I feel like it answered a lot of the previous parts of this with the comment your responding to but we see that warlocks even warlocks that are literally just straight up murderers don't become insensate and insane. People who do Mind Tricks become more likely to do Mind Tricks people who do murder become more likely to do murder neither of these things preclude sanity neither of them preclude guilt neither of them preclude surrender.
On some level I fully believe that warlocks have essentially no choice but to get worse the only people that could feasibly help them are they all so people that would separate their heads from their neck if they knew. Which leads to reinforcement cycle of damned if you do - damned if you don't, die on your feet or die on your knees.
The fact that the white Council has no methodology of actually reclaiming the vast majority of any possible warlocks means that warlocks that but do stealthily break the laws just kind of stick around in the white Council letting the paranoia build and their essentially psychosis worsen as time goes on until you get conspiracies like Peabody and the hollow man.
Again I'm not saying that the people who do dark magic aren't being corrupted by it I'm not saying that law breaking isn't a big metaphysical deal even if the intent situations behind it necessitate or change how the corruption manifests.
Just that treating lawbreakers as wild animals when inherently every lawbreaker we've ever interacted within this Quest has been someone who is fully capable of making decisions based on information they know with significant foresight and understanding of consequences which by virtue of being able to accurately interpret reality you have to assume they are sane.
Horace Shaw is a lawbreaker multiple times over he lived in a small house in Australia while growing magic fungus in his basement you think multiple people were just disappearing in like the suburbs of Australia or do you think he could suppress it long enough to just do his research and then occasionally take someone in a premeditated fashion to feed to his mold.
These are people that are capable of showing fear compassion and contrition but have no reason to ever surrender themselves or get help because the only people that could yet again feasibly help them by the people that would separate their head from their neck.
I feel like I'm not making myself particularly clear about this because people have like said that I'm underestimating the slope that black magic puts people on but the slope is nowhere near vertical or at very least the verticality of it seems to differ depending on the circumstance.
So I'm going to reiterate people if they think they're going to be given a fair shake are willing to surrender themselves to authorities they are not willing to just lay down and fucking die. You cannot put an absolute of near certain death and actual certain death and expect people to be okay with picking certain death. Being a warlock almost has nothing to do with that it just facilitates an inciting incident where the options are die on your feet or die on your knees. Which leads the problems I've stated before.
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While I agree that the /intentions/ of the person taking action are not without significance, they carry far less weight than the /consequences/ of that action.
