad apples" who quintupled the US human caging rate. It's not "bad apples" who have led US to cage Black people at 6 times South Africa at the height of Apartheid.
It's not “bad apples" who buy tanks and grenade launchers and facial recognition databases or who invented cash bail. It's not “bad apples" who cage disproportionately Back, immigrant, and poor people for not having safe places to live or medical care for addiction.
The "bad apple" narrative just misses the core causes of violence, pollution, inequality, etc... and distracts us from the public policy choices we can make to make people truly safe: slate.com/news-and-polit…
The same is true of "crime" generally. When someone hurts someone else, the first reaction in our culture for many people is to punish, even though it is a scientific fact that putting people in cages does not reduce future harm.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1453440568546168834
Human beings are capable of both enormous good and also of causing enormous harm and brutality. The primary factor that we have control over is creating environments and systems of connection, relationship, health, and community instead of pain, trauma, and isolation.
We need a shift in the media away from stories of individual blame/praise toward more honest, and evidence-based framing: we are all creatures of environments. Whether we harm each other or make a beautiful world is the result of collective decisions, not good or bad individuals.
This has very important lessons for current debates about whether we should continue to invest in the punishment bureaucracy or invest in systems of human flourishing, which I explore in depth here:
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1422949466986921991
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