WHAT makes young British males inflict serious injury and even death by 100 kicks? Why is “a good kicking” — meaning, of course, a very bad kicking — now as British as roast beef? Good kickings are not administered for reasons of self-defence; Robert Johnston, who was kicked to death last weekend in Bolton, was returning home after celebrating his birthday — not threatening physical violence against his attackers. The arbitrary and unadulterated malignity reminds us once again, if we needed reminding, of man’s permanent propensity to evil.
But it requires more than a mere potential for evil, which lurks in every human heart, for young men to kick someone to death. Having met quite a few kickers-to-death in the course of my medical career, I am struck by how much malice and hatred they bear the world. To kick someone to death is the physical eruption of their insensate rage that boils like magma below (and not very far below) their thin crust.
Generally they come, these enraged young kickers, from the increasingly broad sector of society in which the concept of a “normal” assault is accepted, where stabbings are often believed to have gone “too far” and where confessions of having been “out of order” or even “way out of order” are the nearest anyone comes to confessions of guilt. I am quoting from many of my patients.
The kickers come also from a home and social background in which human relations are overwhelmingly governed by crude physical power and little else. You do what you can get away with but yield to superior strength: matters of principle don’t come into it, and finer feeling, or even simple affection, is unknown.
This would be deadly enough, but the young men in question believe themselves to have been deprived of material wealth and public prestige to which they think they are entitled. The world, they believe, has used them ill, and they reciprocate by looking out on it with aggressive malignity and using it as far as they are able as a mere instrument for their immediate gratification.
Their hatred of the world is written in their faces, in their deportment and even in their fashions. Their faces are set hard in hatred. They look as if they expect at any moment an attack on them or at least an insult to their dignity. Their gait is a predatory lope, even when they are engaged on an entirely peaceful errand.
They believe that civility is weakness, or — more importantly — will be taken by their peers as weakness. As for their appearance, the more brutal the better; they want to make it look as if there is no savagery they would not commit.
They are shaven-headed (not just to disguise incipient baldness) and tattooed, and if they have a dog it is a rottweiler or a pitbull. Even harmless and law-abiding young men want to look as though they might attack at any moment. I asked one such man why he wanted to look like this and he replied that it was the only way he could walk the streets where he lived unmolested.
You do not see so many brutal-looking young men anywhere else in the world as in Britain. I have scoured the globe in search of a society that produces so many vicious faces set in hatred against their own existence, but so far have not found one.
As it happens, I am writing this in Germany — not a country without a history of brutality, of course. I have travelled hundreds of miles there on trains, inter-city and suburban, and have yet to see the faces that are unavoidable on British trains, or the minor acts of antisocial behaviour that the possessors of such faces commit (such as putting their feet up on seats, or conspicuous littering) as a challenge to the respectable: a challenge that the respectable fail to meet for fear of being knifed in the ribs. In Britain, our fear of young adults is now such second nature to us that we do not even notice how much we are governed by it.
From what does this hatred of the world arise? Why should so many young men be in a permanent state of undirected rage, demanding complete respect from themselves but willing to accord none to anyone else, and inclined to regard the slightest inconvenience, or even glance in the eye, as a challenge to their dignity? At the root of the problem is self-esteem: they have far too much of it. On the other hand, they have no self-respect at all. Self-esteem is an egotistical quality, self-respect a social one. Self-esteem imposes obligation on others, that they treat one as if one were of supreme importance, far more important than anyone else; self-respect imposes obligations on oneself, for example that one behaves with decency and controls oneself for the convenience of others, even in the most difficult circumstances.
Having grown up in a radically asocial environment — half of British households no longer have a dining table and many inmates in the prison where I work have never eaten a meal at a table with someone else — young adults are flattered by politicians, misled by advertisers and persuaded by soap operas and chat shows that they are unique and uniquely valuable human beings. This is so merely by fact that they draw breath; nothing whatever is required of them.
They are worthy of an infinitude of respect, regardless of their conduct, but they feel as a corollary that respect for others is a detraction from the respect that is due to them. And in effect, the only way they can make others respect them unconditionally, in the way they wish, is to make others fear them. A boot, a fist, a knife, a machete, a gun: these are what make a young Briton respectable.
They are aware of their rights, which are by definition without limitation or conditional upon anything that they do: for if they were limited or conditional, they would not be rights. But they are rights, and so they are without limitation and unconditional. A duty — for example to conform to certain standards — is therefore not a condition of having rights but a negation of such rights.
At the same time, their minds are filled by daydreams purveyed by the consumer society around them. They are promised happiness and redemption by material consumption. They live in the virtual world of celebrity culture, in which people not so very different from them in tastes, abilities and accomplishments have been spirited into a wonderworld of material luxury and perpetual glamour and entertainment.
I have spoken to many young men in such a state of mind, or rather of soul, about their interests and their ambitions. They have none. They dream but they do not plan. They have no conception of how they might improve their lives, and in any case are not interested in minor or incremental improvements. They want to go from their current dismal and relatively impoverished existence to that of celebrity fairyland at a stroke, or by means of a magic carpet. Life in fairyland is the only life worth living.
Yet even then, they have little idea what they would do if they arrived in that fairyland. They would take three holidays every two weeks; they would drink even more and take yet more drugs. They would be able to act on more whims; but the question of what they would do if their daydream were fulfilled confronts them with the emptiness at the heart of their existence.
They are angry, resentful, embittered and incapable of self-examination. They sense they have been sold a bill of goods. By means of advertisements, television and popular entertainment, they are tantalised by a life of abundance, but it dawns upon them that they will never attain it. But they also believe that everything desirable is a right, and a world in which one’s rights are never granted is an unbearable world, a world against which one wished to wreak revenge.
DEBATE
How would you end thuggery in Britain?
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