A Criminal History of Mankind (16 page)

But perhaps the most important point to emerge from these considerations is that they apply to
everybody
, not simply to criminals or alcoholics. All of us spend a large amount of our time in a state akin to hypnosis. All of us spend a large amount of our lives in a state of boredom or ‘directionlessness’. And the insights of MacDougald, Reynolds and Maslow are just as applicable to company directors as to criminals. This has been recognised by Werner Erhard, the founder of the psychotherapeutic method known as est. As described in a biography of Erhard by W. W. Bartley, the essence of est is the recognition of ‘true identity’. The key to Erhard’s thought is the notion of the Self, and the recognition that this Self is able to take charge of the individual’s life and personality. We are not ‘creatures of circumstance’. We only believe we are when we are in a ‘fallen’ or untransformed state. And the essence of this state is the delusion that we are mere products of our mental and emotional activities, as heat is a product of a fire. An important American physician, Howard Miller - of whom we shall speak later - has made the same observation. The ‘essential you’ fails to grasp its own nature; it sits around passively in a corner of the brain, observing the body’s physical and emotional states as if they were as uncontrollable as the weather. The moment any kind of crisis occurs, the ego awakens with a shock and hurls itself into its proper role as the
director
of consciousness. The situation could be compared to the captain of a ship who has suffered a bout of amnesia, and who sits gloomily in his cabin, staring out of the porthole and wondering why the ship seems to be going in circles. The reason, of course, is that there is nobody on the bridge.

* * *

Let us try to summarise these insights.

Crime is the outcome of negative attitudes. Negative attitudes are due to the selectivity of our perceptive mechanisms. A man who had just been reprieved from a firing squad would fling open his senses like windows; he would notice everything, and everything would strike him as beautiful and interesting. As the American gangster and multiple murderer Charlie Birger stood on the scaffold in 1927, he looked wistfully at the sky and said: ‘It is a beautiful world, isn’t it?’ But he had noticed it too late. He should have noticed it earlier; then a number of people would have remained alive.

Once a man has deliberately closed his mind to all kinds of data - like the blueness of the sky - he has left himself connected to external reality by a dangerously thin thread - the thread of his immediate purposes. And, odd as it sounds, he is now living in a kind of cave inside his own head. That cave contains an enormous number of filing cabinets, full of photographs of the outside world, and the walls are covered with ‘maps of reality’ -
ideas
of how to deal with the problems of living. Religious people have religious maps; politicians have political maps; psychologists have psychological maps. Ordinary people have maps derived from their parents, from people they admire, and from their own experience - the latter usually being the least important. And when confronted by a new situation, each of them skims quickly through a drawerful of old photographs, glances hastily at his maps, and then responds ‘appropriately’.

The photographs he chooses are those that
remind
him of the present situation. For example, if he is being introduced to a moonfaced stranger with a grey suit and a foreign accent, his memory will throw up photographs of various strangers, and various men with moon faces, grey suits and foreign accents. If he found most of these fairly likeable, then he will feel predisposed to like this new acquaintance - while firmly believing that he is forming a judgement solely on the basis of his present observations. Perhaps, as he is shaking the man’s hand, the stranger smiles and shows a gold tooth which recalls a neighbour who once caught him stealing apples; immediately, he feels an inexplicable twinge of dislike.

All these complex mechanisms have been developed over millions of years of evolution. And it is easy to see that most of us are quite simply overweighted with habit mechanisms. We are like the dinosaurs, whose bodies were so gigantic that it cost them an immense effort to move, Bui with human beings, it is the ‘robot’, the ‘habit-body’ that has become so gigantic and complex that it does most of our living for us. The average human being lives in his habit-body like a mouse in a windmill. As we get older, the mechanism grows more rusty and cumbersome, and we experience less and less of those flashes of freedom - of sheer delight - that make life worth living. This is why, as Gurdjieff says, many people die long before their physical death. They continue to respond to external stimuli, immense, creaking windmills, tenanted only by a dead mouse.

In the light of this assessment, it may seem that the long-term future of the human race looks unpromising. But the comparison with the dinosaur may be misleading. This is not a problem of man’s long-term evolution but of what happens during an individual’s lifetime. As Wordsworth points out, children often see things ‘apparelled in celestial light’; it is with the approach of adulthood that the ‘shades of the prison house begin to close’. And we have seen that this is not as inevitable as Wordsworth thought. It is largely due to ‘faulty blocking’. What is necessary, at this point in evolution, is for man to recognise that
he
is in charge of his consciousness, that if we can unconsciously close our minds to interesting data, then we can use conscious intelligence to open them again.

What prevents this recognition? The answer can be seen in the following paragraph, which is from a book called
Curious Facts
:

Mrs Marva Drew, a fifty-one-year-old housewife from Waterloo, Iowa, typed out every number from one to a million after her son’s teacher told him it was impossible to count up to a million. It took her five years and 2,473 sheets of typing paper.

The sheer waste of time takes the breath away. Could anything more dreary, more pointless, more repetitious, be imagined? What could motivate any human being to do anything so futile? Yet the answer is plain enough. A schoolteacher - a figure of authority - told her son it was impossible. She decided that, in this single instance, she would prove she knew better than authority. So she wasted five years of her life. We can see that the attitude of mind is identical to Panzram’s - the defiance of authority - and that the act has the baffling illlogicality that is characteristic of crime. And, like the professor who went to bed instead of attending to his guests, there is also an element that savours of hypnosis. If the lady had had the common sense to say: ‘But schoolteachers are not infallible’, she would have saved herself five years - the equivalent of a prison sentence. But in order to
know
that, she would have had to change her whole attitude - not merely towards authority, but towards herself. Society had conditioned her to a certain view of authority and, therefore, of herself.

