The Exaltation of The Delinquent

Murderers, rapists, torturers and serial killers are the new television stars. To them is owed an attention, a solicitude, a respectful and affable fondness which many journalists or television presenters kindly dispense.
Furthermore, an administrative memorandum must exist which obliges dull correspondents (who seem to be employed only on condition that they have argued with the detested conjunctives and conditionals) to ask the strict relatives of defenceless victims of incarnated demons of the mastery-destruction drive: “Do you forgive your daughter’s slaughterer?”.
Every time I pay my television licence fee, the idea that it will contribute to paying managers who, not only do not oblige those who should know the consecutio temporum (the sequence of tenses) perfectly well, to respect it, neither do they find the time or manner to require a minimum of decency from their employees.
The Italian television, both public and private, has become an incubator of delinquent contents, a patronage of mediocrity and voyeurism.
For such a phenomenon to exist, it is necessary that in a certain group of people the percentage of perverts becomes the majority.
Some days ago I was listening to the participating concern for the ‘sad destiny’ of Erika (she ferociously killed her mother and her young brother) who (what a pity!) on reaching her twenty-first birthday, would be transferred from the youth detention centre to a prison for adults; obviously, not even a single word was mentioned, for the victims.
In my article “The Lost Son”  I have attempted to clarify the unconscious motivations of the “conation to forgiveness”.

Here, I would like to add some brief considerations.
Freud showed us, scandalising the priggish people of his time, how the aggressiveness is a universal disposition of the human psyche and how every individual has within him the germs of violence and murder.
The human society, on the other hand, founds itself upon the senses of guilt of the primordial Parricide, upon the horror that the sons felt in front of the mortal remains of the murdered father.
“Civilisation dominates the dangerous aggression desire of the individual weakening it, disarming it and keeping it guarded from an instance within the individual’s self, like a garrison in a conquered city”. ¹
Freud demonstrates how the feeling of guilt can be originated by two sources: from the fear that arouses the authority (firstly parental and then of the social order), and from the successive fear which arouses the Super-Ego.
The first source obliges us to renounce the drive satisfaction. But as it is not possible to hide the persistence of prohibited desires from the super-ego, the search for punishment is structured. The severity of the super-ego replaces that of the parents. The Master reminds us that, because civilisation obeys to an internal erotic pressure finalised in uniting human beings into a cohesive mass, it can only reach this aim through a growing reinforcement of the sense of guilt.
If this is the process which maintains civilisation, we can easily understand how, in a historical phase in which finding a parent who behaves as a true Father is an absolute rarity, and the total impunity for the crimes committed is perceived, a break-up of the human civilisation can truly be risked.
A degenerate variant of the social body, after having taken over the mass-media, seems to want to consciously condition the common feeling, eliminating the sentiments of ‘pietas’ towards the victims.
On the basis of an equivocal and delirious egalitarianism incarnated in the slogan “God Save Cain”, the inclination to offend, even though living in each one of us, is completely denied in these people: by projection the familiarity of the aggressive impulses is recognised in the executioner, towards who, a powerful unconscious attraction is triggered.
It is only due to this phenomenon, or to the total ignorance of the laws which regulate the human psychism, that some judges and psychologists can authorise the freedom of ferocious murderers, to later demonstrate themselves absolutely amazed by the repetition of their crimes.
Only he who has done a profound research on his own psychism, has familiarised himself with his own aggressive-destructive inclinations, has recognised them and hence does not deny them, can demand from himself, and consequently from anyone else, the respect for the rules that humanity has established to build the social structure upon.
A nation in which ferocious murderers, instead of being kept in conditions in which they can no longer harm (since the so-called re-education in the cases of violent murder is pure ideological phantasy founded on the ignorance of a basilar law of the psychism, called ‘compulsion to repeat’) find freedom after very few years, is destined to an inevitable break-up.
The only consolation remaining for us is that we can say, conscious of the universal inclination to commit crimes, a society can only have a tomorrow with the certainty of the punishment and with the unconditional protection of the victims.

Written by: Quirino Zangrilli © Copyright

Translated by Linda De Nardo

Notes:

1 – S. Freud, Civilization And Its Discontents, 1929.