Demonstrating once again that there is no evil beyond the reach of the human soul, we have the story of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in his cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.
People are shaking their heads, unable to imagine why a man would do this.
I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you right now. You watch the reports of the trial, when it happens, and tell me if I’m wrong.
Fritzl believes he’s the victim. He was himself abused as a boy, and he considers it horribly unfair that everyone is making a big deal out of what he’s done now, when nobody stepped in to save him when he was victimized himself.
He believes that he actually had his daughter’s best interests at heart, because if he’d let her have her freedom she’d have used it badly.
He believes he deserves some praise for installing mechanisms (or so it’s reported) that would release the captives in the event of his prolonged absence.
He believes that everyone who’s condemning him now is a hypocrite, because they’re doing things equally bad and just haven’t been caught yet.
That’s a horrible story. I had heard only that there was a case of incest in Australia, not what you described.
It’s painful to comment on such a story; but what I see in this is the horrid legacy of psychology. Psychology replaced ethics and morality in the western intellectual tradition. What it allows people to do is to excuse their sinful behavior. (i.e. if someone did something bad to me, I can use this to rationalize my own evil behavior.) If you’ve followed the development of psychology you know that the elite in the field now deny that anyone is responsible for anything. (Good or bad.)
– this ‘idea’ stems of course from Darwinism, and the idea man is just an animal operating in terms of instincts.