Big Trouble or Little Evils: The Ideological Struggle Over the Concept of Harm

Abstract

This chapter argues that there has never been a ‘civilising process’ across the course of modernity but an economically functional conversion of harms from physical brutality to socio-symbolic aggression. The subject’s acceptance of core harms can be best explained in a framework of transcendental materialism, with a focus on the process of deaptation, which proliferates harms in the tension between shifting realities and ossified ideologies. The criminalisation of harms is maintained in a state of imbalance by negative ideology, which legitimises the existing spectrum of harms by constantly warning us of the far greater harms we would risk should we instigate a process of transformation. This dominant ideology operates at the core of the criminalisation process, compelling us to regard specific harms as the ‘price of freedom’.