The Executioner (Penguin Great Ideas)

by Joseph de Maistre

Just as the most abject and revolting substances are nevertheless still capable of a certain degradation, so are the natural vices of humanity even more vicious in the savage. He is a thief, he is cruel, he is dissolute; but he is these things in a different way than we are. To become criminals we must overcome our nature; the savage follows his. He has an appetite for crime, and no remorse at all. While the son kills his father to spare him the inconvenience of old age, his woman destroys in her womb the fruit of their brutal lust to escape the fatigue of nursing it. He rips off the bleeding scalp of his living enemy; he tears him to pieces, roasts him, and devours him while singing. If he comes upon strong liquor, he drinks to intoxication, to fever, to death, deprived equally of the reason that would command a man to fear it and of the instinct that warns the animal by distaste. He is visibly perverted; he has been stricken in the deepest layers of his moral being. He makes the observer who knows how to see tremble. But do we want to tremble for ourselves and in a very salutary way? Let us reflect that with our intelligence, our morals, our sciences, and our arts, we are to the primitive man precisely what the savage is to us.