Translated material
XX century and peace. 1990. #10. ESSAY
ESSAYAnthony Burges
Democracy and violence
Summer causes fatigue, laziness and a breakdown in good citizens. It pushes bad citizens to antisocial acts. In France, youth gangs made robberies with injuries and intentional arson, in Germany - the robbery of the bank with the capture of hostages, with the murder and illegal crossing of the border.
As for the atrocities made by the gangs from Annesi, the British press used in her reports about them a title of one of my books, or rather, the name of the movie staged according to the book "Mechanical Orange". This picture was staged by Stanley Kubrick in playing the main role of Malcolm Mc-Dauwell. The name of the film was a kind of label for the newspaper men to describe youth crimes, and it comes to the point that, by thought, they begin to consider all minor rapists, thieves and killers, who, under the influence of good heat and weather, attack defenseless old people, mainly for the sake of entertainment. The task of the writer is to observe a real life and its description, and not the invention of something that would replace it. So this work (written more than a quarter of a century ago) had a certain accuracy of prediction. Today we live in a world of more violence than in 1971, when the Mechanical Orange movie appeared on English screens, and they now represent me as a guilty to a certain extent for the situation. This, of course, is nonsense, however, it is necessary to answer the question in what extent the media are guilty of increased violence?
The press almost does not contribute to the growth of crime, books contribute to it to a very insignificant extent, but television may play a significant role in this. I have no doubt that young French criminals have seen enough scenes of violence, fights and shootings at home. Bright colors, exciting music, throwing the scenes of murder into trembling ... All this causes boiling blood and helps to transfer violence from the world of arts to the world of surrounding reality.
As the number of television channels increases, the screen is more and more clogged with bloodied corpses, whether they are "scenario" or genuine. There is no difference between a fight in Beirut and a shootout stipulated by the cinematic scenario - both look the same, and our reaction to them comes down to momentary interest. The world of real events and the world of invented events turn into a single whole. I am convinced that violence on screens in our living rooms has a certain influence on the behavior of that youth, the energy of which clearly prevails over intelligence, but, nevertheless, it does not yet replace their original sin. It is easier to destroy than to create. Young people have power and muscles, but they have not yet been taught how to use them for creative purposes. When the only way of self -expression is violence, then the “original sin” of crime is ready to break out, especially when the popular media stimulate it.
Our era is not too different from other eras. In the 19th century, London rabble was a constant threat. In the XVII century, apprentices were always ready to rebel. It seems already proven that humanity is changing little. But in some respects it still improves. International football matches in our era are often accompanied by violence. However, when they just started playing football in England, a severed head was used instead of the ball. Most of our violence belongs, so to speak, to the private sector: Nazi Germany showed us what danger violence carries with us when it becomes part of state philosophy.
Even before they invented the press and began to try to increase its circulation, enduring immoral acts and violence in the headlines, a great many of the thefts, violence and murders, which were not talked about to the public, have already been committed. Now they have entered our house, thanks to the media. However, there are certain indicators of the obvious growth of aggressiveness these days, which are somehow connected with the philosophy of life that has become dominant in the West.
We all recall the golden past, in which, they say, there were no abductions of persons and aircraft, there were no strainers, rapists and unpunished street murders. Such an era, apparently, never existed. However, there were times when the inhabitants of New York - today the cities, probably, with the highest level of violence in the world - could sleep calmly in the central park of summer nights. There were times when residents of all cities considered their human right to walk at dusk along the streets and not to be attacked, the times when passengers of aircraft were not searched in search of weapons and when the safety of residents of apartment buildings did not depend on armed Switches with a terrifying appearance and from internal television surveillance.
You can explain in different ways the origin of this crisis of law and order. However, as it seems, all the explanations converge that in the 20th century the suppression of our primitive instincts has ceased to be considered something dictated from above and, in any case, by something necessarily commendable. And it seems to me that in democratic countries, individual freedom becomes the desired goal for liberal philosophy.
Democracy is based on a complex interweaving of relations between citizens, which implies that the suppression of our internal violent instincts is the duty of each individual soul. The structure of the family inspired this by tradition, and according to the same tradition, the child always learned about his civil duties, still sitting on his father's knees. However, Freud showed that the child should resist his father, that the family is not a prototype of the highest order, but the distribution of roles in the Greek tragedy. By transferring the liberation of the psyche to the social plan, we find that we have managed to overcome their neurosis and live in the world in which permissiveness prevails. Our fathers are no longer the guards of acceptable order for all: young people despise their parents and allows them only biological functions. They made their children, and now their only responsibility is. To feed them. We ourselves. Adults learned to despise those parents who control our societies. We are bad sons and daughters, just like the current youth. And, since the social contract, with which normal citizens should be protected from antisocial elements, apparently, is strongly and our hostility increases to those who oversees us.
We have little confidence in the police, and many responsible citizens show neglect of the laws. We are cynical in relation to the state, the deepest cynicism is reflected in the robberies, abductions of people and murders. Faith in the forefather, God, who rewards, but also punishes, befell the fate of all other prejudices. The church is powerless to apply the Cairo heavenly on immoral acts in the same way as the state is too liberal to subject citizens of the death penalty.
We live in a century that turned the police into an enemy. Honestly, I do not see a solution to the problem of aggressiveness in the law enforcement apparatus, as well as the problems of the effectiveness of its employees. All us have an aggressive instinct. And we all need to be taught to restrain him. So individual crime. opposed to the state. It is a bitter fruit of a liberal tree. This is even one of the aspects of the Liberum Arbitrium - the right to choose that the fathers of the Church presented as the greatest gift of God to man. The solution to the problem of crime lies - I say this with a sigh - in education and in the early Union of the intelligence of young people with a matter of great importance - with the maintenance of public order. Unfortunately, the criminal minds that overshadowed our summer are small caliber minds. In other words, these are the minds of fools.
In the UK - and I have no doubt that in France and Germany - crime indicators are decreasing with age. In England, children aged 9 to 10 years are comprehended, as it is easy to rob and kill the elderly. They use the fact that too small to bear full responsibility in the face of the law. In correctional colonies, they meet with their old friends and plan new robberies and attacks that they will commit when they were released. The number of violent crimes increases everywhere, and defenseless old people turn into the main sacrifices. Traditional ideas about meanness no longer exist, and someone seems entertaining to look at the old woman, flooded with her own blood. With all this, there are no big reasons to show more anxiety than we always showed. So we will show ourselves to hypocrites if we are horrified by the crimes of this summer, although we have the right to regret the television television operators with mosquito brains that threaten the child with a gun, but respectfully treating the microphone. We will show ourselves with hypocrites. Because there is nothing crimes compared to the crimes of the Nazi state and those crimes that we so calmly digested ourselves, turning them simply into regrets of their historical past. The whole nation was criminal and made death with its philosophy. We learned how dangerous it is to trust the state, and the street crimes of our era are simply the consequences of individual freedom.
If people are killed in sacred wars, then we should not be surprised that they are killed on the streets of cities where there is nothing saint. Ultimately, we must be ready to defend ourselves from ourselves. Epictete, a philosopher - a slave with a lamp, found that thieves always steal his lamps, he deduced from this conclusion that theft is inherent in thieves, and therefore began to buy lamps that did not even steal. If we have turned into sacrifices of private aggressiveness, whether from political activists or stupid murderers with weapons in our hands, we should admit that we also participate in human existence. Maybe this is not a very encouraging conclusion, but that's all I can offer you.
("El PAS", Madrid)