A Criminal History of Mankind (15 page)

As soon as we become aware of this mechanism, it becomes easy to observe it in ourselves. If, for example, I am feeling ill, trying not to be physically sick, I can observe how almost any thought can push me in one direction or another. The mere mention of food is enough to make me wonder what I ever saw in it. Yet it is equally easy for me to ‘snap out’ of it. I hear a pattering noise on the windowpane and think: ‘Can it be raining?’ And when my attention comes back to my stomach, I am no longer feeling sick. The rain has rescued me from my claustrophobic mental world, re-established my connection with reality.

And now it becomes possible to see how a Panzram or Merkhouloff becomes locked into an attitude of self-destruction. His negative mental attitudes cut him off from reality like a leaden shutter. There would be no point in telling Merkhouloff that his fear of killing someone by accident is absurd; his anxiety has made him ‘unreachable’, like the girl Pauline, encountered in the first chapter, who was told to go and embrace the Abbé and could not be made to abandon the idea, even by the man who had implanted the suggestion. Panzram’s tragedy was not that he was a social reject who was inevitably driven to violence and crime; it was that he was trapped in a state of ‘negative suggestibility’ so that he was totally unable to utilise his potential as a human being.

But is this necessarily so? For the criminologist, this is obviously the most important question of all. The answer, quite clearly, should be no. If the mind is the slayer of reality, it should also be the creator - or, at least, the amplifier - of reality. If the problem of criminality is due to negative attitudes, then it should be possible to solve it through positive attitudes. Panzram may have been resentful and vicious; but he was also highly intelligent. This in itself should have enabled him to break out of the vicious circle.

The revolutionary idea of ‘curing’ criminals by a change of attitude was not only suggested but demonstrated and proved by an American penologist named Dan MacDougald. His involvement in rehabilitation came about by accident. In the mid-1950s, MacDougald, who is a lawyer, was approached by farmers who wanted to complain about the Federal authorities. The authorities were overloading the Buford Dam in Georgia so that the overflow often ruined crops and drowned cattle. Their case seemed so reasonable and logical that MacDougald had no doubt it should be easily settled. To his surprise, it seemed practically impossible to persuade the authorities to listen. The engineers in charge of the dam told him you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and it took three years of arguing, and a cost of $46,000, to get things changed.

What baffled MacDougald was that it seemed so difficult to
get through
to the authorities; it was just as if they had put their hands over their ears. And he began to see the outline of an explanation when he heard about an experiment performed at Harvard by Dr Jerome Bruner. Bruner was trying to determine the way stimuli are conveyed to the brain. It was known that they travel along nerve fibres by means of electrical impulses, and the experimenters had put electrodes in the nervous system - they were using a cat for their experiments - so that they could see exactly what nervous impulses were passing at any given moment. They discovered that if a cat was placed in a quiet room and a sharp click was sounded in its ear, this click could be traced as it moved along the nerves all the way to the cortex.

They then tried placing a bell jar containing two lively white mice in front of the cat. The click was again sounded. And, oddly enough, their apparatus recorded no electrical impulse in the nerve. That seemed absurd. They could believe that the cat was ignoring the impulse as it gazed intently at the mice. But if the eardrum vibrated, then the impulse should have been carried along the nerve and registered on their oscilloscope. It looked as if the cat was somehow turning off the sound
at the eardrum
. What was actually happening, other experimenters discovered later, was that the cat sends counter-impulses to inhibit the sound - to block the nerve fibre, so to speak.

MacDougald also came across the astonishing piece of information that the five senses pick up about ten thousand ‘units of information’ per second and that all this information is forwarded to a processing system in the brain. But the mind can only use about seven out of the ten thousand. The other 9,993 units of information have to be ignored.
This
is why the mind has such an efficient ‘filter’ system. As I sit here, typing this page, my body is recording thousands of sensations. My feet are rather cold. I cut my thumb this morning and the end still hurts. My chin tingles faintly from the aftershave I put on it. I feel the pressure of the chair, the pressure of my clothes, the slight breeze from the open door and dozens of other minor sensations that I
can
focus on if I choose to. But when I am writing, I do not choose; I ignore them all. Or rather, my excellent inhibitory system does the work for me. If someone severed my inhibitory fibres, I would be unable to concentrate.

