Question :

Osho,

What will be the Legal System used in the new commune until all of its members are totally conscious? Will there need to be a system of punishment and reward?

 

 

Maneesha, all legal systems are nothing but the revenge of society — revenge against those who don’t fit in with the system. According to me, law is not for protection of the just, it is for protection of the crowd mind; whether it is just or unjust does not matter. Law is against the individual and for the crowd. It is an effort to reduce the individual and his freedom, and his possibility of being himself.

 

The latest scientific researches are very revealing. The people who are termed criminals are not responsible for their crimes; their crimes are genetic, they inherit them. Just as a blind man is not responsible for his blindness, a murderer is not responsible for his murderousness. Both inherit the tendency — one of blindness, another of committing murder. Now it is almost an established scientific fact that punishing anybody for any crime is simply idiotic. It is almost like punishing somebody because he has tuberculosis — sending him to jail because he is suffering from cancer. All criminals are sick, psychologically and spiritually both.

 

In my vision of a commune, the courts will not consist of law experts, they will consist of people who understand genetics and how crimes are inherited from generation to generation. They have to decide not for any punishment, because every punishment is wrong — not only wrong, every punishment is criminal. The man who has committed anything wrong has to be sent to the right institution; maybe a hospital, to be operated on, or a psychiatric institution, or a psychoanalytic school. He needs our sympathy, our love, our help. Instead of giving him our sympathy and love, for centuries we have been giving him punishment. Man has committed so much cruelty behind such beautiful names as order, law, justice.

 

The new man will not have any jails and will not have any judges and will not have any legal experts. These are absolutely unnecessary, cancerous growths on the body of society. There will certainly have to be sympathetic scientists; meditative, compassionate beings, to work out why it happened that a certain man committed rape: is he really responsible? According to me, on no account is he responsible. Either he has committed rape because of the priests and the religions teaching celibacy, repression for thousands of years — this is the outcome of a repressive morality — or biologically he has hormones which compel him to commit rape.

 

Although you are living in a modern society, most of you are not contemporaries because you are not aware of the reality that science goes on discovering. Your educational system prevents you from knowing it, your religions prevent you from knowing it, your governments prevent you from knowing it.

 

A man is attracted to a woman and thinks that he is in love. The woman also thinks she is in love. But the scientific truth is that they both have certain biological factors, certain hormones that attract each other. That’s why it is possible to change the sex of one person from man to woman or from woman to man just by changing the hormonal system. A good injection of hormones and you are full of love.

 

The man who is committing rape perhaps has more hormones than those moral people who manage to live with one woman for their whole life, thinking that they are moral. The real fact is that their hormones are very weak; it is enough for their hormones to be satisfied with one woman. A man with more hormones will need more women; so will be the case with a woman. It is not a question of morality, it is a question of biology. A man who commits rape needs all our sympathy, needs a certain operation in which his extra hormones are removed, and he will cool down, calm down — he will become a Gautam Buddha.

 

To punish him is simply an exercise in stupidity. By punishing, you cannot change his hormones. Throwing him in jail, you will create a homosexual, some kind of pervert. In American jails they have done a survey: thirty percent of the inmates are homosexuals. That is according to their confession; we don’t know how many have not confessed. Thirty percent is not a small number. In monasteries the number is bigger — fifty percent, sixty percent. But the responsibility lies with our idiotic clinging to religions which are out of date, which are not supported and nourished by scientific research.

 

The new commune of man will be based on science, not on superstition. If somebody does something which is harmful to the commune as such, then his body has to be looked into; he needs some physiological change or biological change. His mind has to be looked into — perhaps he needs some psychoanalysis. The deepest possibility is that neither the body nor the mind are of much help; that means he needs a deep spiritual regeneration, a deep meditative cleansing.

 

Instead of courts, we should have meditative centers of different kinds, so every unique individual can find his own way. And we will have — instead of law experts, who are simply irrelevant: they are parasites sucking our blood.We need scientific people of different persuasions in the courts, because somebody may have a chemical defect, somebody may have a biological defect, somebody may have a physiological defect. We need all these kinds of experts, of all persuasions and schools of psychology, all types of meditators, and we can transform the poor people who have been victims of unknown forces… and have been punished by us. They have suffered in a double sense.

 

First, they are suffering from an unknown biological force. Secondly, they are suffering at the hands of your judges, who are nothing but butchers, henchmen; your advocates, all kinds of your law experts, your jailers — it is simply so insane that future human beings will not be able to believe it. It is almost the same with the past.

 

Just the other day there was a report from South India that a woman was thought to be having intercourse with the devil. Now the devil has been almost dead for many centuries; suddenly he became alive in that small village. And the villagers took the woman to the priest who declared that she should be hung upside down from a tree and beaten: the devil is still inside her. Somebody informed the police of the nearby town. The police arrived, but the villagers were reluctant…. Two hundred villagers were standing, stopping the police, saying, “You cannot interfere with our religious conceptions.” And they were beating the woman — they killed her! Until she was dead, they were not satisfied. They could not find the devil, but they killed the woman.

