Coming to terms with an outcome that flattened the national spirit

The collective wail about the Oscar verdict comes from an ancient place where blood must have blood

If there were a hygrometer that could measure the humidity specifically caused by the sighing of humans, on Friday its needle would have shot up to tropic levels. The wave of disappointment that rolled from a Pretoria courtroom into streets, homes and offices around South Africa was almost audible.

Not even Bafana Bafana being kicked out of the World Cup had such power to flatten the national spirit.

The Pistorius trial has gone on for so long that there has been time for everyone to form an opinion on every permutation of every permutation. Professional commentators were not allowed to give their views on Oscar's guilt or innocence before the verdict was announced. Amateurs had no such scruples.

Some tried to keep up a semblance of objectivity. Even when his whimpering evasions turned former fence-sitters against him, there were still those who allowed for the fact that Oscar might not be found guilty of murder, and who allowed also that this outcome would not necessarily mean a miscarriage of justice.

On Friday, many spectators who once claimed to hold no bias abandoned that principle. The emotional response to Judge Thokozile Masipa's verdict was dissatisfaction rather than anger, but when experienced en masse, vague disgruntlement can be more troublesome than overt rage.

A good shout can flush unhappiness from the system. It takes longer to mutter it out.

Judging by the comments on social media, South Africans are quietly crushed by this outcome. Questions rebound and echo: "Does this mean it is fine for anyone to shoot an unknown person through a locked door?" "Why discount the testimony that Reeva must have made a sound after the first bullet hit her?" "How can the 'foreseeability' issue be argued against dolus eventualis on the one hand, and for culpable homicide on the other?"

Cynics might say that after devoting so much time and attention to what felt like a drawn-out television series one expects a crackerjack ending. But there is more to it than that.

Humans seem to enjoy watching other humans being punished, particularly when the prevailing belief is that they are wrongdoers who deserve to suffer. Perhaps it makes the innocent feel superior. Maybe it reassures us that there is a moral net keeping our world in shape, keeping chaos at bay.

In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault wrote: "... the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty." If rough justice acts as a deterrent to other would-be criminals, we reason, there will be fewer victims of crime and we will feel safer.

For punishment to have this effect, it must be witnessed, preferably live and close up. In the Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel brings to life a time in which public executions were common. In one scene, young Thomas Cromwell is encouraged by a motherly woman to watch as a heretic is burnt to death on a pyre. Cromwell's description of a person burning, using sight, sound and smell, is horrifying. The almost-Pythonesque conversation among other watchers is even more disturbing in its callous banality.

That was how things were, five centuries ago. People who fell foul of the law had their heads chopped off or were set alight, in the hope that this would set an example to others.

We have evolved. People who set fire to other people are now criminals, not judges. Right-thinking citizens recoil from them. But the instinct to punish is still within us. The collective wail about the Oscar verdict comes from an ancient place where blood must have blood. Hoping that Oscar would be sent to Pretoria Central is the modern equivalent of hoping to see him drawn and quartered, or stoned at the gates of the city.

Novelists are often astute in piercing the core of human nature. In Sebastian Faulks's Engleby, the eponymous narrator says of police psychologists: "They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule one of human behaviour: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such thing as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone constant motivation."

Engleby also says: "We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing."

Coming from an unstable and antisocial character in a work of fiction, these are not statements that could be quoted in court, but as observations on behaviour they go some way towards ameliorating the outrage that followed the judge's decision that Oscar was not guilty of dolus eventualis murder.

Before last week, hardly anyone outside the legal profession had heard this phrase, meaning "awareness of the likely outcome of an action". Now it is everywhere. And so is the other Latin meaning of dolus - grief.

Robbed of satisfaction, the lynch mob has turned its glare on Masipa. Her supporters, who are legion, have started a #HandsOffJudgeMasipa thread on Twitter. "The court works with evidence, not feelings," wrote one.

Where, then, does this underground tsunami of disappointment find its outlet? Answer: through the #BlameGerrieNel thread, where the dissatisfied vent their spleen.

Blood must have blood. Someone must be punished.