As of the date I commenced writing this document (2006/04/02), one can easily say that the Earth is not at peace.  At least seven countries are involved in a full-scale war with other countries, close to a million people were recently butchered in Rwanda, perhaps two times that will be slaughtered in Darfur, five countries have significant levels of terrorist activites, and crime in many cities is at or near all-time highs.

In major cities in the USA the murder rate frequently falls in the hundreds per city per year:  during the year 2002 in Chicago, the murder rate was 648 people, which is about one person murdered for every forty-five hundred people (648 people murdered / 2,938,299 people = 1/4534).  Clearly, this is a frightening statistic.  One in one hundred million is trivial.  One in forty-five hundred is non-trivial.  In a very simplified but objective manner a one in forty-five hundred murder rate is like saying, "I have a 99.978% chance of not being murdered this year".  Again, this is a very simplified way of viewing the stats, but sometimes removing other factors from a problem and looking at it from a more simplied viewpoint can help shed light on possible solutions to the problem.  Economics professors say, "all other things being equal, …".

There are trends worldwide, and some countries experience problems that other countries do not.  As an American, I will limit my analysis herein to the USA.  Parallels may be drawn in other countries; i.e., early in 2006 in France, non-trivial amounts of rioting and crime have been reported, allegedly because the government is not addressing people's problems and issues.  While that may or may not be true, I will not attempt to analyse the "situation" in France, because I do not live there, and my information may not be accurate.  An accurate analysis requires accurate data.  Since I cannot get accurate information on this situation in France, I cannot analyze it using logic.  For example, let's say the reporting of the rioting was way overblown, and the real cause was a gang war.  That scenario is radically different from a scenario wherein a group of people, based on some criteria, were being discriminated against by the government.

An accurate logical analysis requires accurate data.

Let us logically begin to analyze the "current state of affairs" by looking at violence in the USA.  While it is quite troubling that the murder rate is so high, more troubling in the rate of murder in the USA is that the murder rates of certain minority groups are higher than the murder rates of the majority group.

For example, if we look at the issue of race, there is violence against blacks by whites, "other races", and "unknown races".  It would be logical to assume that at least some component of this violence is racism.  We cannot determine how much of a part racism plays in this violence, because the FBI statistics do not report "hate crimes", and as stated above, we require accurate data to make an accurate analysis.  (This is all the more reason for a federal law to be passed classifying racism as a "hate crime" or, at the very least, for the government to track this data).

However, if we look at the issue of gender, we can determine more about the issue of gender-based murder, because FBI statistics almost always document the gender of the perpetrator of the murder.  Let's look at the murders of women.  The FBI statistics break down the murders of women into two categories of perpetrators:  men and "unknowns".  In 2002, 3251 females were killed by 3169 men, 372 women, and 41 unknowns.  First, with all due respect to the women that were murdered by "unknowns", as the "unknowns" represent less than two percent of the murders, they are not "statistically significant" to our discussion here and thus for the purposes of this discussion we'll ignore the "unknowns".  Now, consider the large gap between the gender of the perpetrators - 3169 men vs. 372 women.  This means a woman is more than 8 times more likely to be killed by a man than by a woman.  This is clearly a most troubling statistic.  Is it because women are viewed as "weaker" than men?  Is it because women are considered by men to be more "vulnerable"?  Are the men who murder women cowards who want to murder someone, and consider women "easy pickings"?  These questions cannot be answered by the FBI statistics, because the data simply isn't there.  We're closer at understanding gender-based crime than we were at understanding race-based crime, but we still can't close in on the answer because of the lack of data.

Instead, all we can do is to use logic to analyze criminal behaviour.

So what are the underlying reasons for these crimes against women?  Anger?  Rage?  Xenophobia?  Prejudice?  Homophobia?  Ignorance?  Jealousy?  Stupidity?  The concept of "not understanding the differences" between the perpetrator and the victim could be considered a common denominator of some form.  The perceptions that "whites don't understand blacks", "men don’t understand women", "caucasians don't understand asians", "heterosexuals don't understand homosexuals", and "no one understands transgendered people" could challenge the perpetrator and cause him/her such unease that they become violent.  Many people simply don't "get" other people and they overreact by feeling inadequate, e.g., "why can't I understand this?  I must be an idiot!" Rather than study and learn, they become angry by "not knowing"; i.e., by being challenged.  Some people clearly resent being challenged.

