The Discrete Antisystem and a Negative Worldview in Criminal Activity Based on Mastering Time

The mechanisms of aim-setting and decision-making in criminal activity as a four-level hierarchical structure were presented for the Russian criminals known as ‘vory v zakonie’. The first level represents a basic concept of saving one’s own life, borrowed from the Torah. The second level, the ‘Thieves’ Law’, is a set of mental models that has much in common with the adaptation and misinterpretation of old religious and legal systems. The third level is a set of general concepts and ideas about what Good or Evil is in the form of words called ‘Notions’. These levels have no material form; they reflect themselves in models of behaviour and argot as a collective output. The fourth level in the material form of page-long ‘secrete messages’, containing some models of behaviour, are the ‘Frames’ (how to behave in imprisonment), wherein the ‘Vory’s Commandments’ (how to behave at large for young criminals) do not belong to the criminal ideology. This criminal ideology, a discrete antisystem, is enriched by the three ideas found in old religious and legal systems proposed as the ‘fifth feeling of Time’: the memory of the soul in the endless time being awoken after reincarnation, making the past as if it never happened, and knowing the future.