In The Epoch Times, Dalrymple recounts the case of Sean Egan, a supermarket manager of 29 years dismissed for physically confronting a prolific shoplifter. He traces a line from Nietzsche and Matthew Arnold through G.K. Chesterton to argue that what we are witnessing is not exactly a change in values but a perversion of older ones.
Procedure is good as a guideline, and in some instances, though not very many in everyday life, is essential—for example, in the flying of an aircraft. But where it is bowed down to and worshipped as if it were a jealous god, it leads to a brainless formalism, gross injustice, and an absurd situation in which a man who attempts to prevent shoplifting is punished much more severely than is the shoplifter.