14th December 2002

Theodore Dalrymple says that many poor souls need institutions, but the ideologues and cost-cutters insist on giving them autonomy.

If freedom entails responsibility, a fair proportion of mankind would prefer servitude; for it is far, far better to receive three meals a day and be told what to do than to take the consequences of one’s own self-destructive choices. It is, moreover, a truth universally unacknowledged that freedom without understanding of what to do with it is a complete nightmare.

Such freedom is a nightmare, of course, not only for those who possess it, but for everyone around them. A man who does not know what to do with his freedom is like a box of fireworks into which a lighted match is thrown: he goes off in all directions at once. And such, multiplied by several millions, is modern society. The welfare state is – or has become – a giant organisation to shelter people from the natural consequences of their own disastrous choices, thus infantilising them and turning them into semi-dependants, to the great joy of their power-mad rulers.

It was by visiting prison that I first learnt that not all men desire freedom. Until then, I had rather airily supposed that all men wanted to be free. Not a bit of it. It gradually dawned on me that many of the recidivists whom I was seeing had shown considerable determination to get back into prison: after all, our police force shows an equal and opposite determination not to arrest and charge wrongdoers, mainly because of the subsequent paperwork involved. To be imprisoned for burglary, therefore, you have almost to want to be imprisoned for burglary, and what I discovered was that many burglars did want to be so imprisoned.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue02 -12-14&id=2602