ANYTHING GOES

Britain and the West are mired in a culture of untruth, wilful blindness and ideologically-motivated
deceit, argues Theodore Dalrymple in this collection of brilliant and beautifully-written essays.
This has had a variety of effects - some trivial, others less so. From political correctness among
doctors to the ruinous failures of the World Health Organisation, from riots in London to sex
changes for 12-year-olds, from the end of free speech to the strange fury of evangelical atheists,
and from the collapse of our bubble economy to the failure of the criminal justice system, it all
goes back to the death of honesty.

SO LITTLE DONE
Graham Underwood worked as a government housing officer - until he was jailed for killing at
least 15 people in a spree spanning several years. However, rather than showing remorse, this
serial killer attempts to justify his actions and goes as far as to claim that he has done the world a
public service in eliminating his victims...
A witty satire about serial killing.
 PREFACE

THE FRAGILITY of civilisation is one of the great lessons of the twentieth century. At the
beginning of that century, optimism that technical and moral progress went hand in hand was, if
not quite universal, at least widespread. As the late-nineteenth-century Russian writer V. G.
Korolenko put it, man was born for happiness as a bird for flight. Thanks to increasing scientific
and technological mastery, humanity would become ever wealthier, ever healthier, and therefore
ever happier. Wisdom would follow as a matter of course.
Mankind has indeed become ever wealthier and ever healthier. The fact of progress is
obvious. The life expectancy of an Indian peasant, for example, now exceeds by far that of a
member of the British royal family at the apogee of British power. In much of the world, poverty is
no longer absolute, a lack of food, shelter, or clothing; it is relative. Its miseries are no longer
those of raw physical deprivation but those induced by comparison with the vast numbers of
prosperous people by whom the relatively poor are surrounded and whose comparative wealth
the poor feel as a wound, a reproach, and an injustice.
But if the hope of progress has not proved altogether illusory, neither has the fear of
retrogression proved unjustified. The Great War destroyed facile optimism that progress toward
heaven on earth was inevitable or even possible. The most civilised of peoples proved capable of
the most horrific of organised violence. Then came communism and Nazism, which between
them destroyed scores of millions of lives, in a fashion that only a few short decades before would
have appeared inconceivable. Many of the disasters of the twentieth century could be
characterised as revolts against civilisation itself: the Cultural Revolution in China, for example, or
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Only ten years ago, in Rwanda, scores of thousands of ordinary
people were transformed into pitiless murderers by demagogic appeals over the radio. They
achieved a rate of slaughter with their machetes never equalled even by the Nazis with their gas
chambers. Who now would bet heavily against such a thing ever happening again anywhere in
the world?
One might have supposed, in the circumstances, that a principal preoccupation of intellectuals,
who after all are supposed to see farther and think more deeply than ordinary men and women,
would be the maintenance of the boundaries that separate civilisation from barbarism, since those
boundaries have so often proved so flimsy in the past hundred years. One would be wrong to
suppose any such thing, however. Some have knowingly embraced barbarism; others have
remained unaware that boundaries do not maintain themselves and are in need of maintenance
and sometimes vigorous defence. To break a taboo or to transgress are terms of the highest
praise in the vocabulary of modern critics, irrespective of what has been transgressed or what
taboo broken. A review of a recent biography of the logical positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer, in the
Times Literary Supplement, enumerated the philosopher’s personal virtues. Among them was the
fact that he was unconventional – but the writer did not feel called upon to state in what respect
Ayer was unconventional. For the reviewer, Ayer’s alleged disregard of convention was a virtue in
itself. Of course, it might well have been a virtue, or it might equally well have been a vice,
depending on the ethical content and social effect of the convention in question. But there is little
doubt that an oppositional attitude toward traditional social rules is what wins the modern
intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals. And the prestige that intellectuals confer
upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to non-intellectuals. What is good for the
bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare
recipient – the very people most in need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them
hope of improvement. The result is moral, spiritual, and emotional squalor, engendering fleeting
pleasures and prolonged suffering.
This is not to say, of course, that all criticism of social conventions and traditions is destructive
or unjustified; surely no society in the world can have existed in which there was not much justly
to criticise. But critics of social institutions and traditions, including writers of imaginative literature,
should always be aware that civilisation needs conservation at least as much as it needs change,
and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles, is capable
of doing much – indeed devastating – harm. No man is so brilliant that he can work out everything
for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to tell him. To imagine otherwise is to
indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.
Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in
which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals has made bad situations incomparably
worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous
notions about how to live derive ultimately from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous
ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable
practical importance and effect. John Maynard Keynes wrote, in a famous passage in The
Economic Consequences of the Peace, that practical men might not have much time for
theoretical considerations, but in fact the world is governed by little else than the outdated or
defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers. I agree: except that I would now add
novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers. They are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world, and we ought to pay close attention to what they say
and how they say it.
 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. 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 neighbourhood 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 metastasising 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 terrorised, 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 behaviour. And when you take the life histories of these people, as I
have, you soon realise 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 offence 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 behaviour
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-coloured 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 wilfully 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.
My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among
my patients, or indeed in the country as a whole. The father of her first child had been violent, and
she had left him; the second died in an accident while driving a stolen car; the third, with whom
she had been living, had demanded that she should leave his apartment because, a week after
their child was born, he decided that he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of
incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.)
She had nowhere to go, no one to fall back on, and the hospital was a temporary sanctuary from
her woes. She hoped that we would fix her up with some accommodation.
She could not return to her mother, because of conflict with her ‘stepfather,’ or her mother’s
latest boyfriend, who, in fact, was only nine years older than she and seven years younger than
her mother. This compression of the generations is also now a common pattern and is seldom a
recipe for happiness. (It goes without saying that her own father had disappeared at her birth, and
she had never seen him since.) The latest boyfriend in this kind of ménage either wants the
daughter around to abuse her sexually or else wants her out of the house as being a nuisance
and an unnecessary expense. This boyfriend wanted her out of the house, and set about creating
an atmosphere certain to make her leave as soon as possible.
The father of her first child had, of course, recognised her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her
own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as
flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible—sober him up
and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him.
The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug
addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all
about his past before she had his child.
The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have
a child—in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by
three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever.
The conditions for the perpetuation of evil were now complete. She was a young woman who
would not want to remain alone, without a man, for very long; but with three children already, she
would attract precisely the kind of man, like the father of her first child—of whom there are now
many—looking for vulnerable, exploitable women. More than likely, at least one of them (for there
would undoubtedly be a succession of them) would abuse her children sexually, physically, or
both.
She was, of course, a victim of her mother’s behaviour at a time when she had little control
over her destiny. Her mother had thought that her own sexual liaison was more important than the
welfare of her child, a common way of thinking in today’s welfare Britain. That same day, for
example, I was consulted by a young woman whose mother’s consort had raped her many times
between the ages of eight and 15, with her mother’s full knowledge. Her mother had allowed this
solely so that her relationship with her consort might continue. It could happen that my patient will
one day do the same thing.
 My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne children of
men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the
meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her—and say to
hundreds of women patients in a similar situation—proved: next time you are thinking of going out
with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I’ll tell you if you can go out with him.
This never fails to make the most wretched, the most ‘depressed’ of women smile broadly or
laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I
mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite
literally in the form of tattoos, saying ‘FUCK OFF’ or ‘MAD DOG.’ And they understand that if I can
spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they—and therefore they
are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.
Moreover, they are aware that I believe that it is both foolish and wicked to have children by
men without having considered even for a second or a fraction of a second whether the men have
any qualities that might make them good fathers. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may
turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider the question is to act as irresponsibly as it
is possible for a human being to act. It is knowingly to increase the sum of evil in the world, and
sooner or later the summation of small evils leads to the triumph of evil itself.
My patient did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet
her refusal to take seriously and act upon the signs that she saw and the knowledge that she had
was not the consequence of blindness and ignorance. It was utterly wilful. She knew from her
own experience, and that of many people around her, that her choices, based on the pleasure or
the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only of herself, but—
especially—of her own children.
This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure
for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than
the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of
doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better
phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an
extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life’s rich tapestry?
The men in these situations also know perfectly well the meaning and consequences of what
they are doing. The same day that I saw the patient I have just described, a man aged 25 came
into our ward, in need of an operation to remove foil-wrapped packets of cocaine that he had
swallowed in order to evade being caught by the police in possession of them. (Had a packet
burst, he would have died immediately.) As it happened, he had just left his latest girlfriend—one
week after she had given birth to their child. They weren’t getting along, he said; he needed his
space. Of the child, he thought not for an instant.
I asked him whether he had any other children.
‘Four,’ he replied.
‘How many mothers?’
‘Three.’
‘Do you see any of your children?’
He shook his head. It is supposedly the duty of the doctor not to pass judgment on how his
patients have elected to live, but I think I may have raised my eyebrows slightly. At any rate, the
patient caught a whiff of my disapproval.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. Don’t tell me.’
These words were a complete confession of guilt. I have had hundreds of conversations with
men who have abandoned their children in this fashion, and they all know perfectly well what the
consequences are for the mother and, more important, for the children. They all know that they are
condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse, and hopelessness. They tell me so
themselves. And yet they do it over and over again, to such an extent that I should guess that
nearly a quarter of British children are now brought up this way.
