And when you take the life histories of these people, as I have, you soon realize that their existence is as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of many a dictatorship. Instead of one dictator though, there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own little sphere, his power circumscribed by the presence of others such as he.
Violent conflict, not confined to the hearth and home, spills out unto the streets. Moreover I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers, run not by the government as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum enterprise, the drug dealers.Young men and women, in debt to drug dealers are kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds and beaten or whipped. Of compunction there is none only the residual fear of the consequences of going to far.
Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit it. In the worst dictatorships some of the evil ordinary men and women do they do out of fear of not committing it. There goodness requires heroism. In them Soviet Union of the 1930s, for example, a man who failed to report a political joke to the authorities was himself guilty of an offence. In modern Britain no such conditions exist. The government does not require citizens to behave as I have described and punish them if they do not. The evil is freely chosen.
