The latest scientific researches are very revealing -- perhaps ten percent of the people who are termed criminals are not responsible for their crimes; their crimes are genetic, they inherit them. Just as a blind man is not responsible for his blindness, a murderer is not responsible for his murderousness. Both inherit the tendency -- one of blindness, another of committing murder.
Now it is an established scientific fact that punishing anybody for any crime is simply idiotic. It is almost like punishing somebody because he has tuberculosis -- sending him to jail because he is suffering from cancer. All criminals are sick, psychologically and spiritually both.
In my vision of a commune, the courts will not consist of law experts, they will consist of people who understand genetics and how crimes are inherited from generation to generation. They have to decide not for any punishment, because every punishment is wrong -- not only wrong, every punishment is criminal.
The man who has committed anything wrong has to be sent to the right institution -- a psychiatric institution, or a psychoanalytic school, or maybe a hospital, to be operated on. He needs our sympathy, our love, our help. Instead of giving him our sympathy and love, for centuries we have been giving him punishment. Man has committed so much cruelty behind such beautiful names as order, law, justice.
The new man will not have any jails and will not have any judges and will not have any legal experts.
These are absolutely unnecessary, cancerous growths on the body of society. There will certainly have to be sympathetic scientists, meditative, compassionate beings to work out why it happened that a certain man committed rape: is he really responsible? According to me, on no account is he responsible. Either he has committed rape because of the priests and the religions teaching celibacy, repression for thousands of years -- this is the outcome of a repressive morality -- or biologically he has hormones which compel him to commit rape.
Although you are living in a modern society, most of you are not contemporaries because you are not aware of the reality that science goes on discovering. Your educational system prevents you from knowing it, your religions prevent you from knowing it, your governments prevent you from knowing it.
The man who is committing rape perhaps has more hormones than those moral people who manage to live with one woman for their whole life, thinking that they are moral. A man with more hormones will need more women; so will be the case with a woman. It is not a question of morality, it is a question of biology. A man who commits rape needs all our sympathy, needs a certain operation in which his extra hormones are removed, and he will cool down, calm down.
To punish him is simply an exercise in stupidity.
By punishing, you cannot change his hormones. Throwing him in jail, you will create a homosexual, some kind of pervert. In American jails they have done a survey: thirty percent of the inmates are homosexuals. That is according to their confession; we don't know how many have not confessed. Thirty percent is not a small number. In monasteries the number is bigger -- fifty percent, sixty percent. But the responsibility lies with our idiotic clinging to religions which are out of date, which are not supported and nourished by scientific research.
The new commune of man will be based on science, not on superstition. If somebody does something which is harmful to the commune as such, then his body has to be looked into; perhaps he needs some physiological change or biological change. His mind has to be looked into -- perhaps he needs some psychoanalysis. The deepest possibility is that neither the body nor the mind are of much help; that means he needs a deep spiritual regeneration, a deep meditative cleansing.
Instead of courts, we should have meditative centers of different kinds, so every unique individual can find his own way.
Instead of law experts, who are simply irrelevant -- they are parasites sucking our blood -- we will have scientific people of different persuasions, because somebody may have a chemical defect, somebody may have a biological defect, somebody may have a physiological defect. We need all these kinds of experts, of all persuasions and schools of psychology, all types of meditators, and we can transform the poor people who have been victims of unknown forces -- and have been punished by us. They have suffered in a double sense.
First, they are suffering from an unknown biological force. Secondly, they are suffering at the hands of your judges -- who are nothing but butchers, henchmen -- your advocates, all kinds of your law experts, your jailers. It is simply so insane that future human beings will not be able to believe it.
It is almost the same as in the past: mad people were beaten to cure their madness; people who were schizophrenic, who were thought to be possessed by ghosts, were beaten almost to death -- this was thought to be the treatment. Millions of people have died because of your great treatments.
Now we can simply say that those people were barbarous, ignorant, primitive. The same will be said about us. I am already saying it: that your courts are barbarous, your laws are barbarous.
The very idea of punishment is unscientific.
There is nobody in the world who is a criminal; everybody is sick, and needs sympathy and a scientific cure, and most of your crimes will disappear.
But first private property has to disappear: private property creates thieves, dacoits, pickpockets, priests, politicians.
Politics is a disease.
Man has suffered from many diseases and he has not even been aware that they are diseases. He has been punishing small criminals and he has been worshipping great criminals. Who is Alexander the Great? A great criminal; he murdered people on a mass scale. Adolf Hitler alone killed millions of people, but he will be remembered in history as a great leader of men.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Nadirshah, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane are all mass-scale criminals. But their crimes are so big, that perhaps you cannot conceive.... They have killed millions of people, burned millions of people alive, but they are not thought of as criminals. And a small pickpocket, who takes away a one-dollar note from your pocket will be punished by the court.
Once private property disappears.... And in a commune there is going to be no private property, everything belongs to all; naturally, stealing will disappear. You don't steal water and accumulate it, you don't steal air. A commune has to create everything in such abundance that even a retarded person cannot think of accumulating it. What is the point? It is always available, fresh.
Money has to disappear from society.
A commune does not need money. Your needs should be fulfilled by the commune. All have to produce, and all have to make the commune richer, affluent, accepting the fact that a few people will be lazy. But there is no harm in it.
In every family you will find somebody lazy. Somebody is a poet, somebody is a painter, somebody simply goes on playing on his flute – but you love the person. A certain percentage of lazy people will be respectfully allowed. In fact a commune that does not have lazy people will be a little less rich than other communes which have a few lazy people who do nothing but meditate, who do nothing but go on playing on their guitar while others are toiling in the fields. A little more human outlook is needed; these people are not useless. They may not seem to be productive of commodities, but they are producing a certain joyful, cheerful atmosphere. Their contribution is meaningful and significant.
With the disappearance of money as a means of exchange, many crimes will disappear.
As religions disappear, with their repressive superstitions and moralities, crimes like rape, perversions like homosexuality, diseases like AIDS will become unheard of. And when from the very beginning every child is brought up with a reverence for life -- reverence for the trees because they are alive, reverence for animals, reverence for birds -- do you think such a child one day can be a murderer? It will be almost inconceivable.
And if life is joyous, full of songs and dances, do you think somebody will desire to commit suicide? Ninety percent of crimes will disappear automatically; only ten percent of crimes may remain, which are genetic, which need hospitalization – but not jails, prisons, not people to be sentenced to death. This is all so ugly, so inhuman, so insane.
The new commune, the new man, can live without any law, without any order. Love will be his law, understanding will be his order.
Science will be, in every difficult situation, his last resort.
-OSHO
