Watching the underclass, the addicted and the stupid getting busted. Doesn’t that make you feel superior?
It is amazing how many shows there are on TV that deal with justice, law and order. It doesn’t matter if it’s reality TV like Cops or fiction like those many CSI shows (all these different offspring of the same formula are a phenomenon in itself). Each country seems to have it own mixture of court TV, forensic documentaries, lawyer dramas and car chases …
In all these shows one topic prevails: the law wins, the bad guys are caught and punished.
One would think that we would want to watch something relaxing in the evening or ignore other people’s problems - instead murder and minute details of investigation seem to be more interesting than some simpler forms of entertainment.
I’ll give you blood, you give me better ratings!
But behind all this is our natural (?) desire for social porn: to participate in what’s going on and staying informed about the newest gossip of the global tribe. It doesn’t matter if it’s a real event like O.J. Simpsons trial or such trivial crap like Paris Hilton going to jail for being a drunken pussy. We want to be informed and we want to ‘relate’ - and it doesn’t matter if it’s a petty criminal or a superstar - or even fictional character.
It doesn’t matter if it’s other humans killing each other or making love to each other - we love to watch and learn intimate secrets behind it all.
But there is another layer to this lust for justice. It’s a double sided affair of the same mechanism of ‘violence’. We all have been victims of social, emotional or even criminal violence - so we want justice, revenge or just the reassurance that we will receive justice and protection. But deep in our fantasies we are also thieves and murderers - we all had the impulse / moments in our life’s to cause mayhem to others out of anger or a simple case of road rage.
Science and bad scripts to the rescue - we bring justice on a weekly basis.
So on one side we want protection from violence - but we also love to explore and participate when others were violent or even killed. For a few minutes we can dive into the mindset of the killer, the victims and the justice system - and compare it to our own inner world. It a mental carnival in which we can play every role and explore their good and bad sides while munching potato chips.
Scientists have shown many times that we mentally and emotionally emphatize on a deep level with other people - no matter if we watch something happening in reality (like driving by a traffic accident and everybody gloats) or a fictional event (we cry when made up characters die or model our lives on their behavior).
Especially in our hysterical media world plus criminals and terrorists at each corner we welcome ’security’, ‘justice’ and ‘protection’ - even when it’s just artificial. Soothing our minds is almost as important as real justice, protection or security.
So watching violence and how others deal with it or are doing terrible stuff helps us to cope with violence in our own lives and shows us new, different or frightening ways to deal with this topic.
But real crime and real violence is no ‘game’ to explore. Especially in fictional crime the dead always return in another series and lethal injuries can be overcome with a good script. Even court TV, recreations or documentaries do not really show the blood, pain and horror or real crimes. So can’t really emphatize, we always only get a filtered nicer version of reality.
Even celebrity victims are pretty dead after being murdered by their celebrity husbands.
Before I finish the empathy aspect of the Justice Porn: it is amazing that we do not really hunger for justice. In many fictional and real stories we are rather fascinated by the dark and evil characters. Some murderers have become celebrities or have a weird cult following. It is more of a social consensus that the bad guys have to loose, not because we love justice, but because we don’t want to be on the receiving end of a bad persons action without protection and the moral high ground against ‘evil doers’.
Since we all can relate to pain and suffering we all agree / empathize that we don’t want to suffer from it. This has nothing to do with justice, this is simply egoism and self preservation.
It’s good to be the king …
One last aspect is the God-complex in all of this. Sitting there and watching the crime like God watches masturbating sinners - we ’see and know’ more than the real or unreal protagonists. We are TV Gods, we know it all - and we also judge the people in the stories and events we watch on screen.
It’s truly pornography of power for the powerless. It’s an illusion of power and simpler version of sitting on a jury bench yourself (just without any responsibility). Most of all ‘all of our couch potato opinions’ don’t have any serious consequences. The law and justice are thankfully no longer bound to popular opinions or people’s anger and rage - at least in most countries.
And that’s a good thing. Instead of ropes for lynching and stones for stonings give them TV.
Stumble it!
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