The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

By the second half of the 1950s, a new generation was already expressing its distaste for this stability. In England, the ‘Angry Young Men’ – named after John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger – directed their abuse at the ‘establishment’ – the church, the government, the royal family. In America, the ‘Beat Generation’ – led by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg – turned their backs on society in favour of the ‘hippie’ culture; but the emphasis was still on the iniquity of the establishment. In France, the followers of Sartre called themselves Maoists and called for a communist revolution. In Germany, still numbed by the defeat of 1945, there was as yet no sign of a new literary generation, but the spirit of dissatisfaction was growing.

The revolt against ‘stability’ received one of its clearest expressions in the manifestos of a group that called itself Situationist International, founded by Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. They argued that the establishment has learned to control the people by turning life into a kind of continuous entertainment – the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. Computers, television and all the other ‘mod-cons’ were designed to keep people passive and cow-like. The answer should be ‘subversion’ in every department of modern life, in schools, universities, factories. Anything that adds to the convenience of modern life should be regarded as a target for attack.

Another increasingly powerful influence on this rebel generation was Herbert Marcuse, a German Jewish sociologist with strong Marxist leanings who emigrated to America after the Nazis came to power. He seems to have detested American society very nearly as much as Hitler’s Germany, finding it too obsessed with success, conformity, standardisation. As early as 1941 he was expressing deep misgivings about technological society and the tendency of technology to deprive man of his freedom. In 1951, his book Eros and Civilisation took its starting point from Freud’s argument that civilisation always seems to involve repression of man’s natural instincts. And in 1964, One Dimensional Man began with the proposition: ‘A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation, a token of technical progress.’ At the back of Marcuse’s mind lies a vague, misty concept of some ideal ‘unrepressive society’, a Rousseau-ish dream in which everyone can do as he likes. His hatred of ‘repression’ became steadily more vitriolic until, in An Essay on Liberation (1969), it explodes into a fountain of bilious rage; the rebels of the new generation are advised to cultivate the ‘methodical use of obscenity’, to refer to President X and Governor Y as ‘pig X’ and ‘pig Y’, and to address them as mother-fuckers because they have ‘perpetrated the unspeakable Oedipal crime’, to take drug trips to escape the ‘ego shaped by the established society’ and to seize every opportunity for social sabotage. Marcuse was basically an old-fashioned anarchist; but his denunciation of the unsatisfactoriness of modern life aroused an echo in all young people who found modern life frustrating and boring.

The drugs Marcuse was recommending were not opium derivatives, but ‘psychedelics’ like mescalin and LSD, which are non-addictive. Significantly, these seem to operate by paralysing the normal ‘repressive’ function of the left brain, and allowing perception to be shaped by our far richer right-brain awareness. In the late 1950s, Timothy Leary, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard, began controlled experiments with ‘psychedelics’ (he invented the word) and became convinced that they could become the instrument of a new, enriched consciousness. He summarised his doctrine in the phrase: Turn on, tune in, drop out.’ Sacked from Harvard in 1963, he became a guru of the new generation. He would later be sentenced to ten years in jail for drug-smuggling.

In the autumn of 1966, a number of ‘Situationist’ students at Strasbourg University founded a society for the rehabilitation of Marx and Ravachol, and printed a pamphlet urging revolt against authority; they were all expelled. This was counter-productive; students all over France took up the protest. They became known as ‘enrages’. At Nanterre University, they shouted down lecturers and painted obscene graffiti on the walls. The police had to be called in. In May 1968, the violence spread to Paris; students built barricades and hurled paving stones, while the French police reacted with their customary lack of finesse. For a while, it looked as if de Gaulle’s government was about to come crashing down. But, in fact, the workers themselves found all this talk of revolution rather silly, and declined to take over the factories. Slowly, the French revolt faded away. But in England, in West Germany, in America, it smouldered on. When the Shah of Persia came to Berlin in June 1967, students protested about his repressive regime; the police reacted violently, and a student named Benno Ohnesorg was killed. This convinced the young that terror had to be met with terror. Two of the most active organisers of protest were Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. In London in October 1968, student protesters in Grosvenor Square were treated roughly by the police. Some of them began to speak of founding a more ‘active’ organisation, something along the lines of the French enrages – a word they decided to translate as ‘Angry Brigade’. In America, a group of ‘urban guerrillas’ who called themselves the Weathermen were already trying to undermine the capitalist system with bombs placed at military installations, banks and the offices of big corporations.

