The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

This mechanism called ‘completing’ is the most important of all functions of consciousness. Without it, the world would be meaningless. I glance across the room and see something lying under the table; for a moment I cannot decide what it is. Then I realise it is a child’s toy seen from an odd angle. I have ‘completed’ it.

Consider what happens if I come home from a long journey. I am delighted to be back in my own sitting room. I pour myself a glass of wine, toss a log on the fire, put my feet on the footstool and sigh with contentment. The room is somehow realler to me than usual. Why? Am I not ‘completing’ it in the same way as usual?

Not quite. Because I am pleased to be home, I am paying more attention to everything, putting more energy into perception. The result is that I am actually seeing more. That sounds absurd – surely I am seeing the same room I always see? But no. Because my mind is more awake, I notice that my wife has changed the curtains, that the lampshade is lopsided, that one of my children has left his shoes where someone can fall over them… On a normal evening, I notice none of these things; my perception limits itself to a few crude basic facts, like a simple sketch. Because I am wide awake, my mind has added all kinds of new details to the sketch.

The reason I enjoy setting out on holiday is that the sketch becomes far richer than usual, more detailed. I am ‘completing’ perception with more care and attention.

We have a name for this more-complete perception. We call it happiness.

And how do we ‘cause’ happiness? By what process do we enrich perception?

A simile will help to make this clearer. Think of the mind as a lake. Consciousness is the surface of the lake. All our memories and experiences lie below the surface of the lake – some in its very depths, some floating around just under the surface. When I have any new experience, I ‘complete’ it by calling up memories from below the surface. So when I set out on holiday, I relax into a state of contentment, and all kinds of memories come floating to the surface. These memories may bring a surge of delight, and the delight causes more memories to surface. And suddenly, there are so many memories bobbing around on the surface that I can hardly see the water. The more consciousness is ‘enriched’, the more I experience delight. The more I experience delight, the more memories break the surface. And these are the moments in which I want to shout ‘Of course!’ as it suddenly dawns on me that life is infinitely marvellous and exciting, and that most of us waste it by allowing consciousness to remain a mirror, a flat surface of water.

The next morning, I wake up, and consciousness is once again a smooth watery surface. I make an effort; a few memories bob up, float around for a few minutes, then sink again. And suddenly I can see the basic problem of human existence. It takes energy to bring objects to the surface. I can ‘summon’ this vital energy to a certain extent. But if I am to experience ‘holiday consciousness’, the sense of enrichment, I must start a process of ‘feedback’, whereby my delight releases more energy, and the energy causes more delight. And this seems to be the problem. It is not difficult to cause flashes of ‘delight’ – in fact, as Maslow pointed out, most healthy people have them. But it is far more difficult to start the ‘feedback process’. My mind is usually like an old car with damp spark plugs; I can press the starter until the battery is flat, and the engine still shows no sign of life.

Of course, physical stimulus helps a great deal. This is why I may experience ‘enrichment’ setting out on a holiday, and why children experience it on Christmas day. If I can relax in some new and interesting place, with a glass of wine and the prospect of a good meal, my chances of achieving ‘feedback’ are very high indeed. And here we have the motivation of crime. Haigh, the acid-bath murderer, hankered after fast sports cars, good clothes, and expensive hotels. He clearly believed that ‘enrichment’ lay in obtaining these by any possible means. Bundy’s crimes could be translated into the belief that no ordinary man can have as much sexual experience as he wants, and that this unfulfilment is a permanent obstacle to enrichment of awareness; he decided that the simplest solution to the problem was rape and murder.

Then why do such methods never seem to succeed? Anyone who has any dealing with criminals – any policeman, lawyer or psychiatrist – will verify that, far from being happier than the rest of us, most of them seem to be gnawed by a permanent dissatisfaction. The Boston Strangler may have worked a few of his problems out of his system; but it took him two thousand rapes and a dozen or so murders, and he paid for these with his freedom and his life. As a method for the enrichment of consciousness, crime is a failure.

The reason should be obvious. Enrichment depends upon focusing the two ‘beams of perception’; and ‘meaning perception’ must be as powerful as ‘immediacy perception’. Meaning perception is a power of the mind; it depends upon a certain mental energy. And this mental energy is precisely what all criminals lack. They lay far too much emphasis on the physical stimulus in the process of ‘enrichment’. Carl Panzram committed his first burglary at the age of eleven: he was reaching out for the physical stimulus; so was Steven Judy, who committed his first rape at the age of twelve.

The poet Shelley, on the other hand, recognised from an early age that the answer lay in strengthening meaning perception. In the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, he wrote:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine – have I not kept the vow?

beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave…

Shelley grasped that the real answer to enrichment of awareness lies in that action of ‘summoning’ memories to the surface of consciousness, the ‘phantoms of a thousand hours’ which lie inside us. Proust made the same discovery when he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea and was flooded with memories of childhood. Proust also experienced the paradoxical sense that man is really a kind of god: ‘I have ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal…’

The poet also experiences the odd conviction that the physical world around us is not as real as it looks. Shelley writes:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats, though unseen, amongst us …

and Wordsworth describes how he rowed a boat on to Lake Windermere by night and was overwhelmed by a sense of ‘unknown modes of being’. The man who has once experienced these insights is never likely to become a criminal, for he never makes the criminal’s mistake of believing that the physical world is the only reality. He now knows intuitively that the answer lies in a hidden power behind the eyes.

In fact, even the criminal grasps this, in his own muddled way. As the author of My Secret Life observes himself in the mirror, he is trying to add a final element of realisation to the experience; that is, he is attempting to bring his mind to a focus it does not normally achieve. And this, we can see, is the motivation behind all sex crime. Frederick Baker attempts to achieve it in the rape of a child, Jack the Ripper in his orgy of sadism, Paul Knowles in his rampage of violence. The Boston Strangler deliberately arranges his victims in obscene postures so that he can, so to speak, photograph the scene, engrave it on his consciousness, to be able to ‘summon’ it later to enrich his awareness. And this element of sharpened perception explains the addictive element in crime. The Chicago rapist William Heirens began to experience orgasm as he climbed in through a window. The French gangster Jacques Mesrine turned from fighting rebels in Algeria to armed robbery; the sharpened awareness produced by danger had become a drug.

So crime is not, as Wells suggested in The Croquet Player, some horrible legacy of our cave-man ancestry. It is an attempt to compensate for the narrowed awareness produced by split-brain differentiation; and, in that sense, it springs from the same source as human creativity. Shakespeare said that the lunatic, the lover and the poet ‘are of imagination all compact’; he could have added the criminal to the list. It is a mistake to think of the criminal as inhuman – notwithstanding some of the examples in the previous chapter. He is, on the contrary, more human than the rest of us; he is more enmeshed in the basic fallacy that makes most human life an unsatisfactory pursuit of will o’ the wisps. We are all victims of the ‘passive fallacy’, the failure to grasp that, where happiness is concerned, it is the mind itself that provides that final convulsion of achievement.