Kathryn Paige Harden

symbiotic species.

So wasps reproduce using figs.

If a fig tree notices, I'm anthropomorphizing the tree here, notices that the wasp is a lazy pollinator, it will start to wither the figs that that wasp has laid its eggs in.

So in every system, from very basic organisms all the way up to humans, we see that

having rules and having some action that signals we are going to enforce those rules is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of that cooperative system.

We do need some sort of consequences in order to have any sort of group that functions.

At the same time,

I want to be clear that we live in an incredibly harsh, punitive, incarcerating society.

And the separation that I want to kind of make here, the things I want to pull apart here is, what is the difference between holding people accountable, keeping the group safe,

Signaling that we take the breaking of the rules seriously, but without necessarily making the person who's violated those rules suffer as much as possible.

And often those two things can become collapsed in our imagination.

Accountability versus this punitiveness, this retributive punishment.

I think that there's a couple examples that we can look at, and they're not even utopian examples.

If we look around the world, we can see situations in which people have had to deal with, or societies have had to deal with, the aftermath of what seems like unimaginable violence.

Communities in Africa that have had to reintegrate child soldiers who've committed atrocities against that village, but they were...

also pulled into the army as children.

A Norwegian man, Anders Breivik, who committed one of the worst mass murders in Norwegian history, but also who clearly struggled with serious mental health problems and a bad childhood environment his whole life.

And these are really extreme examples, but they're examples in which

obviously something horrible has been done.

And also, if we look at the developmental histories of the lives of these people, this violence didn't come out of nowhere, right?