I’m not exactly a law-abiding citizen.

If there’s no traffic coming, I cross on red. On my bike too. And if a road is completely empty, I find it hard to stick to the speed limit. Demonstrating for a cause I believe in? I don’t necessarily need a permit for that.

I’m in favor of laws. But not too much order.

I once spent three days in a police cell because I’d filmed a secret action by anti-militarists for television. The police weren’t very friendly. I was given nothing to read. Nothing to do. Later they had to apologize because I’d been arrested without good reason.

Three days is nothing, of course, compared with what happens to people in dictatorships. But I did get a taste of how awful it is when the people who are supposed to enforce the law suddenly turn against you.

On Monday I wrote about international justice. About Navi Pillay, who received the Nobel Peace Prize. And about the strange situation where we have an International Criminal Court, but the most powerful people on earth often couldn’t care less about it.

In “my” 2125 we don’t need an international criminal court at all.

Not because everybody can get away with whatever they like. But because we’ve finally learned how to stop people from slaughtering each other on a massive scale.

Sound good?

In my book The Only Possible Solution you’ll meet René Girard. A French philosopher who spent much of his life working in America. He had a rather unusual theory about why people go after each other.

According to Girard, we often don’t want something because we really want it ourselves. We want it simply because somebody else has it. It starts innocently enough. Kids suddenly want the same toy because another kid is holding it, and start hitting each other over it. Adults try to outdo one another too. Which can end in pretty childish behavior.

When tensions in a society grow, Girard says something happens that you can see all through history. People look for a scapegoat. Someone to blame for everything that’s going wrong. A minority. Another people. People with a different religion.

If we just exclude those people or chase them away, everything will be fine again.

That’s nonsense, of course. But it works. Sometimes only for a little while.

In the armed conflicts I covered as a reporter, I often saw people who didn’t know each other at all beat each other’s brains out. Simply because they were on the wrong side, came from the wrong country, behaved differently.

Girard thought we first had to understand how that mechanism works. How we dump our own problems on other people. And how violence then leads to more violence.

Imagine children in 2125 learning at school how to recognize a scapegoat. How to tell when someone is trying to make them afraid of a group of people. Learning why leaders sometimes need enemies to stay in power. And then learning how not to go along with it.

Wouldn’t that be at least as important as history or geography?

I know wars don’t start just because one group of people hates another. Most of the time it’s about money and power. All sorts of reasons people turn out to be willing to kill each other for.

But even then, you first have to get enough people to want to fight that war.

And for that, you usually need an enemy.

Maybe in 2125 they’ll look at our international courts in amazement. At all those judges spending years trying to establish who ordered the murder of thousands of people. Not because those judges were doing unnecessary work.

But because we only started dispensing justice after the damage had already been done.

I hope the International Criminal Court will still be there. Somewhere in The Hague. A beautiful old building where schoolchildren go on field trips. And the guide tells them that people who sent hundreds of thousands of others to their deaths were once put on trial here. A museum that teaches us how terribly wrong the world was at certain moments.

The children will probably stare at him in disbelief.

Why did those people do that?

And why did nobody stop them?

Back From The Future is a series of short stories in which I look back from the year 2125 at the world we are creating today.