Maybe, no child is beyond redemption, but there are people that are worse than worthless. The people that gave Ishmeal the Brown-Brown and the AK, f'instance. There is nothing that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld or Henry Kissinger could EVER do that would redeem their lost humanity.
Pardon me if I have lost reverence for human life, we have proven ourselves to be a malignant virus. I have much more respect for animals.

Nobody Is Beyond Redemption

Not true. George Wanker Bush and Cheesedick Cheney are most definitely beyond redemption. His Excellency, The Great Obama, is more than halfway there.

Perhaps no one is beyond redemption. But the cost of redemption is an interesting one.

Ishmael Beah reformed when he reached a place where his former actions no longer made sense. Of course his reform was progressive and partial - unsurprisingly.

I suggest that this might be because he took some time to confront and learn the differences in his surroundings.

We see little redemption and little rehabilitation, whether of prisoners, politicians, or CEO's. However, that may be because they remain in a society in which their crimes make sense.

Just as Beah had some reason to believe he had to kill, 0bama has some reason to believe he must footsie lobbyists more sweetly and parse vacuities more smoothly than McCain if he is to achieve power, for better or for worse.

Let me draw a deep breath and say, folks, that this applies to Dick Cheney. Somewhere deep inside, Cheney is a babe who wants his mum, fears the dark, and has decided that he must do unto others, since they're surpassingly likely to want to do unto him.

To be clear none of this means we should not lock these misfits up or that we should let them out if they feign rehabilitation. Anyone that dangerous and that psychopathic should be securely disabled.

To rehabilitate anyone, we must make sure that the misbehaviour that made sense to that person in that persons situation no longer makes sense.

Beah had to be removed from situations in which he could imagine that he had to shoot people to live well.

Analogously, Cheney has to be removed from situations in which he can imagine opportunities to achieve power by lies, manipulation, and social machinery. He has to be shorn of money and power, in other words, a jail, perhaps including a stretch at solitary confinement, is probably as good a chance at humanity as this society has to offer him right now.

I'm stretching terms a bit, but chronic misbehavior has to do with something like PTSD.

Somebody banged Cheney up and left him in pretty bad shape. That doesn't mean we have to give him a tab of acid, a bottle of Old Granddad, and a shotgun, but we ought to acknowledge it so we don't go do the same thing to someone else.

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The principles can be generalized, in part, if we do so carefully.

Not only are we born creatures of need, we remain so, every one, though we develop through our various attempts at fulfilment.

I would suggest that what happens to us in this regard largely determines where we place ourselves between extremes of coercion, cooperation, and isolation.

Rather than attempt to prove the following, I ask that you examine yourselves and your children to see whether it does not ring true.

- Humans prefer cooperation to isolation and coercion, but shift strategies quickly on contingency.

- Humans anticipate cooperation, isolation, coercion, or all manner of nuanced distinctions in the above, depending on what they have experienced.

- Once experienced, humans fight, flee, or cooperate based not exactly on the results of those actions, but on the results that we anticipate.

Examine the rhetoric of people in different political camps and see whether the following does not hold true.

People with faith in human capacities (accurate or otherwise, and often despite considerable moralistic kvetching) gravitate towards classical anarchist and contemporary progressive positions in that they favor broad cooperation with little coercion. I'd place Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Chomsky, and Nader very roughly in this category.

People vary from this broad position depending on what they fear, whether that fear is reasonable or unreasonable.

So, a libertarian a la Ron Paul might fear that any institutionalisation of cooperation may lead to undue coercion, that apparently benign social propositions to share will lead to Maoist or Leninist centralization.

Alternatively, a Lenin or Mao might observe that expecting the rich to cooperate without force is useless or worse. Similarly, they fear the coercion and damages involved in that historically massive lack of cooperation.

A fascist or similar despot, or most of the guys I used to chat with by the Bianchi holster rack in my father's sporting goods store - let's say Mussolini, Reagan, or Cheney for public figures - apparently fear both. They imagine that respect is a function of fear and supply a manner of coercion and reward.

And of course things get confusing because each of these fears does indeed have palpable historical basis. The Commune de Paris and the Anarquistas of the Spanish revolution got squashed, and support for the ideas of St Simone and Bakunin begat Lenin who begat Stalin - so to speak.

We have to create an environment in which cooperation draws blessing and coercion achieves nought. That's pretty difficult, especially given our own pasts and problems.

But it might help to recognize that every action in which we engage has the added function of teaching our associates.

In politics and economic life, I'm afraid, it must amount to a large amount of non-cooperation and very selective cooperation with predominantly malignant government and industry.

In homes and schools with children, we should massively move away from coercion and towards supplying of need, especially the need for attention that gets ignored wholesale nowadays as parents flee their griefs through distractive consumption.

And we need to construct social groups structured to use common resources equitably. I need to go farther in research of this, but so far I have found Elinor Ostrom's work in this area quite exciting.

I think specific structures derived from her amendments to game theory might enable the creation of viable sub-national (probably very sub-national) cooperative groups.

Should relatively stable groups exist, these will have considerably more advantages for members than do the largely predatory institutions of the broad society.

Such circumstances would render these fears largely maladaptive and might redeem a lot of us less psychopathic than Cheney.

Congenital brain defects make it impossible for some people to ever empathize with the plight of others, be they human beings or other animals. That is why you find that most psychopaths tortured animals when they were children - they didn't ask to be born like that. On the other hand, there are children who were raised under such horrific conditions that they lost any contact with their own humanity. We need to separate the two conditions and find remedies for both - without punishment. After all, no child comes into this world with the intention of being a sociopath or displaying overt sociopathic behavior - they do no make that choice and should NEVER be punished for it. We need to find ways to protect society from the true psychopaths, and ways to help the 'manufactured' sociopaths to redeem their humanity. Maybe we could ask Finland for some help with this problem - they seem to have a good solution.

As for people like Bush, Cheney, Kissinger, et al, - I do believe they are born sociopaths and society needs to be protected from their predations - but we can't do that until they are charged and held responsible for their heinous crimes - and Americans seem unwilling to do that. In fact, they tend to choose psychopaths as idols and leaders - so where is the problem, really? The values of a society are reflected in their leaders - a moral society would rebel against such horror and fight to restore sanity and humanity. But that isn't easy with the addiction to violence so prevalent in the US. I don't see any change on the horizon, either - the Nazis weren't about to change until the Russsians crushed them. Maybe that is the only way any culture that has become so anti-social can change.

As for the horrific wars in the past - most of them were waged between competing armies - few were truly wars of aggression and conquest against ordinary people. Religion is one of the few drivers of all-out murder against the innocent, just as true today as in the days of the Crusades.

There ARE people beyond 'redemption,' and probably more than one would think. Christ is credited as saying, "Let the dead bury their dead." In the work of Gurdgieff-Ouspensky, a type of man called a 'Hasnamuss,' is described who exhibits the following traits:

(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious

(2) The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray

(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures

(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature

(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one’s physical defects

(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved

(7) The striving to be not what one is.

When trying to redeem such a person, they might pretend to be trying to change, while secretly laughing at your gullibility, and wait for the opportunity to act out their dark impulses. It's hard to believe such monsters exist, until you watch the news and hear about the murder of little children.

Modern psychology labels such individuals as psychopathic, or sociopaths, and they can appear quite charming and charismatic on the surface.