MacDougald’s dazzling insight was that this explained not only the indifference of the Federal authorities but the anti-social behaviour of criminals. The criminal is essentially a man whose judgement on life is negative. He thinks he will only get what he wants by grabbing it. And he is literally blind to all the things that contradict his negative view of existence. Dickens’s Scrooge is a good example of what MacDougald calls ‘negative blocking’. A lonely childhood has convinced him that the world is an unpleasant place, so that his attitude to life is unyielding and defensive: ‘Christmas, humbug!’ The girl to whom he was once engaged puts her finger on his problem when she says: ‘You fear the world too much.’ He is thoroughly miserable in his cheerless room, yet is unaware of any other possibility. He is trapped in ‘immediacy’, the world of the microscope. All the ghost of Christmas Past has to do is to show him his own childhood; the ice around his heart melts and the ‘faulty blocking vanishes’. ‘He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts.’ The sheer
multiplicity
of the world begins to break through.

We can also see that Scrooge’s ‘faulty blocking’ would be reflected in his understanding of words. If a psychologist had presented him with an association test containing words such as ‘Christmas’, ‘kindliness’, ‘charity’, ‘love’, ‘neighbourliness’, his associations would have been words like ‘humbug’, ‘gullibility’, ‘stupidity’, ‘feeble-mindedness’ and ‘nuisance’. The three ghosts alter and
broaden
his understanding of these words.

This was the basis of MacDougald’s own solution to the problem of ‘unblocking’ criminals. He cites William James, who remarked: ‘The greatest discovery of my generation is the fact that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.’ The key to a man’s attitudes lies in his understanding of words, says MacDougald. And where crime is concerned, the keywords are those associated with religion: love, sin, neighbour, punishment, responsibility, and so on. The anti-social personality’s understanding of such words is often incomplete or contradictory. For example, most alcoholics agree that their situation is largely their own fault; yet they go on to deny that their failures are their own responsibility; they are inclined to lay the blame elsewhere. Clearly, their understanding of the notion of responsibility is vague and contradictory.

In effect, MacDougald set out to change the attitude of criminals by appealing to their intelligence, and by trying to instil into them a fuller understanding of these basic words. He was convinced that the New Testament contains the most comprehensive teaching for a harmonious society, and that in the original Aramaic, the meaning is even more precise than in the English translation. A single example will serve. The Aramaic word for ‘self’ is ‘
naphsha
’. This, according to MacDougald, means the ‘true self’, a man’s essential being. We have been taught that love of ‘self’ is undesirable, another name for selfishness. Yet the New Testament tells us to love our neighbour as ourself. This seems to suggest that a man
should
love his ‘self’, and is, MacDougald believes, one of the key concepts of Christianity. In the case of Panzram, it is easy to see what he means. Panzram loathed himself, and said so repeatedly. Yet his autobiography reveals that he was a man of considerable intelligence and integrity, and that these were his ‘essential’ attributes. If Panzram had recognised this, he would never have become a criminal. Even as a criminal, his intelligence would almost certainly have responded to this recognition that he had good reason to love his ‘
naphsha
’ and should not be ashamed to do so.

MacDougald obtained permission to try out these ideas in the Georgia State Penitentiary at Reidsville. He started from the assumption that prisoners are intelligent enough to grasp the lesson of Bruner’s experiment with the cat: that they are somehow
refusing
to see and hear certain things. It is a law of nature that each person seeks to achieve his own goals. The trouble with the criminal is that his faulty attitudes cause him to pursue these goals in such a muddled way that he never achieves them. As we have seen in the case of Haigh, the criminal’s ‘cleverness’ is usually a form of stupidity. The criminal’s chief problem is that, like the alcoholic, he feels helpless; nothing ever comes out right. He blames ‘life’. MacDougald set out to show criminals that the real blame lay in their own muddle and confusion, their negative attitudes.

The results were spectacular. Initial tests at the Georgia Institute of Correction showed that sixty-three per cent of prisoners - many of them ‘hard core psychopaths’ (i.e., Panzram-types) - could be rehabilitated in a matter of weeks. Follow-up studies eighteen months later showed that there had been no backsliding. The instructors from MacDougald’s institute (which at that stage was called the Yonan Codex Foundation, the name being that of the Aramaic version of the New Testament MacDougald preferred) began by instructing two prisoners in their methods for two weeks, and then the four of them instructed another twenty-two prisoners, four of whom were also chosen as instructors. Later the course was renamed Emotional Maturity Instruction.

