Winston Smith, the protagonist of the novel, writes in his diary: "Thoughtcrime does not entail death; thoughtcrime is death." Then Winston remarks in another part of the novel, "Thoughtcrime is the only crime that matters." As a matter of fact, thoughts are the birth of actions, and the brain is the breeding ground. Nothing will change unless, first, the change comes in thought.

"The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion," writes American journalist Elizabeth Drew. Thoughts work by the way of opinion. And opinions are convictions, when the thinking mind is convinced that his line of thinking can't go wrong. It is, therefore, important to look for a criminal in his thoughts. In a funny way, crime is also a matter of opinion.

A criminal, like rest of us, looks at the world through the prism of thoughts, the banality of his crime justified as an expression of how he likes to relate to the world. Some people don't pay taxes because they want to cheat the government. Its called tax evasion. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes because he didn't believe in the government. It was tax resistance.

It is said that society, like fish, starts rotting from the head. It is the same with individuals. It starts with the brain, where thoughts become putrid, when mind becomes crooked and vile, when profane appears as profound, distortion as normal. Henry Kissinger observed that Nixon could have been a different man "if only he had been loved when he was a child." Whether the distortions occur at birth or during upbringing, whether it's congenital or acquired, the crux of the matter is that thoughts are the way a man is made.

Thus the crime scene is the display centre for what is manufactured in the brain. The five senses are vendors, who provide raw materials for the finished products, and whether the degradation takes place in supply or production, criminal thoughts are concoctions where instincts and impulses let out deadly fumes. When a stinky rich politician steals relief goods, using CI sheets to build cow-pens and stables for his horses, and biscuits to feed those animals, it is irrelevant whether we blame his Maker or his mother. The miserable man has simply lost his soul.

So, I would say it is time to crack down on thoughts. Yes, we are cracking down on crime, going after people who put formalin in fish, adulterated food, sold expired medicine, grabbed land, abused power or stole public money. But there was a thought behind each of these horrible crimes, the thought which made perfect sense to them when they committed those atrocious acts.

A century ago, Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote a masterpiece, "The Man Without Qualities," describing the "second reality" that the ideologue creates out of his imagination so he can settle in comfortably in his web of lies and never have to live in, or even look at, reality again. The criminal is also an ideologue of some sort who likes to live in this fabrication, his misdeeds giving active form to his sordid thinking.

If a criminal kills, if he steals, anything that he does and everything that he dares, germinates in the fertile ground of his ominous conviction, which grows in the cover of his false pretension. He becomes an innovator, an entrepreneur, a job creator, reformer, and saviour. He runs industries, owns newspapers, TV channels, shopping malls, amusement parks and then gets involved in politics and charity. He creates his own reality which is devoid of the reality that is real.

Perhaps it was Confucius who argued that when words lost their meaning, chaos ensued. Thoughts are like clouds and words are like rain. The very small drops of water moving around in the clouds bump into each other, join together and grow bigger. Then these drops become too heavy and rain down on earth. Similarly, thoughts carry ideas which bump into each other to become opinion, and when the opinion becomes too heavy, the thinker can't hold. That is when he begins to talk. But his words lose meaning when they become shelter for mischief.

Leaders, commanders, men of authority, ringleaders and zealots work through their audience with the power of words. Millions get roused, even to give their lives in the frenzy of spoken words. More people died in revolutions and purges than in territorial wars. One estimate has it that 160 million people died in wars and revolutions in the 20th century. "The Black Book of Communism" published by Harvard University press reports that communist revolutions alone cost 100 million lives, a whopping 49 million killed by Mao Zedong during his Cultural Revolution! The lords of words proved deadlier than the lords of wars.

It shows that the clash of ideas is more dangerous than the conflict of interests. And the battle of minds is more atrocious than territorial conquests. The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia often cut the ears of their enemies and forced them to eat those ears before they were killed. It was as if a ritual to close the circle by forcing one to swallow the words one spoke.

In a way, every crime is an act of conquest. The mind takes over a new realm of connivance and cruelty. It exceeds expectations to set up a new regime of insensibilities. The criminal is inspired by these insensibilities as much as a revolutionary is driven by his zeal. For a criminal crime is freedom, crime is martyrdom. Crime endures after the criminal is dead.

We need to destroy the spirit of crime which hides in our thoughts. Henceforth, let us make it a crime if we don't practice what we preach

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.