CRIMES OF LOGIC

With this single line, Camus opens The Rebel. The whole book unfolds from it. We can recognize, sometimes even forgive, a crime committed in a sudden storm of feeling. We know what it is to lose control. The other kind of crime is harder to see clearly because it does not look like a crime at all. It is committed slowly, after deliberation, in service of an idea that is supposed to be true.

The crime of logic is the more dangerous of the two. It does not need anger, hatred, or even dislike of its victim. It needs only a system that makes the victim’s suffering necessary. Once such a system is in place, ordinary people who would never strike a stranger in passion will arrange for that stranger to lose his livelihood, his standing, even his life, and feel righteous afterward. The intelligence approves what the heart would have refused.

Camus saw this at the scale of the totalitarianisms of his century. But it appears in small forms too. The firing made for the sake of the team. The friend cut off for the sake of an ideology. The cruelty toward strangers excused by what one believes about their group. Each is a small crime of logic, defended by the elaborate machinery of reasons.

The discipline is to be more suspicious of yourself when you are calm and certain than when you are angry. A revolt that requires you to do harm coolly and on principle is closer to the trap than one in which the heart still flinches.