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Perhaps the greatest of modern epidemics in western society is that of self-infliction. Never before in history have so many people made themselves so miserable by their actions, opinions, habits, tastes and proclivities. On all previous ages, circumstances were so difficult or dangerous for most people that no helping hand was needed for misery to triumph. This is the first age in which people can choose the kind of misery they want: previously it was the privilege of the rich to do so.
Just as Mankind has freed a substantial proportion of itself from many of the more obvious and grosser forms of misery – want, pain and disease – so various forms of wilful pathology have taken up misery’s baton. Every morning for fifteen years I use to go to my hospital thinking that I had heard every tactic that human self-destruction could devise, but every morning proved me wrong. Something new that I had not thought of was always waiting for me: the ways of self-destruction were protean and inexhaustible. The meanest intelligence is capable of discovering a new method: nor is the highest intelligence immune to the siren-song of self-destruction.
I first came across this problem very early in life. My parents had everything to make them happy, but instead they persisted in living as miserably as the Captain and his wife in Strindberg’s Dance of Death. For the first eighteen years of my life I did not hear them address a single word to one another. When I went to a friend’s home where parents spoke to one another, I found it strange and even mildly disconcerting. Speech, in my opinion, was not for parents and was unnecessarily noisy or loud.
I now realise that they were not pioneers in the art of living miserably. But it was almost as if they felt a duty to live in this fashion. Happiness for them would have been almost a betrayal, a manifestation of not living correctly.
By comparison with the people I met later, however, their efforts to live miserably seemed banal, traditional and altogether lacking in imagination. Ours is the rococo age of self-infliction. I was to meet (to take just two examples) a woman who deliberately injected herself with the blood of someone with HIV so that she might contract AIDS, and a man who used the fact that he was HIV positive to attract women in bars to have unprotected sex with him. No doubt where human perversity is concerned there is nothing new under the sun, at least in essence; but what I thought was new was that such perversity had become almost a mass-phenomenon, as if people now felt not fully alive without it.
The crises brought about inevitably by their own conduct seemed to reassure them that their lives were not ordinary or boring, but had some drama and significance to them. Romantic agony was better than dull contentment. From the perspective of one six-bedded ward in one hospital, I saw thousands of people in pursuit of their own misery with a kind of dogged determination. ‘Man is born for happiness,’ said the Russian writer and contemporary of Chekhov, V. G. Korolenko, ‘as a bird for flight’: to which I can only say that, whether or not it was ever true, it is certainly not true now. About one in nine people in western society is taking antidepressants and, even if these drugs are mostly useless, this is surely an indication of widespread discontent with life.
I have no clear explanation for the outbreak of self-infliction, of the mass choice of conduct that will self-evidently lead to misery, but one possible factor (I surmise) is that there are so many ready-made possible explanations in advance for our conduct. Sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, economists, evolutionists, neurochemists and others are at the ready to explain whatever we do ex post facto, and therefore we shall never lack for a certified excuse for what we have done or failed to do, usually in pursuit of some very short-term gratification. And since, whatever our protestations to the contrary, we all now more or less believe that to explain all is to forgive all, especially in ourselves, we are liberated from the guilt of having behaved foolishly.
It doesn’t matter if the explanations are bogus, so long as someone appears to believe them. An abusive man will tell the woman he abuses that he can’t help himself, as an epileptic can’t help having a fit, and often the woman will believe him, at least for a time. I have had the following conversation on many occasions.
‘He can’t help himself, doctor. His eyes just go. And then he hits/strangles me. He needs help.’
‘Would he do it in front of me, then?’
Oddly enough, this little question often sowed a small seed of doubt.