 

This used to be the common practice all over the world. Mad people were beaten to cure their madness; people who were schizophrenic, who were thought to be possessed by ghosts, were beaten almost to death — this was thought to be the treatment. Millions of people have died because of your great treatments.

 

Now we can simply say that those people were barbarous, ignorant, primitive. The same will be said about us. I am already saying it: that your courts are barbarous, your laws are barbarous. The very idea of punishment is unscientific. There is nobody in the world who is a criminal; everybody is sick, and needs sympathy and a scientific cure, and half of your crimes will disappear. First, with the disappearance of private property…. Private property creates thieves, dacoits, pickpockets, politicians, priests.

 

You will be surprised to know that just a few days ago a cartoonist was put into jail in the contemporary, educated city of Madras, because he has printed a cartoon in a magazine with the caption that the man who looks like a pickpocket is a cabinet minister; and the man who looks like a dacoit, is the prime minister. There were two men in the cartoon. Immediately, he was caught by the police — and this is called democracy! One cannot even joke, one cannot even laugh. He has not named anybody — but all your politicians are pickpockets, are dacoits. They also need psychiatric treatment, they also need sympathetic psychiatric nursing homes. They have to be cured of their politics. Politics is a disease.

 

Man has suffered from many diseases and he has not even been aware that they are diseases. He has been punishing small criminals and he has been worshiping great criminals. Who is Alexander the Great? — a great criminal; he murdered people on a mass scale. Adolf Hitler alone killed millions of people, but he will be remembered in history as a great leader of man.

 

I received a letter from the president of the Neo-Nazi party saying that I should stop speaking against Adolf Hitler because, “It hurts our religious feeling.” I said, “My God!” I had been receiving letters from Hindus, from Mohammedans, from Christians, from Buddhists, from Jainas. I have been facing hundreds of cases in courts on the same grounds, that I have hurt somebody’s religious feeling — but I had never even dreamt that to speak against Adolf Hitler was going to hurt someone’s religious feelings.

 

And the president of Neo-Nazi party had said, “Adolf Hitler, to us, is not just a great political leader, he is also the reincarnation of the ancient, Old Testament prophet Elijah. Now he will be remembered in history as the great incarnation of the prophet Elijah who killed forty-five million people. Certainly it must have been done according to the will of God. Who are the people you read about in history?

 

Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Nadir Shah, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane are all mass scale criminals. But their crimes are so big, perhaps, that you cannot conceive…. They have killed millions of people, burned millions of people alive, but they are not thought of as criminals.

 

And a small pickpocket, who takes away a two rupee note from your pocket will be punished by the court. And perhaps the two rupee note that you were carrying was not authentic at all. But his mother is dying, and he has no money for medicine, and I cannot say that he is a criminal; he is simply a kind-hearted man who loves his mother.

 

Once private property disappears…. And in a commune there is going to be no private property, everything belongs to all; naturally, stealing will disappear. You don’t steal water and accumulate it, you don’t steal air. A commune has to create everything in such abundance that even the retarded person cannot think of accumulating it. What is the point? It is always available, fresh. Money has to disappear from society. A commune does not need money. Your needs should be fulfilled by the commune. All have to produce, and all have to make the commune richer, affluent, accepting the fact that a few people will be lazy. But there is no harm in it.

 

In every family, you will find somebody lazy. Somebody is a poet, somebody is a painter, somebody simply goes on playing on his flute — but you love the person. A certain percentage of lazy people will be respectfully allowed. In fact a commune that does not have lazy people will be a little less rich than other communes which have a few lazy people who do nothing but meditate, who do nothing but go on playing on their guitar while others are toiling in the fields. A little more human outlook is needed; these people are not useless. They may not seem to be productive of commodities, but they are producing a certain joyful, cheerful atmosphere. Their contribution is meaningful and significant.

 

With the disappearance of money as a means of exchange, many crimes will disappear. As religions disappear, with their repressive superstitions and moralities, crimes like rape, perversions like homosexuality, diseases like AIDS will become unheard of. And when from the very beginning every child is brought up with a reverence for life — reverence for the trees because they are alive, reverence for animals, reverence for birds — do you think such a child one day can be a murderer? It will be almost inconceivable.

 

And if life is joyous, full of songs and dances, do you think somebody will desire to commit suicide? Ninety percent of crimes will disappear automatically; only ten percent of crimes may remain, which are genetic, which need hospitalization — but not jails, prisons, not people to be sentenced to death. This is all so ugly, so inhuman, so insane. The new commune, the new man, can live without any law, without any order. Love will be his law, understanding will be his order. Science will be, in every difficult situation, his last resort.

 

- Osho, "The Golden Future, #24"