Thus we obtain the origin
of that sad human figure which is the product of the interaction of
those factors, an abnormal man, a man not adapted to the conditions of
the social environment in which he is born, so that emigration becomes
an ever more permanent phenomenon for the greater portion of men, for
whom the accident of birth will less and less determine the course of
their future life. And the abnormal man who is below the minimum of
adaptability to social life and bears the marks of organic degeneration,
develops either a passive or an aggressive form of abnormality and
becomes a criminal.
Among these abnormal human beings, two groups must be particularly
distinguished. Limiting our observations to those who are true
aggressively antisocial abnormals, that is to say, who are not adapted
to a certain social order and attack it by crimes, we must distinguish
those who for egoistic or ferocious reasons attack society by atavistic
forms of the struggle for existence by committing socalled common crimes
in the shape of fraud or violence, thereby opposing or abolishing
conditions in which their fellow beings may live. This is the atavistic
type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive,
form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic
reversion to a savage and primitive type. These constitute the majority
in the world of criminals and must be distinguished from the minority,
who are evolutionary, or progressive, abnormals, that may also commit
crime in a violent form, but must not be confounded with the others,
because they do not act from egoistic motives, but rebel from altruistic
motives against the injustice of the present order.
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