Theodore Dalrymple

The Frivolity of Evil

When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt

to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping.

Autumn 2004

When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping.

You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in

advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it.

Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released

from prison, but the debt is not paid off.

It would be just as absurd for me to say, on my imminent retirement after 14 years of my

hospital and prison work, that I have paid my debt to society. I had the choice to do

something more pleasing if I had wished, and I was paid, if not munificently, at least

adequately. I chose the disagreeable neighborhood in which I practiced because,

medically speaking, the poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich: their

pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder,

seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. No doubt

I also felt my services would be more valuable there: in other words, that I had some

kind of duty to perform. Perhaps for that reason, like the prisoner on his release, I feel I

have paid my debt to society. Certainly, the work has taken a toll on me, and it is time to

do something else. Someone else can do battle with the metastasizing social pathology of

Great Britain, while I lead a life aesthetically more pleasing to me.

My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best

prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting

the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened

to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my

mind.

No doubt my previous experiences fostered my preoccupation with this problem. My

mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and though she spoke very little of her life

before she came to Britain, the mere fact that there was much of which she did not speak

gave evil a ghostly presence in our household.

Later, I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had recently

been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought

between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies,

opposed by armies that didn’t scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the

current dictator was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or

driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses

or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected

intellectual. In Liberia, I visited a church in which more than 600 people had taken

refuge and been slaughtered, possibly by the president himself (soon to be videotaped

being tortured to death). The outlines of the bodies were still visible on the dried blood

on the floor, and the long mound of the mass grave began only a few yards from the

entrance. In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized,

abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made

the Sun King look like the personification of modesty.

Still, all these were political evils, which my own country had entirely escaped. I optimistically supposed that, in the absence of the worst political deformations,

widespread evil was impossible. I soon discovered my error. Of course, nothing that I

was to see in a British slum approached the scale or depth of what I had witnessed

elsewhere. Beating a woman from motives of jealousy, locking her in a closet, breaking

her arms deliberately, terrible though it may be, is not the same, by a long way, as mass

murder. More than enough of the constitutional, traditional, institutional, and social

restraints on large-scale political evil still existed in Britain to prevent anything like what

I had witnessed elsewhere.

Yet the scale of a man’s evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences.

Men commit evil within the scope available to them. Some evil geniuses, of course,

devote their lives to increasing that scope as widely as possible, but no such character has

yet arisen in Britain, and most evildoers merely make the most of their opportunities.

They do what they can get away with.

In any case, the extent of the evil that I found, though far more modest than the disasters

of modern history, is nonetheless impressive. From the vantage point of one six-bedded

hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just

described and 5,000 victims of it: nearly 1 percent of the population of my city—or a

higher percentage, if one considers the age-specificity of the behavior. And when you

take the life histories of these people, as I have, you soon realize that their existence is as

saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship.

Instead of one dictator, though, there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own

little sphere, his power circumscribed by the proximity of another such as he.

Violent conflict, not confined to the home and hearth, spills out onto the streets.

Moreover, I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers:

run not by the government, as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum

enterprise, the drug dealers. Young men and women in debt to drug dealers are

kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds, and beaten or whipped. Of

compunction there is none—only a residual fear of the consequences of going too far.

Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings

it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one

requires people to commit it. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil ordinary men

and women do they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires

heroism. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, for example, a man who failed to report a

political joke to the authorities was himself guilty of an offense that could lead to

deportation or death. But in modern Britain, no such conditions exist: the government

does not require citizens to behave as I have described and punish them if they do not.

The evil is freely chosen.

Not that the government is blameless in the matter—far from it. Intellectuals

propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention

and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws

that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people

from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it

flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of

man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.

Of course, my personal experience is just that—personal experience. Admittedly, I have looked out at the social world of my city and my country from a peculiar and possibly

unrepresentative vantage point, from a prison and from a hospital ward where

practically all the patients have tried to kill themselves, or at least made suicidal

gestures. But it is not small or slight personal experience, and each of my thousands,

even scores of thousands, of cases has given me a window into the world in which that

person lives.

And when my mother asks me whether I am not in danger of letting my personal

experience embitter me or cause me to look at the world through bile-colored spectacles,

I ask her why she thinks that she, in common with all old people in Britain today, feels

the need to be indoors by sundown or face the consequences, and why this should be the

case in a country that within living memory was law-abiding and safe? Did she not

herself tell me that, as a young woman during the blackouts in the Blitz, she felt perfectly

safe, at least from the depredations of her fellow citizens, walking home in the pitch

dark, and that it never occurred to her that she might be the victim of a crime, whereas

nowadays she has only to put her nose out of her door at dusk for her to think of nothing

else? Is it not true that her purse has been stolen twice in the last two years, in broad

daylight, and is it not true that statistics—however manipulated by governments to put

the best possible gloss upon them—bear out the accuracy of the conclusions that I have

drawn from my personal experience? In 1921, the year of my mother’s birth, there was

one crime recorded for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it

was one for every ten inhabitants. There has been a 12-fold increase since 1941 and an

even greater increase in crimes of violence. So while personal experience is hardly a

complete guide to social reality, the historical data certainly back up my impressions.

A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal—in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me,

claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and

then called an ambulance.

There is something to be said here about the word “depression,” which has almost

entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of

the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be

unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply

significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical

condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means.

Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to

be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of

mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a

belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward

from conduct.

A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be

ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to

the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to

see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own

power and responsibility. The patient’s notion that he is ill stands in the way of his

understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The

doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than

enlightening.