How To Raise A Generation Of Psychopaths

In my last post, I talked about why it was wrong to blame "Liberalism" for the August riots, saying that both the left and right who had part of the correct answer.

The left blame social deprivation and government under-investment; the right blame a culture of liberal indulgence. Both are correct, but I want to explain exactly why, and how this creates a psychopathic psychology in some of our youngsters.

Listening to young people who are also from deprived backgrounds, asked why they chose not to get involved in the riots, they shrugged and said "Cos I had good parents, I guess". If you want to hear why it's happening, ask those who choose NOT to do it, then the answer will become clearer.

Listening to parents who choose not to discipline their children, one of them said "Because the government doesn't give me the right to be a proper parent". What this parent means, is that because of a culture that defends the right of the child, the parents feels (and in a legal sense, this could be true) that they are subordinate to the rights of their children.

The extention of the rights of the child is one of the major things (as well as women's rights and the rights of gays and ethnic minorities) that seperates modern times from decades such as the 1950s and earlier, when children were beaten behind closed doors. Some on the right wish for a return to those values; it that would be simplistic and lazy thinking, as it ignores the truth that while for some children raised in that environment it enforced a strong discipline and fear of punishment, it gave a green light to any parent of a violent temper to indulge their weaknesses onto their offspring. So let's not return to that era.

The historic result of that was the "baby boomer" generation, who wanted everything to be better for their children; a harmless enough wish, but not when implemented at a goverment-sanctioned level.

The "rights" pendulum swung to the other extreme, where any teacher was obliged to tell social services of any incident of parental violence reported by children. Furthermore, teachers themselves could be reported for any perceived "violence" in the classroom. Added to that, children are legally immune from effective punishment, and those punishments that exist are more influenced by preventative "behavioral science".

In this environment, with children being told that they are worth more than the earth, and at the same time being protected by law from their own parents, a certain psychology develops in the mind of the child. But more on that later.

I should also mention the fact that since the 1950s, and especially in the last thirty years, the gap between the top ten percent and the bottom ten percent has grown to an unbridgeable gulf. It is therefore not surprising if some of the parents at the bottom therefore think that since the government has taken away their rights as parents and transferred them to their children, they have a common excuse to hand the parenting of their children onto the government themselves, and society in general. So a culture of government dependency is born. And also a culture of lack of responsibility. The children raised in the "sink estates have few real chances at the advancement that has been fed into and encouraged by their parents' generation; the frustration grows, with a psychology of interal all-empowerment and external impotence.

So some parents feel disempowered by the law; some parents use that same sense of disempowerment as an excuse to abrogate on their responsibilities; and many parents feel the need to indulge their children (either because they instinctively feel the need to give a better upbringing than they got themselves, or simply through lazy discipline). Either way, it's the children who are psychologically changed from that.

Add something else to this psychological cocktail: as well as the growing gap between rich and poor (by many estimates, one of the largest in the developed world), there is the change in the moral guide that keeps our culture together; I'm talking about amoral materialist capitalism.

This may seem like an easy target, but it's also a pertinent question. Why did so many teenagers go on a mass looting spree (in the French riots, they burned cars rather than looted, although that may also be because their deprived neighbourhoods had so few shops ready to loot) rather than indulge in other violent activities?

They did so because, as many of them put it, it was their way to stick it to the rich and get their own back. For the past thirty years in particular, British culture has been fed a morality of getting rich by any means; the only key to happiness is to get rich, and get lots of stuff. Some on the left blame Thatcher's long legacy for these riots. Again, that's too simplistic, as I've mentioned in the points above; there are a number of components that all need to be in place, rather like a necessary compound to make a dangerous substance.

They all need to be in place in order for this to happen. But now, in August 2011, it DID happen.

So, to summarise: we created a generation of youngsters, many of whom have no sense of right or wrong; who have a sense all-powerful impunity; who feel conversely angry and disconnected from the success enjoyed by those celebrated in the media, and the false sense of opportunity encouraged by their parents.

