We are all guilty! The essential Dr Heinz Kiosk

Dr Heinz Kiosk: X-ray intellect

‘We are all guilty!’ is the cry of Dr Heinz Kiosk, perhaps the most important person of science of the last hundred years.

The great social psychologist is currently, among many other things, chief psychiatric adviser to the Meringue, Éclair and Profiterole Authority. (See Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ column in the London Daily Telegraph newspaper.)

Fellow doctor and Kiosk exegete Theodore Dalrymple provides a concise summary of Kiosk doctrine:

• Self-blame is salutary (as long as it is abstract and collective rather than individual)
• It is incumbent on those of superior moral sensibility — the Brahmin caste of moral philosophy — to express self-blame on others’ behalf
• People of superior moral sensibility are not like the mass, who see only appearances
• People of superior moral sensibility make no hasty censorious judgments
• People of superior moral sensibility suffer no vulgar prejudices
• People of superior moral sensibility see through to the moral reality of things with a gimlet or X-ray intellect
• The root cause of social dysfunction, or ‘evil’ as it is called by the ignorant and obscurantist, is always in us, the us in question being our biological, cultural, or political ancestors, but never me
• When anything terrible happens, or rather is done, we are to blame for it, not the — merely apparent — perpetrators
• We are responsible: I am not
• We have done something to make them behave badly
• If it were not for us the world would be a peaceful, happy place
• We are ultimately responsible for all the ‘evil’ in the world
• We are all guilty!

Wharton