Every industrialized country produces crime, but not in equal measure. The United States, despite its wealth, education, and technology, has long had a strikingly higher rate of violent crime than other developed nations. Kevin N. Wright, an assistant professor in New York, argued that the explanation is not simply weak social control – broken families, bad neighborhoods, absent policing – but something built into the American way of life itself: personal autonomy, a materialistic lifestyle, the decline of the extended family and close-knit community, and a broader breakdown of shared moral restraint that together push young people toward crime as an available option.
Wright’s deeper claim is that this way of life doesn’t just fail to prevent crime – it actively runs on a habit of exploitation, and crime is simply the most visible, most punishable expression of a much larger pattern.
What Actually Holds People Back?
Wright poses a simple thought experiment. Think of a moment when you were angry enough at someone to want to hit them, even hurt them badly – and you were ready to do it. What actually stopped you? It probably wasn’t the police, or the law, or the fear of jail; in that moment you likely weren’t thinking about consequences at all. Some internal restraint held you back before any external threat could. Coercion and force, Wright points out, cannot build or sustain social order on their own – a society held together only by threats of punishment isn’t really held together. What actually restrains most people, most of the time, is an internalized respect for the law and for others, instilled through upbringing, education, and community – not the deterrent effect of punishment after the fact.
That internal restraint is precisely what a culture of exploitation erodes.
Exploitation as a Way of Life
In industrialized societies, Wright argues, social control isn’t only about preventing crime – it exists inside a much wider, everyday process of people taking unfair advantage of each other, most of which never gets classified as a crime at all. The line between what the law punishes and what society simply tolerates is not very meaningful in practice: both criminal acts and ordinary exploitation flourish wherever legal culture is weak and internal restraint has eroded.
If exploitation is defined broadly – taking unjust advantage of someone else for personal gain – examples are not hard to find in everyday life, in America and in Pakistan alike.
Consider the classroom. Studies in the United States have found cheating widespread across secondary schools and universities. It is no less common in Pakistan, where an entire ecosystem around examination fraud has taken root. A dishonest student copying from a classmate is exploiting that classmate’s effort for personal benefit – a small, familiar act that nonetheless follows the same logic as larger crimes: someone else’s labor or trust, taken without consent.
Consider the marketplace. Deceiving consumers is one of the most common and normalized forms of exploitation in industrial life. Markets built on volume – Lahore’s Shah Alam Market is a well-known example – do enormous business in cosmetics, lipstick, face powder, soap, shampoo, and household chemicals, a large share of which turn out, after purchase, to be counterfeit. False advertising has become an art form in its own right: newspapers run advertisements for miracle cures for “hidden” illnesses, electrical treatments for complex diseases, and cures for addiction or venereal disease that have no real medical basis. Some who run these schemes justify themselves with a simple principle – caveat emptor, let the buyer beware – as if the deception itself were not the point. Newspapers that profit from carrying these advertisements are complicit in the same exploitation; Urdu-language papers, Wright’s source material argued, have historically been among the worst offenders.
Consider medicine, a profession founded explicitly on service rather than profit. Even here, the profit motive has displaced the mission in places. Doctors sometimes recommend expensive tests or surgery of doubtful necessity. In the United States, federal investigations into the Medicare program have uncovered elaborate schemes involving doctors, hospitals, and health institutions billing for care patients didn’t need. Pakistan has its own version of the same problem, regularly reported in the press: counterfeit medicines manufactured and sold on a commercial scale. Even something as mundane as a dental visit can become exploitative – a dentist called in to remove a single tooth who insists a full cleaning and scaling are also “necessary,” inflating the bill for a service the patient never asked for and cannot easily refuse.
Children absorb the same logic early. If a parent can skip work by claiming to be sick when they aren’t, a child reasons, why can’t I skip an exam the same way? If a workplace is careless enough that tools and supplies go missing without consequence, an employee may reason their way into taking something for themselves. The exploitative habit, once normalized at the top of a household or a company, tends to travel downward.
Why the Line Is So Hard to Draw
In a society where this kind of everyday exploitation is common, it becomes genuinely difficult to say where legally acceptable behavior ends and misconduct begins. Are legal definitions simply too narrow? Do people quietly adjust their sense of right and wrong to fit their own convenience? Is this a problem confined to a few bad actors, or does it describe how people in that society generally deal with one another? Where mutual deception is an accepted, unremarkable part of daily transactions, it becomes hard to convince anyone that exploitation is actually wrong – because almost everyone has learned to practice some version of it.
The determination of what counts as crime is itself shaped by a society’s dominant culture. As long as people at every social level accept different forms of exploitation and pursue financial gain through both legal and illegal channels without much distinction between the two, crime in the narrower legal sense will keep being committed – because the underlying appetite it feeds on is never actually addressed.
The same logic extends to more disturbing territory: the commercial exploitation of the human body, including pornography and, most seriously, the exploitation of children for profit, which degrades both the exploited child and the childhood of anyone exposed to it – an industry in which people spend enormous sums on material built entirely on using another person. Even crime reporting itself can become a form of exploitation: sensational coverage of frightening crimes sells newspapers and expands the budgets of the institutions that report on them, both profiting from someone else’s suffering.
Success at Any Cost
None of this should be especially surprising in a culture that measures its own worth by success and achievement. The trouble is that real achievement is hard to come by honestly, and it becomes far more tempting to reach for shortcuts, especially once results start to justify whatever method produced them. A society only reliably rewards honest achievement when it consistently values honesty, self-restraint, and respect for others above the achievement itself – and in practice, status, wealth, and property tend to command far more respect than the means used to acquire them, in Pakistan as much as anywhere else.
Familiar workplace mantras carry the same message in miniature: I don’t care how you get it done. Show them who’s the boss. Get it at any price. Taken together, these attitudes describe a culture in which using other people for personal advantage is not an aberration but an accepted, even admired, way of getting ahead – and crime, in this reading, is only the small, visible, punishable fraction of a far larger and more tolerated pattern. One fair objection remains worth raising: exploitation that is formally labeled a crime is only one category of it. The exploitation that never gets prosecuted – the counterfeit cosmetics, the unnecessary surgery, the rigged exam, the predatory advertisement – may deserve just as much condemnation, precisely because it is never punished at all.
No Comments