In other words, these are the bones of the psychology of a psychopath. They are fearless; boundless; and angry.

This is contemporary Britain's bastard creation: a "lost" generation, disconnected from their parents; disconnected from morality; disconnected from material reality. Their only connection is to their peers, the "gang", and whatever they can grab for themselves. Without role models, the only "role model" is the one they create from fake "media reality".

A Clockwork Orange, come to life.

The English Riots and the "Death Of Liberalism"

So now that the smoke has disappated, the police are in force, and calm has been restored to the streets, the inquest has begun. Or the blame game. Depends on your point of view.

The riots of the past four days have been the worst in the UK (and possibly in Europe) for decades. Certainly, I doubt there has been such widespread breakdown of law and order in Britain for a hundred years or more. During the Depression, I didn't read of any such looting and destruction ever happening on such a scale as England has witnessed in the last week.

Why did it happen, and what can we do to prevent it from being repeated? This is what people from opposite ends of the political spectrum have been debating endlessly.

The Conservatives, not surprisingly, and those at the extreme right, say that a culture of Liberalism is to blame. When there is a culture of criminals being able to claim benefits from the state, and when there is a culture of lack of responsibility in general, this feeds into this wicked cycle of a breakdown of values.

On the "liberal" left, people like Ken Livingstone have been talking of a culture of cuts creating anger and resentment from the poor, added to the decades of underinvestment and a culture of ignorance that institutions such as the police and the government have shown to the poor.

Clearly, both of these views can't be completely right. Blaming "liberalism" completely does not provide the full picture; there are plenty of other "liberal" countries in the world that have not had riots - Scandinavia being the obvious one; Germany also provides a fairly positive example (considering that nearly ten percent of the German population is ethnic Turkish, there are relatively few racial issues; though the fact that Germany is culturally pacifist since the Second World War also helps).

At the same time, emphasizing social issues as a root cause (as the left does) also fails to deal with the full issue; again, there is plenty of poverty in the developed world as a whole, yet there has been no similar breakdown in law and order elsewhere on this scale.

The closest comparison is the French riots in the middle of the 2000s (when Sarkozy was the interior minister); that went on for weeks, and the spark was also a controversial death blamed on the police.

As most of our leading politiicans have pointed out (rightly, as I mentioned in my previous post), it is about a gang culture, that has grown out of a lack of moral leadership from parents and other authority figures.

This issue cannot be blamed on the left or right, because being taught social and moral responsibility is not a political issue; it is a family issue. If parents choose to abrogate their responsibilities as parents, that is not only their problem, it becomes a social problem. It is how children turn into potential criminals; it is how children turn into potential sociopaths.

So it would be wrong to blame a "culture of liberalism" for these riots; nowhere does liberalism as an ideology tell parents that they have the right to not be parents. This is not about liberalism or conservatism, this is about basic parental responsibilty and children being given positive moral examples from their family.

There are plenty of families struggling in poverty because of social deprivation that bring up perfectly good, law-abiding children. Interestingly, many of those children are the families of immigrants; judging from some of the teenagers seen looting and rioting, many of them were not the children of immigrants - they were the children of "chavs".

It depends on the moral code that the parents teach their children; if they tell their children that it is OK to commit crime because they are poor, then these parents are passing on their own responsibilities to society; if they choose not to care what their children are doing once they walk out the door of their home, they are no longer acting as parents.

Any decent person, regardless of political persuasion, I think would find it difficult to argue with that. The scenes in Peckham, where people were going out of their way NOT to blame multiculturalism for the riots, shows us that some people at least, do not want to find quick scapegoats for the unrest. On the other hand, the scenes in the London suburb of Eltham, where vigilanteism was hijacked by the thugs of the anti-immigrant English Defence League, was another reminder that some people ARE susceptible to the easy answers of reactionary politics.

So, Liberalism is far from dead; but Liberalism was never about excusing common criminality and parental ignorance. Only an anarchist or nihilist would support the actions of the past few days in England.

