Harry Hole; The Bat - Page 253

"Ive been a policeman all my life, Holy, but still I look at my colleagues around me and wonder what is that makes them do it, fight for other people’s wars. What drives them? Who wants to go through so much suffering for others to have what they perceive as justice? They’re the stupid ones, Holy. We are. We’re blessed with a stupidity so great that we believe we can achieve something. We get shot to pieces, we’re obliterated and one day we jump into the sea, but in the meantime, in our endless stupidity, we believe someone needs us. And if one day, you should still see through the illusion, it’s already too late because we’ve become police officers, we’re in the trenches and there’s no way back. We can just wonder what the hell happened, when it was exactly that we made the wrong decision. We’re doomed to do do-gooders for the rest of our lives and doomed to fail. But, happily, truth is a relative business. And it’s flexible. We bend it and twist it until it has space in our lives. But everyone knows it’s not healthy with the extinction of vermin for any length of time. You get to taste your own poison.

So what’s the point, Holy? The man’s been in the flak turret all his life, and now he’s dead. What more is there to say? Truth is relative. It’s not easy to understand what extreme stress can do to a person, for those who haven’t experienced it themselves. We have forensic psychiatrists who try to draw a line between those who are sick and who are criminal, and they bend and twist the truth to make it fit into their world of theoretical models. We have a legal system which, at its best, hope can remove the occasional destructive individual from the streets, and journalists who would like to be seen as idealists because they make their names by exposing others in the belief that they’re establishing some kind of justice. But the *truth*?

The truth is that no one lives off the truth and thats why no one cares about the truth. The truth we make for ourselves is just the sum of what is in someone’s interest, balanced by the power they hold."