Abraham Maslow discovered that, when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began to recall peak experiences which they had had in the past, but had not noticed at the time, flashes of that deep sense of well-being. He also discovered that, when his students began to talk and think about peak experiences regularly, they began to have more peak experiences. The left brain was beginning to recognise the ‘invisible helper’ and its power to induce those sudden moments of supreme well-being.
And now, at last, we can see the outline of the solution to this problem of human criminality and human evolution.
Once we are aware of some fact, we can begin to absorb it into consciousness until we know it instinctively. And in the past century, we have slowly become aware of the basic facts about consciousness. Freud’s insight into the unconscious, Husserl’s into intentionality, Adler’s into the will-to-power, Maslow’s into the peak experience, Frankl’s into the law of reverse effort, Sperry’s into the double brain: all these have revolutionised our knowledge of human psychology. What has emerged is the recognition that consciousness is not a passive mirror that reflects experience. It is a hand that grasps reality. The tighter it grasps, the ‘realler’ the world becomes. And any sudden ‘clenching’ of this fist induces the flash of the peak experience. This is why, as Dr Johnson says, ‘the knowledge that he is to be hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully’. It is because he is at last using consciousness for its proper purpose, to grip. It is because we so seldom use it for its proper purpose that the hand remains so feeble. When Maslow’s students began to think and talk about the peak experience, this knowledge dawned on them instinctively, and they began to induce peak experiences by a simple clenching of the fist.
‘Clenching’ has the effect of closing the leaks, and closing the leaks has the effect of suddenly increasing the ‘pressure’ of consciousness. This, as Hesse says, is why concentrating on small things revitalises us; it closes the leaks. And ‘clenching’ does it instantaneously, bringing a flash of insight. In the same way crisis so often brings the sense of ‘absurd good news’. It causes consciousness to ‘clench’, convulsively, making us aware that it has ‘muscles’, and that these muscles can be used to transform our lives.
Nothing is easier than to verify this statement. All that is necessary is to narrow the eyes, tense the muscles, make a sudden powerful effort of ‘clenching’ the mind. The result is an instantaneous twinge of delight. It vanishes almost instantly because the ‘muscle’ is so feeble. But we know that any muscle can be strengthened by deliberate effort.
We can also observe that as we ‘clench’ the mind, it produces a sense of ‘inwardness’, a momentary withdrawal into some inner fortress. This is clearly what Kierkegaard meant when he said ‘Truth is subjectivity’. It is, in fact, a sudden flash of contact with the ‘source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside us.
And what relevance has all this to the problem of crime? The answer can be seen if we consider again Dan MacDougald’s cure of ‘hard core psychopaths’ in the Georgia State Penitentiary. A criminal, as Sartre pointed out, is a man who has become accustomed to thinking of himself as a criminal; he feels himself to be a victim – of society, of bad luck, of his own violent impulses and lack of purpose. MacDougald ‘cured’ his criminals by making them recognise that their problems lay in their own mental attitudes. When he intervened in the case of a prisoner who was planning to kill another prisoner with an iron bar – to avenge an insult – the convict invited his enemy to have a sandwich and a coffee, and the situation was resolved; MacDougald had taught him that he was not trapped in some inevitable fatality, some murderous destiny. He had taught him the secret that has transformed man from a naked tree dweller to the most highly evolved creature on earth: that man’s controlling force – ‘Force C’ – is the most important thing about him. As Wells’s Mr Polly discovered: If you don’t like your life, you can change it.
At the moment, society shares the assumption of the criminal: that nothing much can be done. But then, all the major transformations of society have started with the few who know better. The conclusion is inescapable. Only when society recognises that it possesses the power to control crime will crime be controlled.
Looking back over three million years of human history, we can see that it has been a slow reprogramming of the human mind, whose first major turning point was the moment when the mind became aware of itself. When man learned to recognise his own face in a pool and to say I, he became capable of greatness, and also of criminality.
But if this history of human evolution has taught us anything, it is that ‘criminal man’ has no real, independent existence. He is a kind of shadow, a Spectre of the Brocken, an illusion. He is the result of man’s misunderstanding of his own potentialities – as if a child should see his face in a distorting mirror and assume he has changed into a monster.
The criminal is, in fact, the distorted reflection of the human face, the ‘collective nightmare of mankind’. And this insight is in itself a cause for optimism. As Novalis says: ‘When we dream that we dream, we are beginning to awaken’.
The End