Liberalism is about giving people the freedom to do want they want within the commonly accepted boundaries of lawful behavior; it is about accepting that the market does not provide all the answers for society, and that people sometimes need goverment to provide services that the private sector cannot fairly provide; it is about goverment providing a helping hand where needed to those who follow the law and respect others, while providing an effective punishment to those who do not.

Riots, Damned Riots, and Revolutions

Tottenham, London, can now be added to the list of cities in the Western world (i.e Europe and America) that have seen riots in recent years.

In the last week, even Tel Aviv, Israel (of all places) has joined the ranks of the more famous anarchy-prone metropoli such as Athens an Madrid, to name two.

That's not to mention the riots and civil strife happening on a daily basis in Syria, sporadically in Yemen, Egypt; civil war in Libya etc. etc.

Of course, the riots of the last few years each have there own roots, and are not directly related to each other, and I don't want to go into each set of events in too much detail, for the sake of space. But some things are worth talking about.

Starting most recent first, the riots in Tottenham and around.

It was the shooting of an armed criminal with gang links a few days before that was meant to be the spark. A protest walk in the Tottenham high street became hijacked by what appear to have been gang elements (many of them immigrant origin), and the end result was nearly twelve hours of mayhem in three seperate locations in the Haringey district of North London, resulting in looted and burned out shops, supermakets and retail outlets, as well as burned out police cars and a bus.

It may be tempting to ink these riots to those happening around the same time in places like Tel Aviv, Athens and Madrid. Tempting, but not entirely fair or accurate. The riots/ demonstrations in these other places are people (either young or old, or both) venting their frustration at their respective government's response to the economic and social effects of the financial crisis - unemployment, rising prices, cost of living etc.

In the case of the Tottenham riots, there are direct criminal elements involved. In that respect in bears a closer resemblance to the riots that took place in France several years ago (long before the financial crisis, as I remember); a teenager of North African origin was killed by a policeman; riots broke out across some deprived suburbs of Paris, quickly multiplying to other cities around France (Sarkozy called the rioters "scum" at the time); it got to the extent that by the tail end of weeks of the national riots there were "only" 1,000 cars that had been burned out in one day.

Those riots were also likely instigated by gangs seeing an opprtunity to wreak their own sense of "revenge" on the police and the establishment.

The essential question is: why do gangs exist in these circumstances? The answer doesn't take a PhD in Sociology to get to. Gangs exist as social networks to occupy a wider social vacuum (i.e. through dysfuctional family networks, community networks, lack of other connection to the social ladder etc.).

Am I making excuses for criminality? Of course not. I'm simply looking at the issue through a cause-and-effect rationality, in coming to understand why it happens. The police do the same thing: that's why when there is proper engagement with a community; when there are real opportunities for community improvement; when a community works together; when families work together, the levels of gang activity usually go down. That has been proven to be the case in Glasgow (the police did a successful programme there a couple of years ago).

So, back to Tottenham. As was reported, over the last few years, the suburb has seen rising levels of unemployment and falling levels of police interaction. You go figure what happens. Create the vacuum, and see who takes up the space.

So in an indirect way, yes, there is a link to all these riots over the "post-crisis years" (I just invented that phrase). The seperate make-up and triggers are different, but the underlying causes remain somewhat similar.

It is fair to say that without the financial crisis, the Arab Spring may well not have happened (as it took everyone, even the "experts" by surprise); the demos and riots across Europe are all direct consequences of the crisis. While the Gangs Of Tottenham can never dare to claim to hold the same legitimacy for their openly criminal behaviour, the gangs exist indirectly because of the social vacuum in the community in Tottenham itself, which has been exacurbated by the effects and government policy since the financial crisis.

Of course, the same community vacuum exists in other parts of London; exists in other inner cities around the UK; and exists in other inner cities around the Western world as a whole. Let me say again: there can never be a justification for the criminal behavior that we have seen in Tottenham.

The problem is that if these "community vacuums" are allowed to fester while the government continues to cut back on sevices like law and order and investing in social cohesion, the only growth economy we can expect in these places is further gang warfare and anarchy.