A specialty among children and alcoholics: the inability to defer gratification.
“At first it seemed as if the [London] riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs….The truth is, it’s not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have…children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement….Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of the instinct.”
So wrote the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Jonathan Sacks, in The Wall Street Journal (August 20-21, 2011, “Reversing the Decay of London Undone”). While he mentioned that “crime is rampant [and] so are drugs,” he failed to connect the dots between the “wishful thinking,” the inability to defer gratification and alcoholism. The ideas are fueled by alcoholically-induced distortions of perception, which can result in logic being turned inside out. The inability to defer gratification is a result of alcoholism-caused damage to the neo-cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for controlling the impulses of the lower (pre-human) brain centers. Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver thought violent revolution was the solution to perceived inequities until he got sober, after which he gradually figured out that practically everything he had believed when he was drinking was wrong. When sober, recovering alcoholics almost never retain a belief that violence is a solution, almost always come to think of responsibility as a prerequisite to liberty and self-esteem, and become far more “civilized.” If we really want to reduce violence, improve the lot of the “poor” and increase the odds that instinct gratification will be delayed, those charged with a criminal act should be required to become and remain abstinent as a condition of release and parole.