Man has achieved his present position as the ‘lord of creation’ because he is the most social animal on earth. But because he is a social animal, he keeps looking to other people for his cues to action. The key to crime, therefore, lies in man’s history as a social being.

HOW MAN EVOLVED

The following two extracts are examples of sadism, one real, one fictional:

We slept, having given the prize of the night to a tale of Enver Pasha, after the Turks re-took Sharkeui. He went to see it, in a penny steamer, with Prince Jamil and a gorgeous staff. The Bulgars, when they came, had massacred the Turks; as they retired, the Bulgar peasants went too. So the Turks found hardly anyone to kill. A greybeard was led on board for the Commander-in-Chief to bait. At last Enver tired of this. He signed to two of his bravo aides, and throwing open the furnace door, said, ‘Push him in.’ The old man screamed, but the officers were stronger and the door was slammed-to on his jerking body. We turned, feeling sick, to go away, but Enver, his head on one side, listening, halted us. So we listened till there came a crash within the furnace. He smiled and nodded, saying: ‘Their heads always pop like that.’

That night, after a quick round of buggery with Saint-Fond, I withdrew to my apartment. But I couldn’t sleep: so stirred up was I by Clairwil’s violent words and actions, I had to commit a crime of my own.

My heart beating wildly at the evil thoughts racing through my brain, I leapt out of bed and dashed to the servants’ quarters. There I stole a butler’s clothes and a guard’s pistol. Then, looking very much like a gentleman of fashion [the narrator is a woman], I slipped into the night.

At the first street corner to which I came, I stationed myself inside a doorway and waited for someone to pass. The prospect of the crime which I was about to commit thrilled me like nothing I had ever experienced. My body glistened with sweat. My insides churned with the turmoil which precedes sexual congress - a fundamental excitement which honed all my senses to a fine cutting edge. I was aflame, ablaze now, for a victim.

Suddenly, in response to my devil’s prayer, I heard groans - a woman’s voice, soft, low-pitched and mournful. Racing in the direction from which the sounds came, I found a tattered, feeble-looking creature huddled upon a doorstep.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded, drawing closer.

‘One cursed by fate,’ she replied; ‘if you are the harbinger of death, I will embrace you gladly.’

‘What are your difficulties?’ I asked, noticing that, in spite of her grief, she was rather a comely creature.

‘My husband has been put in jail, my babies are starving; now this house on whose steps I sit, this house which once was mine, has been taken away from me.’

‘By fuck!’ I cheered. The sexual heat welling up inside my body had become almost unbearable. ‘Come now, let me put your talents to the test.’

So saying, I seized her by the hair and jerked her to her feet. Wrapping one arm around her waist and urging her hips forward, I jammed the pistol barrel into her vagina. ‘Goodbye, bitch,’ I said softly. ‘Here’s a fucking you’ll never forget.’ Whereupon, pulling the trigger, I sent her spinning off into eternity.

The first excerpt is from T. E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, the second from de Sade’s novel
Juliette
(here slightly abbreviated, since de Sade enjoys spinning out the woman’s pleas for mercy). It is one of de Sade’s milder inventions. The difference in the quality of the cruelty is immediately apparent. De Sade makes it clear that his Juliette is experiencing intense sexual excitement at the thought of committing murder. It is doubtful whether Enver Pasha experienced anything at all except a kind of savage amusement. Enver’s cruelty is a form of stupidity, springing out of complete lack of imagination. De Sade’s cruelty is totally conscious; in fact, it was the result of too much imagination, of years spent in prison with nothing to do but indulge in erotic daydreams. Yet the essence of the sadism, in both cases, is an
inflated ego
. The sadist derives from his act the same feeling of power that the Right Man experiences when he gets his own way by shouting and bullying.

This, clearly, is the very essence of crime: the self-absorption and lack of imagination. A delinquent who mugs an old lady or wrecks a telephone kiosk is as absorbed in his own needs as a baby crying to be fed. Freud revealed his own insight into crime when he remarked that a baby would destroy the world if it had the power.

In 1961, two psychiatrists, Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, began to study the mentality of criminals at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in New York. Their initial premise was that men become criminals because of ‘deep-seated psychologic problems’. They became popular with their patients because their attitude was permissive and compassionate. They believed that most criminals are the product of poor social conditions or problems in early childhood, and that with enough insight and understanding they could be ‘cured’. Gradually, they became disillusioned. They noticed that no matter how much ‘insight’ they achieved into the behaviour of a murderer, rapist or child-molester, it made no difference to his actual conduct; as soon as he left the doctor’s office, he went straight back to his previous criminal pattern. He didn’t
want
to change. Yochelson and Samenow also became increasingly sceptical about the stories told by criminals to justify themselves. They found them amazingly skilful in self-justification - suppressing any material that might lose them sympathy - but the real problem lay in the criminal character. They lied as automatically as breathing. They had a strong desire to make an impression on other people - they were what David Reisman calls ‘other directed’ - and a great deal of their criminal activity sprang from this desire to show off, to ‘look big’. They were also skilful in lying to themselves. Particularly striking is Yochelson’s observation that most criminals - like Bruner’s cat - have developed a psychological ‘shut-off mechanism’, an ability to push inconvenient thoughts out of consciousness - even to forget that they had made certain damaging admissions about themselves at a previous meeting. ‘This,’ as Yochelson observes, ‘meant that responsibility, too, could be shut off.’ In short, the central traits of the criminal personality were weakness, immaturity and self-deception. In the case of the child-molester who was finally ‘cured’, they observed that psychological insight ‘was not responsible for the success, but rather the fact that he applied choice, will and deterrence to a pattern that offended him’ (i.e., got him into trouble). He stopped because he wanted to stop; and most criminals went on being criminals because they could see no reason not to.