The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

What becomes clear is that the central problem of the criminal is the problem of self-division. And it is easy to see how this comes about. All human beings experience, to some extent, the need for ‘primacy’, the desire to be ‘recognised’. This obviously means to be recognised among other human beings; the individual wishes to stand out as a member of a group. There is a great satisfaction in achievement for its own sake; but half the pleasure of achievement lies in the admiration of the other members of the group. Crime obviously demands secrecy. And this explains why so many clever criminals experience a compulsion to talk at length about their crimes once they have been caught. Haigh would probably never have been convicted if he had not boasted to the police about dissolving the bodies of his victims in acid and pouring the sludge out in the garden. Thurneman made his own conviction doubly certain by writing a detailed autobiography of his crimes.

Panzram’s crimes were based upon a conviction that he would never achieve ‘primacy’ in the normal way – by winning the admiration of other people. After the Warden Murphy episode, he tried to live out this conviction with a ruthless and terrifying logic; his murders were a deliberate attempt to crush the ‘human’ part of himself out of existence. Yet it refused to die; maimed, bleeding, horribly mutilated, it still insisted on reminding him that he would like to be a man among other men. The declaration: ‘I’d like to kill the whole human race’ was a kind of suicide.

At this point, it is necessary to look more closely into this paradox of human self-destruction: the paradox of ‘the divided self.

The ‘two selves’ of the criminal are present in every human being. When a baby is born, it is little more than a bundle of desires and appetites; it screams for food, for warmth, for attention. These are all immediate needs, ‘short-term’ needs. The child ceases to be a baby from the moment his imagination is touched by some story. From that moment on, he has begun to develop another kind of need: for experience, for adventure, for distant horizons. These might be labelled ‘long-term’ needs, and most of us find ourselves involved in a continual tug of war between our short-term and long-term needs. The child experiences the conflict when he feels he ought to save his pocket money towards a bicycle – to satisfy that longing for distant horizons – while the ‘short-term self wants to spend it on a visit to the cinema and a box of chocolates.

The adult is, if anything, even worse off. With the need to worry about mortgages, television licences and the children’s clothes, he almost forgets that distant horizons ever existed. In effect, we walk about with a microscope attached to one eye and a telescope to the other. But we hardly ever look through the telescope – that eye tends to remain permanently closed.

And now it becomes possible to see why criminality is related to hypnosis. The criminal is, of course, a man who is dominated by short-term needs; like a spoilt child, his motto is ‘I want it now’. But it is one of the peculiarities of consciousness that short-term perception – as seen through the microscope – slips easily into sleep or hypnosis. This is why animals – who wear a microscope on both eyes – are so easy to hypnotise. We need the sense of reality – the telescope – to keep us alert. The chicken’s sense of reality is restricted to scratching for food and sitting on eggs – which is why a mere chalk line can push its consciousness into total vacuity. And the criminal’s sense of reality, limited to short-term objectives, also tends to drift into a state akin to hypnosis. To the rest of us, there is something rather insane about the conduct of a Haigh, putting people into baths of acid just for the sake of a few thousand pounds. The means seem out of all proportion to the end. He has lost all ‘sense of reality’.

With their combination of ‘microscope’ and ‘telescope’, human beings were intended by evolution to be far harder to hypnotise than chickens and rabbits. And indeed, we would be, if we made proper use of the ‘telescope’ to maintain a sense of reality, of proportion. It is this absurd habit of keeping one eye almost permanently closed that makes us almost as vulnerable as chickens.

Then why do we do it? Again, we have to look closely at the peculiar workings of the human mind. When a child is born, he finds himself in a bewildering, frightening world of strange sights and sounds, none of which he understands. Little by little, he begins to recognise regular patterns, which he stores inside his head; and in the course of a few years he has collected enough patterns to create a whole world behind his eyes. So now, when he confronts some new situation, he does not have to study it in detail; the patterns inside his head enable him to master it in half the time.

But this useful mechanism – like all mechanisms – has a serious disadvantage. As the adult becomes more skilled at coping with new situations, he scarcely bothers to study them in detail, or to look for new points of interest. Sitting comfortably in the control room inside his head, he deals with them by habit. Gradually life and consciousness fall into a mechanical routine. Human beings are the only creatures who spend ninety-nine per cent of their time inside their own heads. Which means, of course, that we are only keeping our sense of reality alert for one per cent of the time. It is hardly surprising that we are so easy to hypnotise.

There is something very odd about the mechanism of hypnosis. It seems to be a method of utilising the mind’s powers against itself. Students of self-defence are taught how to immobilise an enemy by placing his legs around a lamp post in a certain position then forcing him to sit on his heels; it ‘locks’ him so that he cannot escape. The hypnotist seems to be able to ‘lock’ the mind in the same way. And the two ‘legs’ that obstruct each other to their mutual disadvantage are habit and self-consciousness. We have all had the experience of trying to do something under the gaze of another person and doing it badly because we have become self-conscious. This is because when some function – like driving a car – has been handed over to habit, then we do it best when we are not thinking about it. Asking someone to pay attention to a task he normally does mechanically is an infallible way of throwing a spanner in the works. This is exactly what the snake does when it fixes the rabbit with its gaze.

But people can become hypnotised without staring into the eyes of a hypnotist (or listening to his voice). If I go into a room to fetch something and then forget why I went there, I have slipped into one of the commonest forms of ‘hypnosis’. The journey to the room has distracted my attention from my purpose, causing my mind to ‘go blank’. There is a story of an absent-minded professor who went up to his bedroom to change his tie before guests arrived; when he failed to return, his wife went upstairs and found him fast asleep in bed. Removing his tie had made him automatically proceed to get undressed and into bed. We can see here how close absent-mindedness is to hypnosis: the professor behaved as if he had been given a hypnotic command to go to bed. And this came about because, as he went up to change his tie, he was living ‘inside his own head’, connected to reality by a mere thread. The unconscious suggestion that it was time to sleep snapped the thread, just as it might have been snapped by the command of a hypnotist.

It is important to recognise that most of us spend a large proportion of our lives in this state of near-hypnosis. And the chief disadvantage of this state is that it makes us highly susceptible to negative suggestion. Our moods change from minute to minute. The sun comes out; we feel cheerful. It goes behind a cloud; we experience depression. In a modern city, most of the sights and sounds are depressing: the screeching of brakes, the smell of exhaust fumes, the roar of engines, the people jostling for space, the newspaper placards announcing the latest disaster. To a man with a strong sense of purpose, these things would be a matter of indifference, for purpose connects us to reality. But the ‘purposes’ of the modern city dweller are almost entirely a matter of habit. So he spends most of his time bombarded by negative suggestions – often sinking into that state of permanent, undefined anxiety that Kierkegaard called Angst and that a modern doctor would simply call nervous depression.