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We’re all still running, according to Kreizler—in our private moments we Americans are running just as fast and fearfully as we were then, running away from the darkness we know to lie behind so many apparently tranquil household doors, away from the nightmares that continue to be injected into children’s skulls by people whom Nature tells them they should love and trust, running ever faster and in ever greater numbers toward those potions, powders, priests, and philosophies that promise to obliterate such fears and nightmares, and ask in return only slavish devotion.
In these vile neighborhoods husbands and wives kill each other, drunkards and dope fiends murder decent working people, prostitutes are slaughtered and commit suicide by the score, and at most it’s seen as some sort of grimly amusing spectacle by outsiders. That’s bad enough. But when the victims are children like this, and the general reaction is no different than Flynn’s—by God, I get to feeling warlike with my own people! Why, already this year we’ve had three such cases, and not so much as a whisper from the precincts or the detectives.”
“context”: the theory that every man’s actions are to a very decisive extent influenced by his early experiences, and that no man’s behavior can be analyzed or affected without knowledge of those experiences.
Kreizler, on the other hand, believed that psychopaths were produced by extreme childhood environments and experiences and were unafflicted by any true pathology. Judged in context, the actions of such patients could be understood and even predicted (unlike those of the truly mad).
the answers one gives to life’s crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.
you cannot objectify the subjective, you cannot generalize the specific.
“The degenerative processes in children have their chief encouragement in the equally defective home surroundings.”
Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become.
‘Habit dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.’”
“We are not obligated to provide everyone who comes to this country with a good life,” Morgan went on. “We are obligated to provide them with a chance to attain that life, through discipline and hard work. That chance is more than they have anywhere else. That is why they keep coming.”
Every human being must find his own way to cope with such severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.
