The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Aksakov sees his grandfather as a ‘noble, magnanimous, often self-restrained man’ – so he is capable of self-restraint. But in this one area of his life, his control over his family, he has made ‘the decision to be out of control’. It is provoked by his daughter persisting in a lie. This infuriates him; he feels she is treating him with lack of respect in assuming he can be duped. So he explodes and drags his wife around by the hair. He feels no shame later about his behaviour; his merriness the next morning shows that his good opinion of himself is unaffected. He feels he was justified in exploding, like an angry god. Like the Japanese soldiers in Nanking, he feels he is inflicting just punishment.

What is so interesting here is the way the Right Man’s violent emotion reinforces his sense of being justified, and his sense of justification increases his rage. He is locked into a kind of vicious spiral, and he cannot escape until he has spent his fury. Peter Sellers’s son records that his father was capable of smashing every item in a room, including keepsakes that he had been collecting for years. The Right Man feels that his rage is a storm that has to be allowed to blow itself out, no matter what damage it causes. But this also means that he is the slave of an impulse he cannot control; his property, even the lives of those he loves, are at the mercy of his emotions. This is part of the ‘unbelievable inner horror’ that Van Vogt talks about.

This tendency to allow our emotions to reinforce our sense of being justified is a basic part of the psychology of violence, and therefore of crime. We cannot understand cruelty without understanding this particular mechanism. We find it incomprehensible, for example, that a mother could batter her own baby to death, simply because he is crying; yet it happens thousands of times every year. We fail to grasp that she is already close to her ‘bursting point’ and that, as the baby cries, she feels that it is wicked and malevolent, trying to drive her to distraction. Suddenly her rage has transformed it from a helpless baby into a screaming devil that deserves to be beaten. It is as if some wicked fairy had waved a magic wand and turned it into a demon. We would say that it is the mother who is turned into a demon; yet her rage acts as a kind of magic that ‘transforms’ the child.

The word ‘magic’ was first used in this sense – meaning a form of self-deception – by Jean-Paul Sartre in an early book, A Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions. In later work Sartre preferred to speak of ‘mauvaise foi’ or self-deception; but there are some ways in which the notion of ‘magical thinking’ is more precise. Malcolm Muggeridge has an anecdote that illustrates the concept perfectly. He quotes a newspaper item about birth control in Asian countries, which said that the World Health Organisation had issued strings containing twenty-eight beads to illiterate peasant women. There were seven amber beads, seven red ones, seven more amber beads, and seven green ones; the women were told to move a bead every day. ‘Many women thought that merit resided in the beads, and moved them around to suit themselves,’ said the newspaper.

This is ‘magical thinking’ – allowing a desire or emotion to convince you of something your reason tells you to be untrue. In 1960, a labourer named Patrick Byrne entered a women’s hostel in Birmingham and attacked several women, decapitating one of them; he explained later that he wanted to ‘get his revenge on women for causing him sexual tension’. This again is magical thinking. So was Charles Manson’s assertion that he was not guilty because ‘society’ was guilty of bombing Vietnam. And Sartre offers the example of a girl who is about to be attacked by a man and who faints – a ‘magical’ attempt to make him go away. This is a good example because it reminds us that ‘magic’ can be a purely physical reaction. Magical thinking provides a key to the Right Man.

What causes ‘right mannishness’? Van Vogt suggests that it is because the world has always been dominated by males. In Italy in 1961, two women were sentenced to prison for adultery. Their defence was that their husbands had mistresses, and that so do many Italian men. The court overruled their appeal. In China in 1950, laws were passed to give women more freedom; in 1954, there were ten thousand murders of wives in one district alone by husbands who objected to their attempts to take advantage of these laws.

But then, this explanation implies that there is no such thing as a Right Woman – in fact, Van Vogt says as much. This is untrue. There may be fewer Right Women than Right Men, but they still exist. The mother of the novelist Turgenev had many of her serfs flogged to death – a clear example of the ‘magical transfer’ of rage. Elizabeth Duncan, a Californian divorcee, was so outraged when her son married a nurse, Olga Kupczyk, against her wishes, that she hired two young thugs to kill her; moreover, when the killers tried to persuade her to hand over the promised fee, she went to the police and reported them for blackmail – the action that led to the death of all three in the San Quentin gas chamber. Again, this is a clear case of ‘magical’ – that is to say, totally unrealistic – thinking. And it shows that the central characteristic of the Right Woman is the same as that of the Right Man: that she is convinced that having her own way is a law of nature, and that anyone who opposes this deserves the harshest possible treatment. It is the god (or goddess) syndrome.

Van Vogt also believes that Adler’s ‘organ inferiority’ theory may throw some light on right mannishness. Adler suggests that if some organ – the heart, liver, kidneys – is damaged early in life, it may send messages of inferiority to the brain, causing an inferiority complex. This in turn, says Van Vogt, could lead to the over-compensatory behaviour of the Right Man. He could well be right. Yet this explanation seems to imply that being a Right Man is rather like being colour blind or asthmatic – that it can be explained in purely medical terms. And the one thing that becomes obvious in all case histories of Right Men is that their attacks are not somehow ‘inevitable’; some of their worst misdemeanours are carefully planned and calculated, and determinedly carried out. The Right Man does these things because he thinks they will help him to achieve his own way, which is what interests him.

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals – or human beings – seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: ‘One in twenty.’ ‘Is that exact or approximate?’ asked Shaw. ‘Exact.’ And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent – one in twenty – of any animal group are dominant – have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in a separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.

This is something that must obviously be taken into account in considering Becker’s argument that all human beings have a craving for ‘heroism’, for ‘primacy’, which seems difficult to reconcile with our fairly stable society, in which most people seem to accept their lack of primacy. This could be, as Becker suggests, because we lose the feeling of primacy as we grow up; but anyone who has ever spent ten minutes waiting for his children in a nursery school will know that the majority of children also seem to accept their lack of ‘primacy’. The ‘dominant five per cent’ applies to children as well as adults.

Now in terms of society, five per cent is an enormous number; for example, in England in the 1980s it amounts to more than three million people. And society has no room for three million ‘leaders’. This means, inevitably, that a huge proportion of the dominant five per cent are never going to achieve any kind of ‘uniqueness’. They are going to spend their lives in positions that are indistinguishable from those of the non-dominant remainder.

In a society with a strong class-structure – peasants and aristocrats, rich and poor – this is not particularly important. The dominant farm-labourer will be content as the village blacksmith or leader of the church choir; he does not expect to become lord of the manor, and he doesn’t resent it if the lord of the manor is far less dominant than he is. But in a society like ours, where working-class boys become pop-idols and where we see our leaders on television every day, the situation is altogether less stable. The ‘average’ member of the dominant five per cent sees no reason why he should not be rich and famous too. He experiences anger and frustration at his lack of ‘primacy’, and is willing to consider unorthodox methods of elbowing his way to the fore. This clearly explains a great deal about the rising levels of crime and violence in our society.