My friends nudged me to read Freakonomics by Stephen D Levitt - which I did by audiobook. Inside, the chapter “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?”, Levitt breaks down how the drug dealing ganglife is little better than working at McDonalds. Recently, Venkatesh has given his two cents on how Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA4) is - in my words - no better or worse than politicians or cops over at Slate.

What gets to me isn’t his knowledge take on GTA4, but his factual accounting of gang life. To succeed in gang life, people need to rely on friends, and like in business, betray associates when the opportunity arises. His basic approach blows the conventional wisdom out of the water: making money, whether from drugs or burgers, is achieved similarly - coerce others to make money for you - whether it’s by hook, crook or book.

This is rather pessimistic viewpoint, but more importantly, it’s a rational, explainable response that helps us understand our place in a capitalist society.

In the last couple of centuries, with the UK’s and USA’s efforts on the rights of children, such as child labor laws and penalties for juvenile criminals, slowly a change of perspective is occurring in other nations. We’re seeing a rise of child abuse investigations in Europe - especially former Soviet Socialist Republic, and Asia is addressing on a nation-by-nation basis, such as Japan beginning to rethink their anime/hentai industry and Thailand’s continuing crackdown on sexual tourism.

For a long time, I’ve postulated a society hold the ethics it’s resources can hold, but here’s a heinous example of how these changes are taking far too long a time to cross cultures: Monster Father imprisons his daughter for 24 years, sires 7 children, kills one of them. The mother did nothing. This isn’t to say that Austrians are pro-abuse as a culture, just that their police didn’t execute when this girl and the children needed them most.

As more of these warped people come to light due to changes in culture, the more likely we’re going to encounter similar extraordinary events, and expose entire cultures of institutionalized and consensual child abuse. Eventually, we have the potential to communicate the abhorrent treatment of young women facing a culture of rape and mutilation in more remote locations.

Children don’t have a choice. We need to set a finite line. A person who physically abuses children as a form of cultural control needs to be excised from the gene pool with prejudice. Cultures that embrace these cultural memes should be pressured by the UN to change and economic efforts should be brought to bare.