Might I suggest that instead of building lots of prisons or tolerating criminality, we might consciously build a civil culture that emphasizes
community over individualism
(especially the fake “rugged” sort so beloved of plutocratically sponsored pols),
civility over status climbing
(especially the look-at-me worship-me tik-toks and their antecedents), and
(following ancient Greek practice)
mostly considers self-aggrandizement disgusting outside of the realms of actual military and civil valor?
It’s devilishly hard to change a culture, that’s why it’s called “a culture”. The mythology of a country is something ingrained in children from the earliest ages, from the films they see and the stories they are told, and repeated endlessly across their lives.
That’s why the French are French, while right next door the Italians and Italian, and just over the mountains the Germans are a breed apart. Even in the US the Southern culture is wildly different than that in New England, and Minnesota Nice is foreign to Texas, where only the strong survive - even as they all speak the same language (mostly) and live under the same laws (mostly.)
You need only look at how cultures cling to their past and feast on old grievances (talk to an Armenian about the genocide, or US blacks about slavery, or Palestinians about Jews, etc.) Pulling people out of those tropes is well nigh impossible.
Fatal Shore is excellent, and shows how readily powerful governments and other entities simply revel in allowing and even fostering extremely abusive practices within their domains of power.
An accurate, telling and brilliant novelistic look at Australia in that era is the superb The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O’Brian.
itself part of the greatest set of sea going novels ever written
For a quick and easy taste of these books, see the splended, highly reviewed, and easily found for streaming movie Master and Commander, combining elements of two of the novels,
In the summer of 1966 I was chosen to be the “host counselor” at a Boy Scout Camp in the Sierra Nevada range of California to a large group of Australian Boy Scouts assembled by merit and lottery from troops throughout Australia. They gave me my first gray hairs of sheer terror, and a rowdy education. Quite unwisely and illegally I drank some smuggled booze one night with 5 of the oldest in the group, and when I enquired about their familial histories of immigration to Australia they wriggled a bit before pouring out their family tales. Amazing, horrifying, and in their cases utterly inspiring. They told me that it was socially unacceptable to talk about such things with “outsiders”.
