Recent quotes:
"These juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct
for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to
a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to 'appeal to
their better natures,' to 'reach them,' to 'spark their moral sense.' Tosh!
They had no 'better natures'; experience taught them that what they
were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore
what he did with pleasure and success must be 'moral.'
"The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation
to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to
these kids in a way they could understand -- that is, with a spanking.
But the society they were in told them endlessly about their 'rights.'
"The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no
natural rights of any nature."
Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. "Sir? How about 'life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'?"
"Ah, yes, the 'unalienable rights.' Each year someone quotes that magnificent
poetry. Life? What 'right' to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific?
The ocean will not hearken his cries. What 'right' to life has a man who
must die if he is to save his children? If the chooses to save his own
life, does he do so as a matter of 'right'? If two men are starving and
cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is 'unalienable'?
And is it 'right'? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document
pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never
unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or
it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that
have ever been invented, liberty is the least likely to be cheap and is
never free of cost.
"The third 'right' -- the 'pursuit of happiness'? It is indeed unalienable
but it is not a right; it is ismply a universal condition which tyrants
cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me
at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long
as my brain lives -- but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs,
can insure that I will catch it."
Mr. Dubois then turned to me. "I told you that 'juveline delinquent'
is a contriction in terms. 'Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty
is an adult virtue -- indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and
only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than
the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be,
a 'juvenile delinquent.' But for every juvenile criminal there are always
one or more adult delinquents -- people of mature years who either do not
know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.
"And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many
ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets
were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted
as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights' ... and lost track of their
duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure."