ARE SOME PEOPLE BORN BAD?

A t the age of 84, /4 America’s grand A. .k man of letters Norman Mailer has lost nothing of his appetite for controversy. His latest novel, The Castle In The Forest, tackles the childhood of Adolf Hitler.The book tells how two-year-old Adolf watched his father whip a dog with “a look of remarkable intensity for one so small”. And how, as a six-year-old, he went into the woods by himself “to work on the power of Adolf Hitler his voice. He would roarat the trees until his throat was sore”.Perhaps the most chilling passage is when Adolf causes the death of his younger brother, Edmund, by deliberately infecting him with measles by kissing him. But above all, the novel poses a central question:“When did evil enter Hitler’s soul?”And it provides an unequivocal answer: at the moment of conception.This, of course, is a dotty idea. For a start, the use of the word evil—which is associated with the occult and the Devil—is pure laziness because evil implies conduct that is so bad we can never explain it.But more importantly, Mailer’s novel does raise the issue of whether Hitler was predisposed at birth to be a genocidal tyrant. Or to put it another way, whether people can be born bad—whether it is in-evitable that some individuals will turn out to be murderers or rapists or bullies or thieves and there is nothing that can be done about it.Coincidentally, a so- called scientific study from the University of Virginia this week reached the conclusion that children may be “born to be bad”.But I believe this conclusion to be completely misguided. And I come to this conclusion having spent a lifetime studying truly bad people—I wrote the biography of the north London mass murderer Dennis Nilsen, for example, and came to know him well.Virginia’s experts in human genetics would have us believe that character defects such as criminal behaviour, the desire to bully others and the necessity to tell lies despite all evidence that one has been rumbled are tied up in our DNA.They have little or nothing to do withinfluences that may bombard us in our infancy. Thus, there is little virtue in trying to be a good child, because the programming of your personality has decided in advance that you can’t win.Forget about the soul, It is all to do with the ingredients that were thrown in by your parents, and by theirs, and soon ad infinitum.The result is a soup which cannot be unmixed. DAILY MAILAre some people born to be bad?

collected from times of india, written by brain masters
Scientists And New Book On Hitler Say Some Of Us Are Predisposed To Be Evil At Birth
Brian Masters