Were Hitler and Stalin criminals or geniuses?
My thoughts in an earlier DailyO piece on the question why we reward criminals, evoked an assortment of responses. Opinions are sharply divided on this count, to which the typical British adage is the safest response, "Much remains to be said on both sides."
So, here is a bit of what remains to be said…
What is common to all who display a criminal streak in politics is sharp individuality. Criminality, the craving for adventure, daydreaming of heroism, potent action and celebrity status: all highlight the same fundamental issue - the plight of the individual in society.
Every group or collectivity functions by a system. The soul of a system is routine. Routine comprises the average, the predictable. Routine is a straitjacket that has little room for the extraordinary.
Doing a great piece of painting may be routine for an artist. It cannot be routine for a people. Experimenting on how to survive mostly on the energy derived directly from the Sun may be routine for a yogi, but not for a housewife.
Most people accept the undeviating flatness of their routine life; for life walks, for the most part, on the crutches of routine.
The problem with routine, however, is that it has little room for expressing uniqueness. This runs counter to the logic of life, by which we are at once members of a species and distinct individuals imprinted with unique personal destinies.
The more a culture develops technologically, the more we are standardised and homogenised. A hundred individuals working on the assembly line of a car factory are revoltingly similar to each other. They are less like human beings and more like robots.
Even as we hail the material advantages of such an arrangement - increased productivity and prosperity - something within us resents this degradation.
Hence the paradox in the human predicament. On the one hand, we need the predictability of routinised activity. On the other hand, we need a touch of adventure, personal initiative, the freedom to dream and to dare, lest life sink into drudgery. Adventure and drudgery are the two poles between which the dynamics of our social life play out.
What makes the difference is the extent to which individuals allow themselves to be assimilated into the system. Most of our coveted practices and processes - religion, upbringing, education, social mores - aim at facilitating our domestication.
The current practice of education suppresses individuality. Homogenisation of thinking and regimentation of responding are its hallmarks. This is oppressive.
Every society progresses because some individuals dare to see, think and dream differently. A disciplined army is good to fight wars. Wars are not visionary adventures. While war compels technological progress, it is regressive in its effect on our humanity and destructive of life.
A society progresses because some individuals within it dare to kick the stars. They could be misunderstood, pilloried, outlawed, killed. But they are the futuristc assets of a given society; as is realised always a trifle too late.
The test of the sanity of a society is the way it treats such individuals. When social, political and cultural systems become rigid, individuals are regimented into mediocrity. Oppression does not have to be by brute force. A whole way of life can become oppressive. That's worse.
We today know that boredom and depression oppress more people than tyrannical hostility does. They are the silent killers of our times. The system we have embraced is the nursery for this oppression.
Leaving a margin for the determinism of heredity, it is reasonable to assume that criminal instincts are born in the interplay of the individual and the society. That is why the son of a saint could be a rogue. What happens when, say, a rivulet flowing down from Gangotri, hits a boulder? It does not cut through the boulder. It bears to the right or to the left. The plight of the genius in the society is similar.
The individual of promise, striking the boulder of social and systemic obstruction, turns either this way to crime or that way to beneficial activities in culture, science, religion.
Was Mike Tyson a criminal or a genius? Were Stalin and Hitler politicians or criminals? Does not crime prowl in the backyard of industry, which includes mercenary religion, education and relationships? Societies, not less than individuals, have to answer these questions.
So, our thriving criminals in diverse fields fascinate because they are at once like and unlike us. They are unlike us to the extent only that they do not tamely surrender to the system. They play the system. To play a system you may borrow its muscles or its brains. If you borrow its brains, you become a limited intellectual asset. If you borrow its muscles, you become a fascinating criminal asset. Either way, and strangely, you are an asset.
This is not to romanticise crime. It is to underline the need to make our systems and structures more conducive to a healthy development of human resources. It is a crime to reduce human beings to pale, shadowy tools that the monarchs of mediocrity may use with boorish indifference to the dignity of our species.
This is doable.