“I have considered all the aggravating and mitigating circumstances in the present case. The imposition of appropriate punishment is the manner in which the courts respond to society’s cry for justice against the crime. Justice demands that the courts should impose punishments befitting the crime so that it reflects public abhorrence of the crime.”
This is an excerpt from the Nirbhaya case judgment that was passed by the Supreme Court bench of Justices Dipak Misra, R Banumathi, and Ashok Bhushan on May 5.
A society that is morally bankrupt and follows moral relativism is not a true bearer of justice. It is one led by false men who pick enemies from time to time to distract you from the real evil the system itself is.
Social media allows you to be a part of this game where justice is served faster than fast track courts and the only end to a crime is to not only take away everything from the accused but also take their life for nothing less will gratify the mob, created.
Your need for a reward by scrolling and refreshing is served by other people putting out newer and different content than you saw yesterday. In such a design, even a similar reward i.e what you received yesterday doesn’t excite you enough because it makes you feel you deserve more for the time you put in today.
You start demanding more than the normal pictures your friends put up. You need more. The algorithm knows this. It predicts what you want to see by cataloguing your interests against those who make the content you want to see. When a man or a woman is called out and you share it with a notion of righteousness, it has less to do with you contributing to the greater good for justice and more so to quench your own desire for reward in this system of slot trickery casino game-like environment.
Today, 15-year-olds have FIRs against them and one died by suicide only because our collective thirst for a constant bombardment for content is not satiated. Allegations however serious can be dealt with in the mechanism of one’s own environment, schools, offices, police, or courts. The law is there to protect you and if you want justice you should appeal to it first. A thorough examination of facts, counters, appeals, and a learned bench of judges are all available to all of us for this. There is a reason why the process for justice takes time. It is not one without examination and retribution.
When you accuse someone online, you have passed on the judgment to your own. You seek to punish them in isolation without a sense of the environment that has brought upon the crime you allege against them. You want the worst for them because you are the one and only judge, jury, and executioner for them. The slot machine starts working. All the mindless scrollers start getting rewarded in the system and you feel you have caused change or at least satisfied yourself when you feel the immediate gratification and adoration you get for being brave.
But these actions have effects outside of our little casino game. People die. Their friends family and society all partake in this charade of evaluating others with the moral superiority of a monk who has given up all the pleasures of the world. I see people cheering for police action against the 15-year-olds. This could have been achieved without the enthusiasm of millions of people online too. But for the little reward the online world gave you, you were ready to gamble their right to unbiased justice. In 1693, in a small city by the name of Salem in Massachusetts, a growing number of women were identified as witches.
Some were seemingly behaving like witches as men claimed back then, while others later were found to be suffering from epilepsy causing frequent seizures. The trial was such that there were a series of tests all intended to prove that these women were in fact witches and to execute them for their being one. If you were accused of being a witch the only way you could save yourself from execution was to accept that you were a witch and live your remaining life as such, in isolation.
The other option was a public execution. It didn’t matter to the public then that these were just ordinary women with epilepsy. It can even be argued that the public wanted justice and the courts did right by them. Anything less than death would not have served the purpose of the public. There was no examination, there was no sense there was no waiting.
Often when you see your followers, or your views or the number of shares you forget these are actual real breathing people. You see someone sharing something about someone, in your fits, you rob yourself of the truth that a real person is made of so much more than what they do in a moment. You forget the society in which they live. You assume that the moment defined them. Here’s a name – Manav Singh.
A 17-year-old accused his classmate that he molested her. No evidence, no trial, just a mob of people who wanted the end of him. The next time you refresh your page for newer faces, newer pictures newer captions remember, it’s a slot machine, made to gamble with the lives of others and then, you.