MacDougald offers one remarkable illustration of the way it worked. One prisoner felt intense hostility towards another. Prison morality - as expounded by Jack Abbott - dictates that in a situation like this honour demands that the two of them fight it out, and that if one can kill the other, he does so. The man had concealed a piece of iron pipe in preparation for the showdown; but after a discussion and exploration of the meaning of the concept of forgiveness, this suddenly struck him as absurd. The man was his ‘neighbour’, and his own distorted concepts were urging him to an act that was basically against his own interests. So he bought the other man a sandwich and a coffee and talked the thing over. The two became friends.

At first sight, it looks as if MacDougald had simply found a way of importing old-fashioned evangelism into the prison, but closer examination shows that to presume this is to miss the point. His basic assumption was that most criminals are acting at a level far below their natural capacity and potential. All men have the same need to grow up, to evolve, to achieve their objectives. By treating them as intelligent human beings, by offering them the possibility of some kind of evolution, MacDougald had changed their basic attitudes. In fact, his discovery had been anticipated two decades before by a Hungarian named Alfred Reynolds, who had left Hungary in the 1930s and came to live in England. Reynolds was in Army Intelligence during the war, and in 1945 was given the almost impossible task of ‘de-Nazifying’ young Nazi officers who had been captured. Reynolds has described how, when he first entered the room, there was an atmosphere of cold hostility. They stared at him, prepared - like Bruner’s cat - to ‘cut out’ anything he had to say at the level of the ear-drum. To their surprise, there was no homily on the evils of Nazism. Instead, he asked them to explain to him what they understood by National Socialism. Once they were convinced he really wanted to know, they began to talk. He listened quietly, asked questions, and pointed out contradictions. Within a matter of days, there was not a Nazi left among them.

All he had done, in effect, was to make them aware that all religions and ideologies prevent people from thinking for themselves. He did not criticise Hitler. He simply let them expound Hitler’s doctrines until it began to dawn on them that they had no need to swallow someone else’s ideas - they were perfectly capable of formulating their own. And he did this by turning their de-Nazification session into a kind of debating society. The sheer pleasure of thinking for themselves did the rest.

Reynolds demonstrates that successful rehabilitation does not depend on the nature of the teaching - whether it is religious, moral, political or whatever. It depends solely upon making people use their minds, and thereby making them aware that they have minds. The criminal’s violence springs out of a feeling that nothing less will enable him to achieve his goals. In fact, he is failing to achieve his goals because he proceeds on the negative assumption that they cannot be achieved. And negative assumptions, as we have seen, produce ‘hypnosis’. The moment he substitutes a positive assumption, his ‘controlling ego’ wakes up and takes command. And the sense of a controlling ego is also the sense of self, of
naphsha
.

Maslow and other psychologists have demonstrated that alcoholics can be cured by inducing a similar recognition with the help of the psychedelic drug LSD. When the notion of using LSD as a cure for alcoholism first occurred to two doctors, Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, their idea was to try and frighten the patient by an experience similar to DT’s. It has been established that many alcoholics begin to recover after ‘hitting rock bottom’, often the experience of delirium tremens, and the doctors soon discovered that a positive LSD trip could be even more effective. LSD, like mescalin, causes a ‘transformation of reality’; sights, sounds, smells, may become more intense. Hoffer and Osmond discovered that if their patients had religious or spiritual experiences under LSD, they were far more likely to be cured than if they had a bad trip, and Maslow made use of the same principle in some of his own experiments. He knew that alcoholics are often more sensitive and intelligent than the average person, and are consequently more likely to be depressed by difficulties and obstructions, and so take refuge in heavy drinking. At first, the drinking produces ‘peak experiences’ which relieve the tension; but very frequently it only produces depression, which leads to still heavier drinking. The whole negative cycle is further complicated by feelings of guilt and helplessness. Maslow questioned his patients about the kind of aesthetic experiences that had given them pleasure before they became alcoholics - music, poetry, painting. Then, under mescalin or LSD, he induced ‘peak experiences’ - feelings of intense happiness and well-being - by means of music, poetry, colours blending on a screen. This method produced many startling cures. And the reason, apparently, was that when the patient experienced a sense of deep relaxation and happiness, it awakened all his hopes, his positive expectations of life. He would also see clearly that these could be best fulfilled if he stayed healthy and determined. He would recognise that to drink heavily to achieve the ‘peak experience’ is counter-productive. The ‘self’ would regain control, and the patient cease to be an alcoholic. In effect, Maslow was doing what MacDougald and Reynolds did: awakening the controlling ego.