Relieving the symptoms not enough cure

Although crime is just a symptom of deeper problems, I salute President Duterte for his determination to toughen up on criminals.

Physicians seek to relieve patients of the symptoms of a disease all the time. However, they also address the disease for a lasting cure. Merely treating the symptoms without curing the disease only aggravates a patient’s condition.

For example, despite the addition of 800 FBI agents, 700 drug enforcement agents, and 1,200 federal prosecutors from 1981 to 1992 in the United States, violent crime increased 24 percent from 1987 to 1991 (“A Tough Cop on the Trail of Hope,” Utne Reader, March/April 1993, pages 70-76.)

What are the root causes of crime? One theory of sociologists points to the breakdown of societal life, community life, and family life, which leads to the breakdown of wellbeing, morals and spirituality.  Science, technology and mass media cause and aggravate the breakdown resulting in individualism, materialistic ambition, and lack of concern for others, which in turn motivates drug dealing and all sorts of theft, fraud and corruption. Frustration of one’s desire to be rich and to belong, combined with the devaluation of human life, results in aggression leading to murder, and depression leading to drug addiction.

To fix the symptoms, fix the disease. Similarly, to fix crime, fix society. Just as symptom relief should be completed with the cure, President Duterte’s political will must be supplemented with social wisdom.

—JORI GERVASIO R. BENZON, [email protected]