The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism, and joyous malignity that staggers and
appals me. I am more horrified after 14 years than the day I started.
Where does this evil come from? There is obviously something flawed in the heart of man that
he should wish to behave in this depraved fashion—the legacy of original sin, to speak
metaphorically. But if, not so long ago, such conduct was much less widespread than it is now (in
a time of much lesser prosperity, be it remembered by those who think that poverty explains
everything), then something more is needed to explain it.
A necessary, though not sufficient, condition is the welfare state, which makes it possible, and
sometimes advantageous, to behave like this. Just as the IMF is the bank of last resort,
encouraging commercial banks to make unwise loans to countries that they know the IMF will bail
out, so the state is the parent of last resort—or, more often than not, of first resort. The state,
guided by the apparently generous and humane philosophy that no child, whatever its origins,
should suffer deprivation, gives assistance to any child, or rather the mother of any child, once it
has come into being. In matters of public housing, it is actually advantageous for a mother to put
herself at a disadvantage, to be a single mother, without support from the fathers of the children
and dependent on the state for income. She is then a priority; she won’t pay local taxes, rent, or
utility bills.
As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now
father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket
money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a
spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demanding, querulous, self-
centred, and violent if he doesn’t get his own way. The violence escalates and becomes a habit.
A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant.
But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. After
all, the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and
yet our rates of social pathology—public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal
disease, hooliganism, criminality—are the highest in the world. Something more was necessary
to produce this result.
Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is
economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described,
but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the
intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that
it is now taken for granted. There has been a long march not only through the institutions but
through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe
themselves as ‘nonjudgmental.’ For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.
There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is
endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer
choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those
areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like,
and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything
material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer
choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the
state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such
non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil
War.
The consequences to the children and to society do not enter into the matter: for in any case it
is the function of the state to ameliorate by redistributive taxation the material effects of individual
irresponsibility, and to ameliorate the emotional, educational, and spiritual effects by an army of
social workers, psychologists, educators, counsellors, and the like, who have themselves come to
form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.
So while my patients know in their hearts that what they are doing is wrong, and worse than
wrong, they are encouraged nevertheless to do it by the strong belief that they have the right to do
it, because everything is merely a matter of choice. Almost no one in Britain ever publicly
challenges this belief. Nor has any politician the courage to demand a withdrawal of the public
subsidy that allows the intensifying evil I have seen over the past 14 years—violence, rape,
intimidation, cruelty, drug addiction, neglect—to flourish so exuberantly. With 40 percent of
children in Britain born out of wedlock, and the proportion still rising, and with divorce the norm
rather than the exception, there soon will be no electoral constituency for reversal. It is already
deemed to be electoral suicide to advocate it by those who, in their hearts, know that such a
reversal is necessary.
I am not sure they are right. They lack courage. My only cause for optimism during the past 14
years has been the fact that my patients, with a few exceptions, can be brought to see the truth of
what I say: that they are not depressed; they are unhappy—and they are unhappy because they
have chosen to live in a way that they ought not to live, and in which it is impossible to be happy.
Without exception, they say that they would not want their children to live as they have lived. But
the social, economic, and ideological pressures—and, above all, the parental example—make it
likely that their children’s choices will be as bad as theirs.
Ultimately, the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the
continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic
consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the
policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomised British
society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of
hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened,
however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would
make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they
should feel bad about themselves—another aspect of the frivolity of evil. Moreover, if members of
the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they
might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behaviour, for you cannot long demand
of others what you balk at doing yourself.
There are pleasures, no doubt, to be had in crying in the wilderness, in being a man who
thinks he has seen further and more keenly than others, but they grow fewer with time. The
wilderness has lost its charms for me.
I’m leaving—I hope for good.
 THE STARVING CRIMINAL

RARELY DOES THE British Journal of Psychiatry produce in the reader anything other than déjà
vu at best and ennui at worst; but an article in the July issue was startling in its implications and
accordingly won wide publicity.
Researchers carried out a double-blind trial of the effect of vitamin and mineral supplements
on the behaviour of prisoners aged 18 to 21. Two hundred and thirty-one such prisoners were
divided randomly into two groups: one that received real vitamins, one that got only a placebo.
Those who received the real vitamins committed about a third fewer disciplinary offences and
acts of violence during the follow-up period than those who took the placebo.
