Through the exposure of Dylan Voller’s treatment in detention by Four Corners and the subsequent Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory in 2016, Australians have come to understand that the Northern Territory has notoriously cruel prisons, where children as young as ten are locked up under appalling conditions and where young adults suffer unspeakable wrongs, such as being locked up for 23 hours a day with little or no daylight.1 The high number of suicide attempts bears witness to these conditions. These prisons exist to punish. They are built around the premise that people have the freedom to decide their actions, and thus wrongful deeds should be discouraged by punishment. It is a view of human behaviour that assumes a rational agent carefully weighing several options and then pursuing the most favourable option. However, what if this assumption, and therefore the entire criminal justice system built upon it, is incorrect? What if human behaviour is not based on a centralised self with free will and that humans act not out of freedom but are following predisposed influences that act upon their unconscious minds?
Modern empirical research, beginning with the experiments of Benjamin Libet in the 1980s (which showed that the brain/body makes decisions before they become conscious and then, when they rise to consciousness, we take credit for them), has shown time after time that the
'self' that we experience as solid, sitting behind our eyes making decisions, is, in fact, more like an orchestra. When one listens to an orchestra, one has a sense of there being a single piece of music. We hear it as one harmonious whole, but we also know that this is only because the different musicians and instruments are performing their separate tasks. There is no single entity distinct from its components. The same can be said about the ‘self ’. The orchestra is a collection; brains and consciousness can be said to work like an orchestra. Different systems work together and create a sense of oneness because they harmonise. When one of the instruments is damaged (receives trauma), the orchestra plays a little out of tune. When more than one instrument is damaged, the orchestra cannot function.
A traumatised brain is like an orchestra playing with damaged instruments.
Pjotr Ouspensky, who was an experienced meditator and, therefore, an observer of the mind, said, in his In Search of the Miraculous: “We say, “’I’ did this,” “’I’ think this,” “’I’ want to do this” — but this is a mistake. There is no such ‘I’… there are hundreds, thousands of little ‘I’s in
every one of us…” “Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking ‘I.’ And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation,
now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.”
Image; ABC, Four Corners, 2016
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