The PR Blog

When ideology excuses everything and responsibility belongs to no one.

I recently picked up Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky again after many years. Funny thing about old books - you read them at twenty and think they're about someone else. You read them again at seventy and suddenly realise they're about everyone.

At its core, the novel is simple enough. A young man commits a terrible act and then discovers something that every civilisation eventually has to learn: we are responsible for our choices. We cannot turn back the clock and pretend the damage never happened.

We carry our mistakes with us.

That is why the book feels so disturbingly relevant today.

Because Raskolnikov never really disappeared into the Siberian snow. He is still with us. Every age produces its own versions of him.

He is the overeducated, self-important intellectual who believes he sees further than ordinary people. He contributes very little, yet somehow feels qualified to judge everyone else. He is angry, resentful and convinced that his ideas place him above the normal rules of right and wrong.

"Crime? What crime?... My killing a loathsome, harmful louse... you call that a crime?"

That is the truly frightening thing about Raskolnikov. He doesn't think he's a villain. He thinks he's the good guy.

He rationalises evil because he has convinced himself he serves a higher purpose.

And there, I think, lies the lesson for our own times.

The details are different, of course. We don't have desperate students wandering around nineteenth-century St Petersburg carrying axes. But we do have plenty of people who believe that so called " noble intentions "  excuse almost anything. 

Over the past few years we have seen policies that damaged businesses, isolated families, closed churches, disrupted education and frayed the social fabric. Yet where is the reckoning? Where are the apologies? Where is the simple admission that perhaps some things went too far?

Instead, ordinary people live with the consequences while many of those who made the decisions remain comfortably insulated from them and, in some cases, seem quite willing to repeat the exercise.

The same mindset appears elsewhere.

Increasingly, it seems that wrongdoing is explained away rather than condemned. Need becomes entitlement, and entitlement becomes justification.

Whose need? Whose entitlement? At what point does grievance become a licence to take what belongs to someone else?

We see youth crime making headlines in places like Far North Queensland, Alice Springs and parts of Melbourne. We hear endless explanations - social disadvantage, historical grievances, systemic failures and poor outcomes.

Some of those things may well be true.

But where is the conversation about self-restraint? About parental responsibility? About teaching children that the world owes you precisely nothing and that respect for others matters?

The child who throws a tantrum in the supermarket and never hears the word "no" eventually becomes an adult who believes his feelings justify disrupting everyone else's lives.

And increasingly, people sense that something has gone upside down.

Real crimes seem to attract less punishment, while invented crimes - questioning authority, defending tradition or refusing to join the latest fashionable cause - can bring swift social or professional consequences.

The old saying, "Do the crime, do the time," sounds almost quaint now.

Today, it appears " they "  want everything and are prepared to do nothing to earn what they want? 

Faith in institutions begins to crumble when people believe there is one set of rules for some and another for everyone else.

That, to me, is why Crime and Punishment still matters.

Dostoevsky understood something permanent about human nature. The greatest danger is not crime itself. The greatest danger is our extraordinary ability to convince ourselves that we are so enlightened, so compassionate or so morally superior that the ordinary rules no longer apply to us.

Raskolnikov's crime began with an idea - that he had the right to decide who mattered and who did not.

Every generation must guard against that temptation.

What have we done to our world?

Perhaps the better question is: what have we allowed to be done?

And sometimes I wonder whether, if Raskolnikov were walking among us today, he would ever make it to Siberia at all.

Or would he simply find an audience ready to applaud him, excuse him and tell him that his victims deserved it because his cause was the right one? And go on to write a best seller and get a spot on prime time TV and a fat pay cheque...