A Gold Medal for Delinquency

Abstract

If delinquency can be thought of as, in part, the violent and unreasoning rejection of authority, then to some degree it is present in every society, democratic or dictatorial. Paradoxically, it may serve some purpose in democratic constitutional develop ment, although it could hardly be encouraged for this purpose. The failure to eradicate delinquency is more significant in a dictatorship than in a democracy. In the democratic community rejection is fragmental and carries few ideological implications. But to the degree that a dictatorial society is totalitarian, the rejection is one of society, of an ideological way of life. Soviet delinquents reject not only the transient authority that bothers them, but the very ideological taproots of communism as well. The authoritarian state possesses instruments of coercion that are hardly acceptable to a democracy. But in spite of the use of such instruments and, in the case of the Soviet Union, in the face of a generation of trial at remolding man to a Marxian image, the delinquent remains the unassimilated antisocial ele ment. The very existence of delinquency there is a measure of the failure of communist society to substitute its will for that of the individual and, in spite of its tragic details, remains a bulwark against totalitarianism.