Contemplating Evil

Novelist Dean Koontz on Freud, fraud, and the Great Society

Nick Gillespie & Lisa Snell from the November 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

I think that's a criminal thing to do to people. It takes away their chance at being something in life. I really believe that everyone has a talent, ability, or skill that he can mine to support himself and to succeed in life. I'm lucky to have a talent and an ability that allowed me to succeed at a very high level. But I also understand how that potential is stolen from you by giving you too many options not to work. If I had that option as a kid, if I hadn't seen the need to work hard and get ahead and not be my father, I probably would have taken it. As a kid, sloth might have been so ingrained in me that by the time I got old enough to focus on the talent, I wouldn't have cared.

Reason: You worked in a Great Society program. How did that affect you?

Koontz: If you've got your eyes open, actually working in one of these programs is an astonishing education. I was in Title III of the Appalachian Poverty Program, which was administered through local school districts. My first job was in Saxton, Pennsylvania, a former coal mining town where the mines were all played out. The people don't leave, they stay there. I was supposed to be a combination counselor and tutor. All the teachers in the high school were supposed to choose the students in their classes who came from the deepest poverty but who had great potential. Those kids were supposed to come to me-- kids who without one-on-one tutoring and one-on-one counseling were going to have a hard time breaking out of their situation.

It sounded very noble and wonderful. I'm slow sometimes, and it didn't occur to me that this position began in September but I was starting in November. So I was coming into a job two months after it should have been filled. It never crossed my mind why that should be. As we went into the faculty lounge, the principal introduced me to the teachers, and the first guy said, "I think it really takes guts to do what you're doing." Guts? I thought. But that was the pattern through every introduction: "It takes a lot of courage to come to this job."

Then I discovered that the fellow before me had been run off the road by the kids he was supposedly trying to help. They had beat him up and put him in the hospital. That's why the job was open. What I discovered very quickly was that instead of identifying the kids who had real potential and could have benefited from the program, the teachers took their worst discipline problems and got them out of the classroom by giving them to me. A number of these kids had police records, reform school records; they were in deep trouble. Basically, a lot of these kids just wouldn't benefit from a lot of instruction. These kids were all out of control. I'm not a big guy, and some of these kids were big guys. But even though these kids were never going to be scientists and doctors, the first thing I discovered was that if you imposed and expected discipline, they liked it. They wanted it and respected it.

But the program was subverted by the people administering it. That's just one way these programs can go wrong. At the end of that year, I also had noticed that the money for the poverty program was not coming to me at all. To get $9.00 worth of books, I once had to fight six weeks. Every dollar we tried to get was disappearing somewhere. It was going to building new gyms, which had nothing to do with helping these kids. And I became absolutely convinced that some of it was going into pockets somewhere. There just was no other way to explain how the money fell through the program and didn't help anybody. At the end of the year, I realized there was no way these kids were ever going to be helped by this program. As committed as I was to trying to do what I could for them, there was nothing I could do because the program operated against me.

Worse than that, these kids went home every night. It was at home where dependency was inculcated in them. Many of them were living in terrible circumstances--living on screened porches in winter, that sort of thing. I had a kid who was one of 12 or 14 children who was just waiting till he was old enough to get out of school without his parents' permission. So he stood around all day or sat all day and did nothing. He didn't want to be in school. His parents made him stay in school because as long as he was there, they received payment for him, as did the school. And that was why they had all these kids. It's a cliché when people will argue with you that welfare recipients don't have kids just to collect payment. Yes, they do. I've been in that system and I've watched it. These kids got nothing from their parents.

The only thing you could do to help these kids--it sounds fascistic--was to take them away from their parents and put them into an orphanage. Newt Gingrich got in deep trouble for saying the same thing. We know there are a lot of horrors that can take place in a public institution. But each of these families has become a public institution where the public is paying to support the whole system. There is no control over what happens to these kids. These kids are simply product. They're produced to make payments and nobody cares about them. The system does not and the parents don't. It's horrifying.

Reason: You've written that "Humanity's hopeless pursuit of utopia through government beneficence leads only to grief, misery, and blood." Around 1971, your politics changed and, by your own admission, you remained a liberal on civil rights issues while becoming a conservative on defense and a "semi-libertarian" on all others.

Koontz: I began to evolve (laughs). Here's where I disagree with doctrinaire libertarians: I think we need a pretty strong defense. I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before. I'd love to see us with a missile defense. We're going to see countries like North Korea with missiles that can make it across the Pacific. And since I live on this side of the country, I'm particularly worried by that (laughs). But in a general sense, I think we'll always need a strong defense.

Reason: What are the other disagreements with doctrinaire libertarians?

Koontz: Although it's completely out of control now, I think the government has some role in recognizing that certain civil rights are like contractual rights. I think society has a contract with its minorities to make sure that they are not discriminated against. That's a contract the government should enforce the same way it would enforce, say, a movie deal or some other contract.

Reason: Specifically, what does that mean? Do you favor affirmative action programs?

Koontz: No. That's what I mean when I say things are out of control. I support the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. I think that if you're a citizen of the country, there's a basic contract that says you should have the same rights as anyone else. I think to some extent--and here's where we start having to draw those lines--that certain private places like restaurants are public places. If you advertise and encourage the public to come, then I don't think it's just to refuse service to someone based on race or religion. I think it's perfectly just to refuse service to anyone based on behavior, but not based on race or religion.

The problem is that when government is given enough authority in a particular area to enforce the law, it starts expanding its authority. How we prevent that is a battle that goes on forever. It'll never stop.