The researchers demonstrated that the two groups of prisoners did not differ in any respect
before the trial (though, importantly, they did not control for previous or current usage of illicit
drugs). Thus the reduction in antisocial behaviour was in all probability attributable to the
vitamins. True, the results have yet to be reproduced elsewhere, and reproducibility is the
hallmark of genuine scientific discovery. True, too, the researchers offered no explanation of why
the vitamins produced their alleged effects—and the supplements contained so many vitamins,
minerals, and fatty acids that it would take several lifetimes to establish exactly which ones
produced the alleged effect.
Still, the trial raised hopes of a breakthrough for Britain’s crime-ridden, even crime-dominated,
society. Could it be that simply handing out vitamin pills to our potential burglars and muggers
could make our homes and streets more secure?
Those who have long been on the lookout for reasons to exempt criminals from responsibility
for their acts—as a sign of their own generosity of spirit—will conclude from these results either
that crime is a manifestation of physical illness of the brain or that it is the result of poverty that
itself gives rise to that illness.
But we should exercise caution: other interpretations are, as always, possible. That many
young inmates are grossly malnourished when they enter prison I have absolutely no doubt,
because each day I see cases of severe malnutrition among those who have recently entered the
adult prison in which I work. Of an average daily intake of 20 prisoners, perhaps six, of whom four
are drug addicts, show obvious outward signs of malnutrition. A rough estimate (allowing for
recidivism) would suggest that perhaps 1,000 malnourished men arrive in my prison annually:
that means (if my prison is typical, and there is no reason to suppose otherwise) that each year at
least 25,000 malnourished men enter the British prison system. What is more, the malnutrition that
I see in the prison is also to be found in the hospital in which I work, among men (and, to a lesser
extent, among women) of the same social class as the prisoners.
Were a film director to need extras to play the part of starving Bosnians in a movie about the
Serbian atrocities, he would need to look no further than my prison’s daily intake. The prisoners’
sunken eyes, which appear disproportionately large in the setting of their sunken cheeks and
prominent cheekbones, their spindly limbs, and their hollow chests with paper-bag skin,
punctuated with unhealing sores, over their bony rib cages, would fit the director’s bill perfectly.
The prisoners’ teeth are falling out; their tongues are glisteningly smooth, angrily magenta red,
and the corners of their mouths are cracked, as in vitamin B deficiency. They are in their early
twenties to their early thirties.
From the dietary point of view, freedom has the same effect upon them as a concentration
camp; incarceration restores them to nutritional health. This is a new phenomenon, at least on the
scale on which I now see it. Last week, for example, I treated in my hospital a skeletal man who
had been released from prison only two months before and had in that short time lost 44 pounds.
A recidivist, he had served many short sentences for theft, and his weight went up and down
according to whether he was in prison or at liberty. This is a common enough pattern of weight
gain and weight loss among the males of my city’s underclass. It has a meaning quite alien to
those who believe that modern malnutrition is merely a symptom of poverty and inequality.
About two-thirds of these malnourished young men take drugs, upon which they spend sums
of money that, however obtained, would secure them nightly banquets. The drugs they take
suppress their appetite: the nausea induced by heroin inhibits the desire to eat, while cocaine and
its derivatives suppress it altogether. The prostitutes who stand on the street corners not far from
where I live—they work a shift system and commute in from a nearby town in buses chartered by
their pimps—are likewise grossly malnourished (they often end up in my hospital), and for the
same reason. You’d think famine were stalking the land.
Not all the malnourished are drug-takers, however. It is when you inquire into eating habits, not
just recent but throughout entire lifetimes, that all this malnutrition begins to make sense. The trail
is a short one between modern malnutrition and modern family and sexual relations.
Take the young burglar whom I saw in the prison last week. There was nothing remarkable
about his case: on the contrary, he was, if I may put it thus, an average British burglar. And his
story was one that I have heard a thousand times at least. Here, if anywhere, is the true banality of
evil.
He smoked heroin, but the connection between his habit and his criminality was not what is
conventionally assumed: that his addiction produced a craving so strong, and a need to avoid
withdrawal symptoms so imperative, that resort to crime was his only choice. On the contrary—
and as is usually the case—his criminal record started well before he took to heroin. Indeed, his
decision to take heroin was itself a continuation, an almost logical development, of his choice of
the criminal life.
He was thin and malnourished in the manner I have described. Five feet ten, he weighed just
over 100 pounds. He told me what many young men in his situation have told me, that he asked
the court not to grant him bail, so that he could recover his health in prison—something that he
knew he would never do outside. A few months of incarceration would set him up nicely to
indulge in heroin on his release. Prison is the health farm of the slums.
I examined him and said to him, ‘You don’t eat.’
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘And when you do eat, what do you eat?’
‘Crisps [potato chips] and chocolate.’
This pattern