Second opinion
'GREAT is the truth,' said Billy Bunter, translating from the Latin, 'and it will prevail a bit.'
He was being unduly optimistic, of course. There is no reason at all why the truth should prevail even a bit, and indeed history, in which one vast untruth has quickly succeeded another in the minds of men, would suggest quite other- wise. And that was in the days before widespread litigation.
Litigation is to veracity what drought is to an African harvest. When I hear a man (or a woman) say, 'Doctor, it ruined my life,' I know that I am departing the realm of Truth and entering the realm not of Error, but of Gross Exaggeration at best, and Complete Fabrication at worst.
Of course, some people's lives are ruined by untoward events: the point is, however, that they never use this particu- lar form of words. Only people who are trying fraudulently to extract large sums of money from hapless defendants use it.
It is astonishing how quickly litigious mania spreads, like an epidemic in fact. It is a terribly debilitating disease, and it communicates itself even to those who one might have supposed were immune to it: refugees from vile political regimes, for example. This proves the miasmatic nature of litigation.
For example, an African who had sur- vived several famines caused by civil war and who had been imprisoned by the regime in circumstances too horrible to recount claimed that his life had been ruined by a cut on his thumb caused by a machine tool in the factory where he worked. His thumb had healed thorough- ly, but he claimed that the shock had ren- dered him incapable of any work ever again.
If he were looking for the true psycho- logical antecedent of his unwillingness to work, of course, he would find it in the system of civil law, for without the prospect of compensation his recovery, of necessity, would have been complete. Thus the civil law is like a black hole: what goes into it never comes out.
Take another case, this time the citizen of one of the viler Arab regimes. His career in his homeland had been che- quered, to say the least. He had been a soldier, and one of his first military duties had been to guard the area in which thousands of his fellow-country- men were being gassed to death. Having performed his duties to the complete sat- isfaction of his superiors, he graduated to the role of torturer, a much sought-after position. He could still hear the cries of the tortured ringing in his ears. His career, alas, was interrupted by further military action, in the course of which he was shot in the leg. The bullet was removed surgically without anaesthe- sia, the latter being reserved in difficult economic circumstances for the senior officers. It was then that he realised that the regime was no good and he managed to effect his escape. And what had ruined his life? He had been driving his car in a suburb when an elderly driver had glided slowly into his rear at traffic lights. He had no injuries detectable by x-rays or other tests, but the whiplash was terrible. It had ruined his life, in fact. And thus we see that the wealth .of insurance companies and the English civil law pose a greater threat to human happiness than poison gas, torture and surgery without anaesthesia combined.
Theodore Dalrymple
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