The solution to bad (and/or bad faith) corporate actors is robust and unsparing oversight by at least one agency (if not more), peopled and aided by acknowledged experts and administrators appointed by and serving at the pleasure of a democratically elected government and open to supervision and monitoring themselves according to legislated regulation by an assembly of elected representatives and enforced by an armed constabulary paid for by taxing the citizens and under instructions by properly appointed judicial officers as part of the legal system, and as per the Constitution of the country, with every utterance, reasoning, and action of this entire chain transparently open to public scrutiny and reported honestly, impartially, and diligently by an independent press while being debated vigorously without fear or favour by any and every citizen under the protection of the said Constitution.
Much of this can and does go wrong. All the time. After all, the entire system is dependent on the moral integrity of humans, which has always been suspect, if not the actual culprit, throughout history. But the solution to this is even more of the same.
What it (the solution) is most certainly not is killing a person outside of the system without due process. That is murder. Plain and simple. Murder is the ultimate censorship. It is the death of all that we hold dear, every single one of the promises we made ourselves, indeed everything that is supposed to hold civilisation together. The murder of a human being is the murder of the very system that we have built to protect us. Even if the murdered human has manipulated and compromised that very system and is a despicable sample of all that is wrong with our own selves.
The moment we condone (leave alone celebrate) murder, which is, to repeat, a killing without due process, we have compromised everything we stood for and claim to stand for. And then, we have lost all moral right to condemn any murder whatsoever. You see, one person’s terrorist is another’s patriot, with only the system of checks & balances we so painstakingly have built over millennia of human evolution standing in between these two definitions. Take that away, and you have negated 50,000 years of gradual but steady progress towards a better society. It erases the gap between the person you claim has been righteously killed and you. There is no difference between you two.
To murder one person is to murder every person. And to call it justice is to murder justice itself.
I condemn all murder. I am sad we still need to say this in 2024.
