We’re all called upon from time to time to understand that which, let’s face it, we cannot understand.

I don’t mean by that the apparent infinity of the Universe or the sound of one hand clapping. I mean an attitude, behaviour or even medical condition that is beyond our capacity for empathy.

While most of us do grasp that we should try and understand, on the whole we don’t bother. One of the most difficult things in life, for example, is to appreciate and sympathise with an irrational fear of open spaces: ‘it’s an open space outside, what’s the problem?’ is a temptingly easy reaction. But for the sufferer, it is a life-restricting – often ruining – phobia.

I try, when looking at some of the chaotic lives they lead, to empathise with what the media has for some thirty years been referring to routinely as the Underclass. I’ve got better at it since meeting some of them, but it’s rarely easy. The bottom line is that we have a seam in the population, aged from 18 to roughly 50, who lack any measurable skills, discernment, manners, common sense, contraceptives or point as members of society. Their problem is not that they are gullible – although they often are: the disability from which they suffer results from an overdose of sensory anaesthetics, and an intelligence quotient simply not up to organising themselves beyond it.

The only things they seem able to notice, understand and appreciate are mobile phones, televisions, bottles, teeth, noses, violence, single-syllable words, money and skin. Unfortunately, this does equip them for a relatively full life comprising speech, gaping, alcohol, pizzas, breathing, fights, The Sun, welfare and sexual intercourse.

I’m back once again in the territory of The Dark Places with this one, but without looking into the murky corners we are never going to emerge into the light. The seemingly insoluble dilemma is that I cannot abide the Nasties who revel in seeing such people as ‘scum’ (a word, if they did but know it, that said people use quite a bit themselves); but equally, I am quickly irritated by the blind equality brigade who insist that everyone is equally valuable to society. Clearly that’s not true: they deserve equal treatment and consideration, and that’s it. But the problem is, at times they are very hard to like. And they are not good  at considering the needs of others.

So for me, there comes a point at which one has to decide what to do about their continued existence in our midst…in such huge (and growing) numbers. And in facing that issue, one must try to be scrupulously honest about which thoughts come from anger, and which from the classic Benthamite attitude of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

I think this is an issue where I will always part company with both Left and Right. The current government’s approach (of setting slapdash private sector knuckle-heads on them) is to my mind not only failing to learn from past mistakes, but also unlikely to do anything to address their behaviours in the long term – or redress the cultural failures that produced them in the first place.

However, the Left (and ‘progressives’ from the past, including me) must accept that we are at least in part responsible for those failures. Many of this group wrestling with life at the bottom of our culture simply aren’t equipped to deal with the permissive society, the deregulated credit society, the cafe society or the so-called post-industrial society. In those places, they have too many children, borrow too much money, drink too much alcohol, and can’t find menial jobs any more – because they’ve all been mechanised or turned into added-value service businesses.

Although I don’t believe in the sanctity of human life (I believe that, as with absolute human rights, the idea is just a pompous ego-trip for our species) equally I don’t hold any truck with euthanasia other than the transparently voluntary version. Killing people is wrong, period. It’s the only way to think, otherwise killing people would become a normal activity within two generations.

So here we are, back at the alternatives. Can such people be turned into useful, stable and contented members of society without infringing upon the social rights of others? In the light of findings about brain plasticity, I would say yes – in theory, undoubtedly they could. But would they do so voluntarily? That, in most cases, I doubt. And how quickly could the necessary research be funded and completed? My view as of today is “It couldn’t be”.

So now what? And believe me, we have reached a stage in the 21st century where it is no longer moral, viable or acceptable to say “Nothing”. Although the Family Courts are a stain upon our British way of life, the majority of social workers who use them do so because they have clients who just don’t seem to be able stop having babies….but don’t seem to be able to support them without massive State aid.

Tough choices. But you see, if fluffy social engineers and political cynics hadn’t kicked this one down the road for over thirty years, we wouldn’t be facing such choices, would we? Not that anyone in power at the moment is facing them: but one day they will have to.

And then what? I freely admit that this is one of the big issues that really can keep me awake at night. I don’t move among these people very often, but when I do their behaviour horrifies me. Too often, that reaction is airily dismissed as ‘Bourgeois’. Bourgeois my arse: it’s a concern for the survival of civilisation.

“If push came to shove” we often hear used as a throat-clearing exercise in the academic. But push has come to shove now in Britain, and the question is no longer academic. Decades of immigration and politically popular housing programmes have left us over-populated and unable to feed the People to a quite ridiculous degree. If we kick this issue down the road again, a generation later other unelected technocrats will pop out of the woodwork to take the sort of decisions we would find utterly despicable.

Given the power, I would sterilise those who sired and/or gave birth to more than two children while in social care.

“And who are you,” comes the knee-jerk question, “to decide on that?” to which the obvious answer is, “Nobody special….but somebody has to”.

We have to make a start somewhere. What I’m suggesting is that it is a parent’s job, sometimes with State help, to bring up children – not the other way round. Down that road lies Lebensborn and the crushing of the individual spirit. Yes, this is a massively retrograde step for anyone with libertarian leanings, and yes, I’m only suggesting it because the mistake has been made, and it won’t reverse itself. This way, nobody dies and nobody even gets aborted: what we do get however is an otherwise insoluble problem brought under control.

The use of the abortion verb there is quite deliberate. I do find it a gobsmacking double standard for liberal women to demand the right to kill in order to exercise control over their bodies on the one hand, and then object to sterilisation that involves no killing of anyone or anything on the other to solve a social problem. (In case you’re in any doubt, by the way, I’m in favour of both abortion and sterilisation).

The logical conclusion from my argument might be that I value the survival of civilised society more than individual liberty, but I disagree in general – and cannot see the two things as mutually exclusive anyway.

What I value is the survival of civilised society above individual license. “If it feels good, do it” is not a self-regarding attitude, and is thus not a question of liberty: it is other-regarding, and clearly a question of demanding the unreasonable satisfaction of personal appetite.

And yes, of course the individual and society are indivisible. Maoists would have you believe that they are in conflict, but societies are (like markets) merely collections of individuals. Individuals are entitled to their privacy, and societies are entitled to protection. We are a pack species, and you can’t have one without the other.

The problem we have at the moment in the West is that sovereign Executives would like to depict constructive critics as people against whom “society” needs to be protected. But they don’t actually mean society, they mean “the Executive”.

The case of a growing, feral Underclass is totally different: by definition, such people need constant discipline and draconian regulation if they are not to become a massive danger to the safety and burdens of others. The very application of such control could easily become the thin end of the wedge, and change a free society into a Police State.

Earlier at The Slog: A conflagration of pants in Ten Downing Street