Doubtless at least some of the aggressors suffered from one or more mental illness categories (e.g., borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, etc.) But very few defendants succeed at the "mentally not responsible" approach during their defense in a court of law.  The majority of perpetrators of these crimes have been judged as being aware of the consequences of their actions.  The majority of perpetrators have committed these crimes as the result of a pique of anger, the desire for revenge, or some other emotion.  Very few people (percentage-wise) committing crimes of this nature have multiple personality disorder, are schizophrenic, etc.

So if the majority of people commiting what one could call "anti-social" crimes are doing so as a result of anger or apathy or some other emotional-based issue or feeling, we could say that they are committing emotion-based crime, which I will refer to as "emotion crime".  Racism, for example, is a hatred of one or more races of people. Racism is hate-based and since hate is an emotion, racism is emotion crime.  Thus one can conclude that violence against women, hate crimes, racism, homophobia et al are emotional acts, and crimes committed due to these reasons are emotion crime.

And this makes an excellent exercise in logic.  Here's how we arrive at our conclusion, above, using logic.  Just follow the steps to see how this works.

a)  We acknowledge that there are crimes that are committed against women due to misogyny, against people of different points of ethnic origin due to bigotry, against people of different races due to racism, against people of different religions due to religious bias, against homosexuals due to homophobia, and against transgendered people due to transphobia.

b)  We define that:
 • misogyny is prejudice against women;
 • bigotry is prejudice against point of ethnic origin;
 • racism is prejudice against race;
 • anti-religious bias is prejudice against people that maintain a certain belief system;
 • homophobia is prejudice against gay people; and
 • transphobia is prejudice against gender-variant (e.g., transgendered) people.

c)  We acknowledge that a component of prejudice is emotion.

d)  Since all of the items listed in (b) are prejudice, and prejudice has an emotional component, then crimes committed due to prejudice all have (at least) one thing in common:  emotion.

You could argue, "wait, prejudice isn't an emotion, it's more akin to ignorance or not-wanting-to-know-ness", and that argument has some validity.  But prejudice in and of itself is a concept, or a "state of being".  Being prejudicial within oneself only harms oneself.  It is the application of prejudice that causes people death, suffering, pain, and other trauma.  And the application of prejudice is accompanied by emotion.  We are not talking about the "thought process" of prejudice in (c), above; we are talking about the day-to-day application of it. For example, one may be prejudiced racially against a certain race, but if that person treats the people of that race without differentiation, then there's no emotional component to that person's actions (although there may be an emotional component to their ideas, concepts and beliefs that make them feel that they should be prejudiced racially.)

When we find a crime that has been either triggered by the sensation of an emotion or has been exacerbated beyond "the breaking point" by an emotion, we refer to that crime as an "emotion crime" (or, perhaps more properly, an "emotion-based crime", but this is wordy).  A logical, rational person does not commit an emotion crime; e.g., a logical, rational person does not butcher his employer, stalk his estranged wife, or burn a cross on someone else's lawn.  A logical, rational person may sit down with his employer and try to work out their problems, or go to a divorce attorney, or go to a therapist, or attempt some other peaceful method of problem resolution (take a long walk, work out at the gym, go away for a weekend by themselves, etc.) The fact that anti-social crimes are emotion crimes also applies to war, which is the most extreme example of both an anti-social act and emotion crime.

One of my personal goals is to see how much the world could evolve if people resolved problems in an objective and logical manner.  No one knows what "The Logic Of Surak" was supposed to have been in the Star Trek series, but since it's (fictional) product was a society that is far more respectful to each other than Humanity seems to be today, I thought I'd try - for lack of a better word - to develop a universally-applicable set of logic and then analyse it's applicability to Humanity.  Before writing the Logic of Surak, I tried to understand exactly how the Star Trek authors viewed Vulcans; i.e., what they thought of when they created a Vulcan character.  While writing the Logic of Surak, I tried to view Humanity through Surak's eyes.

If you read this document and follow me through the development of this logic, you may better understand how your emotions react with your reasoning process.  You may view problems or issues that you are facing in your life in a whole new light.  You may work more efficiently, or with more satisfaction.  You may even be happier! And happiness is an emotion everyone should feel.

Thus, It is with profound satisfaction that I present you with a set of logic that can be used to help you organize your life and arrange your relationship(s) with others while at the same time this same set of logic can reduce crime and could even result in world peace:  The Logic Of Surak.