BETTER4ONE.

I predict, however fancifully and hopefully, that Americans will come to realize that the mass shootings, riots, and frequent murder of young black men will only come to an end after Bill Cosby is exonerated.

The simplest question is this: which is worse? For one innocent man to go to jail, or for fifty women to get raped? It’s obvious; it’s not a matter of opinion: the former is worse.

Fifty innocent victims are well aware of their own condition and victimhood; trauma is made bearable by the comprehension of one’s own virtue, which is, after all, amplified by victimhood. Such is the Socratic notion of victimhood, though there is of course the more contemporary, Sartrean alternative: that we must be held responsible for our own happiness and misery. In this case, fifty women getting raped equates to fifty individuals who knowingly and willingly entered into relationships, of one sort or another, with a man whom they had reason to suspect. It may be true that the reasons they had to suspect him were unsubstantiated, but all the more reason remained for them to be held responsible for disbelieving them.

From a Socratic point of view, the fifty victims each come out better off, each one prospering morally through the relative immorality of their oppressor, but only because they do not unify against him, in depravity, (for what else is a lynch mob?) but continue to stand alone in dignity, preserving the value of the individual by so doing.

Conversely, should an innocent man or even a guilty man be convicted without hard evidence to incriminate him, the precedent would be set for the erosion of the entire legal system. No longer would the law be designed to protect those INDIVIDUALS who lie above it, but rather it would be sabotaged and commandeered to serve those GROUPS who definitionally lie BENEATH IT. Any woman who testifies on behalf of this erosion would be guilty, and then nothing could justify or alleviate her suffering.

Furthermore, we know that our system is just so long as it prioritizes the protection of innocence above the punishment of guilt. We cannot reverse the sorrows of the past, but we can prevent further sorrows from emerging OUT of those sorrows, which is precisely what is prone to happen in the ABSENCE OF a Just Law. Punishment is only the THIRD function of the Legal System; the first is prevention of a crime, and the second is prevention of mob rule. We must ensure that prior to any consideration of punishment, which can only PARTIALLY assuage the TRUE victim’s suffering, and less so to the extent that that victim possesses the virtues of mercy and forgiveness, we prevent the ABSOLUTE suffering inflicted upon an arbitrary SCAPEGOAT.

If we might consider the possibility that one man lies about fifty women, we must just as surely consider the EQUAL possibility that fifty women would lie about one man. It would simply be mad to consider not only that the sheer number of accusers can sway the scales in their favour (when obviously only hard evidence can tip them), but also to consider that ANY rational being would commit so grotesque a fallacy (the most chilling fallacy: ad populum) would already be a form of betrayal against all Humanity.

Regardless of whether or not the man is guilty, we must preclude the conclusion until evidence is produced, and though I feel patronizing for explaining this, as though to children, I should humbly remind my readers that the more people we entertain who attest to something without evidence, the more obviously invalid is the testimony, for evidence has a way of coming forth when enough people are invested in finding it; even ONE person, operating independently, can find evidence for a mystical phenomenon if he or she is sufficiently “biased in favour of one’s own confirmation”.

If even ONE person has that sort of access to any truth, why can’t a mass of fifty? Certainly, numbers begin to tip the scales in the defendant’s favour. We know the motivations for lying, especially since they are no more noble when one enters into employment for a man that one inwardly resents. We also know that conspiracy needs not to have centralized leadership in order to mount; a stand-alone complex can be founded entirely upon an idea, a meme which is propagated through a mass media which we are all participating in. If people burned witches in a time before computers, based entirely upon appeals to authority on the part of the clergy, how much more vulnerable are we now, when each one of us can hear the same sermon through a cell phone that we carry in our pockets!! If media normalizes behaviour, yet we all co-create culture, and the former passive relationship to “truth” is counterbalanced by the active role we take in synthesizing it, then is it not TRANSPARENT that out of the seven-point-seven billion people inhabiting Earth, whose access to the Internet is championed by the United Nations, a measly fifty might produce a lie that is only as effective as our primitive instinct to feel uncomfortable speaking out in a large crowd, a vestige of our tribal heritage which is then sublimated through the channels of a global stage to the same extent that we feel the drive to transcend our tribes and to become global citizens??

Again: despite this, we are all alone. Only the defendants and the plaintiffs truly KNOW what happened, and even they might profoundly disagree. But consider our one alternative to Socrates: Sartre. (Since one has yet to find a more convincing critic or a third option outside of proto-Fascism.) Suppose that all of these women truly are guilty not only for their perversion of the Law but also for their victimhood itself. MUST they live with the shame of what they have done to their scapegoat? Ought these fifty GUILTY women not to go free of that, instead of imprisoning him?

[({Dm.A.A.)}]