Theodore Dalrymple | City Journal
The word “fell” denies agency to the young men, as if they had no choice in the matter. They were victims of circumstance by virtue of their membership of a minority, for minorities are by definition victims without agency.
There is a strange parallel here with how heroin addicts explained themselves to me. When I asked them why they started taking heroin, they almost invariably answered that they “fell in” with the wrong crowd, again passively, as if by some kind of natural force. By this means they denied responsibility for their situation, though it was obvious that they had not so much fallen in with as sought the wrong crowd. They knew that their explanation was bogus, because they laughed when I said how strange it was that I met many people who fell in with the wrong crowd but never any members of the wrong crowd itself.
But this contrived account of “falling” into drug addiction is often accepted at face value by liberal intellectuals, who want to divide humanity into the tiny minority of people with agency (perpetrators) and the vast majority without it (victims)—the latter requiring salvation by liberal intellectuals. The rich and powerful are perpetrators with agency; everyone else is a victim without agency.
