So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780233989594
Publisher: Monday Books
Published: 1994-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

The first chance we get, we fall back on our old habits: massacre and torture ... Oh to be able to eviscerate someone! It is the secret wish of every ‘civilised’ person.

So what, you ask? Celine, you say (that is, if you are not completely ignorant), was a notorious fascist, a Nazi sympathiser. (And from where, from what source, do you suppose that Nazism sprang, I ask in parenthesis?) After the war, he had to take refuge in Denmark, and was only able to return to France after an amnesty.

But the truth of what a man says, ladies and gentlemen, is not to be so easily discounted. Even if the devil himself says so, are two and two not still four?

First, fascists had a good understanding of human nature. Did not fascism triumph originally in precisely the country of Europe with the longest continuous history of civilisation? And did it not next triumph precisely in the country of Europe with the highest level of education and culture?

Second, Celine spent many years in practice as a doctor. Thousands of secrets must have been reposed in him, and therefore there was nothing he did not know about the human heart. He knew whereof he spoke. That other doctors, equally the recipients of confidences, have not written in exactly the same terms demonstrates only the exceptional courage one needs to write the truth.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the key: you envy me, for I have liberated myself from the inner demons which still torment you, because you have not assuaged them. It cannot be that all the authors whom I have quoted – and many others whom I have refrained from quoting, since there is nothing more vulgar than a display of learning – are mistaken. No: it has long been appreciated that the first injunction of any ethical system, which was engraved over the entrance of the Academy in ancient Athens, is to Know thyself.

And I came to know myself after prolonged reading in the public library, and hard reflection in the solitude of my own home. I understood my capacity for violence and cruelty, not from personal experience, but from general principles which I derived from study. And I came to the conclusion (in common with all psychologists of repute) that you cannot repress a natural urge for ever: the very attempt to do so leads sooner or later to a pathological manifestation of it.

Take mourning, for example. Men and women who fail to mourn the deaths of those close to them eventually suffer a deep melancholia which may cause them to act irrationally, or at least to spend many years unproductively and miserably – all of which could have been avoided by the shedding of a few tears at the right time. I do not speak from experience, of course: I have never lost anyone close to me for the simple reason that no one has ever been close to me. But theoretical knowledge is still knowledge, even without direct experience.

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