We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that criminals serve as a reflection of our darker desires and societal norms that we both envy and condemn.
Karl A. Menninger's quote reflects on the complex relationship between society and crime, suggesting that criminals provide a contrasting figure against which we define our own values and morals. They embody the actions we may secretly envy, while simultaneously acting as a target for our judgment and punishment, highlighting our conflicted nature and fascination with rebellion against societal rules.
In practice
During a discussion on morality, one could use this quote to illustrate the complexities of human desires.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.
I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
I came to believe in a power much higher than I
Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.
We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
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