The people of Pardonious XII had a very harmonious society. The most harmonious of all the worlds of men. At least that’s what you’d believe were you to watch the fiction and documentaries of their world.
Their media was required by law to not promote violence of any kind. Physical, sexual, emotional, economic, racial, some rogue artists still produced it, but they were reviled, and their works banned when ever discovered. The result was a media free of any depiction of wrongdoing.
The people believed that depictions of immoral acts caused people to perform them. Their politicians preached this doctrine regularly, their news channels espoused those views routinely, and for the average citizen, no depiction of any form of violence ever crossed their vision.
But the problem endured. Worsened it, in fact. Their statistics showed since the passage of the Safer World Act, the world steadily became less safe. It baffled the pundits and politicians, who double down on the need to be vigilant against the tide of fictional horrors. Some crimes did drop. For example, lone gunmen were less common, as the manifestos of lone gunmen were not widely publicized and discussed.
Other, much more commonplace forms of violence such as domestic violence, especially in generations raised after the ban, however, steadily rose. With it, murders (as most murders are acts of domestic violence), hate crimes, and sexual assaults followed a similar trend. The statistics were the talk of the news, and all the pundits and politicians agreed that simply weren’t doing enough to stamp out these pirate artists and their patrons.
However, the scientists were not so certain. Research, research which no one would agree to publish, not because it wasn’t peer verified but rather because it had a pro-depiction of violence implication showed a bimodal distribution in likelihood to perform violence compared to frequency of viewing depictions of violence. Research into the nature of the depictions further showed that it seemed that certain features of the individual determined which categories they’d fall into, regardless of the nature of the depiction.
This research was generally performed via studies of individuals on other worlds, but it from the data it appeared that depictions of violence decreased the likelihood of performing violence in individuals with high empathy scores and increased it in those with low empathy scores. Research motivating the ban had focused only on those performing the violence, those with low empathy scores, and ignored the skewed nature of the empathy distribution. By eliminating depictions of injustice and violence, they had reduced the understanding of the nature of those things in the empathetic majority and had, in turn, created a society which bred rampant ill behavior.
Several studies, unpublished of course, into the matter found that the percentage of violent criminals expressing extreme and sincere regret of their crimes had steadily risen since the ban, mirroring the increase in the crime rate. It was also found that crimes of passion, ones in which the violence was committed in a period of extreme and unreasoned emotion, increased along the same curve as well, while methodical, pre-planned violent acts were relatively unchanged.
The researchers on Pardonious XII were left with a heavy dilemma, how to convince the public that depictions of wrongdoing, even those done in bad taste, actually decrease the likelihood of a person performing similar wrongdoing, by mere virtue of stimulating the mind to think about it? Experts believed that the real solution to the problem was the nurture of empathy beginning at a young age, and most importantly, the nurture of empathy for victims of violence through depictions of violence.
The scientists were at a loss. The solution was too nuanced and complicated. It didn’t fit on a poster board. A politician couldn’t stick it on a button. News pundits would put the masses to sleep reporting it. People would have to just go on, never being exposed to anything problematic, and therefore, never truly thinking about the problem.