In San Francisco, this idea of total revolution was taken very seriously by a group of ‘hippies’ who had formed around a charismatic little guitar player named Charles Manson. Born in 1934, Manson spent his first term in reformatory school at the age of nine. By the time he drifted to San Francisco in 1967, Manson had spent most of his adult life in jail, mostly for such offences as car theft and credit-card fraud. He found himself in the midst of the new ‘psychedelic’ culture. The hippies of the Haight-Ashbury district took LSD, smoked pot, and called themselves ‘flower children’. No one cared that Manson had been a jailbird; on the contrary, it was regarded as being greatly to his credit. Manson was older than most of the ‘drop-outs’, and girls seemed inclined to regard him as a father-substitute figure. Runaways began to gather round him, and soon the Manson menage in the Haight district seemed to be full of emotionally deprived girls and admiring youths (Manson seems to have been bisexual). If they had never read Marcuse, they nevertheless practised his idea that sex could be used as a form of ‘unrepressive sublimation’ to unfold our higher possibilities.

By 1968, Manson was trying hard to move into the pop music business; Manson’s ‘family’ even moved for a time into the luxury home of a member of a successful group called the Beach Boys. Manson’s lack of success seems to have made him increasingly embittered. The ‘family’, now numbering about thirty (and including children) moved out to a ranch owned by an old man named George Spahn, and lived there in exchange for cleaning out the stables.

With so much drug-taking, violence was inevitable. In July 1969, Manson shot a negro dope-dealer named Bernard Crowe in the chest; in fact, Crowe recovered and decided not to go to the police. Later that month, Manson and his friend Bobby Beausoleil tried to persuade another drug-dealer, Gary Hinman, to finance a move to Death Valley; when Hinman refused, he was tortured, then stabbed in the chest and left to die. On the wall above his body, Beausoleil wrote ‘Political piggy’ in blood – intended to lead the police to the belief that the Black Panther movement was responsible.

Manson’s plan was to cause a revolution by setting whites against blacks (whom he detested). On Friday, 8 August 1969, four Manson disciples – three girls and a man – drove out to a house in Benedict Canyon which had been rented by a man in the pop music business against whom Manson had a grudge; in fact, it was now occupied by the film director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate. Polanski was in London, but Sharon Tate had three guests to supper, two men and a woman. Afterwards they took a psychedelic drug and went into various states of dissociation. As the Manson family members entered the drive, they encountered a youth who had been visiting the houseboy; he was shot in the head. Then they went into the house and killed Sharon Tate and her three guests. The men were shot, the women stabbed to death. The word ‘Pig’ was written on the hall door in blood.

The murders created the sensation Manson had hoped for; the following day, the ‘family’ watched the television newscasts with satisfaction. By that evening, every gun and guard dog in the Los Angeles area had been bought up by frantic householders. Manson decided to strike again while the iron was hot. That evening, after taking LSD, he led six followers to a house in the affluent Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, the home of a supermarket owner, Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. Manson walked into their bedroom with a gun and tied them up, then sent in three followers, who stabbed the LaBiancas to death. They wrote ‘Death to pigs’ in blood on a door, and ‘Helter Skelter’, Manson’s code word for the revolt that would occur when the alarmed whites rose up against the blacks. But the rising failed to occur; Los Angeles was too accustomed to mass murder to over-react. In the following month, the ‘family’ moved out to the remote Death Valley. When Manson set on fire a bulldozer belonging to the State rangers, the police raided the ranch and arrested all the hippies. And after more than a month in jail, a family member named Susan Atkins, who had taken part in both sets of murders, told her cell-mate about the killings, and word leaked back to the police.