The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The Hindu scripture says: ‘The mind is the slayer of the real’ – meaning that our mental attitudes cut us off from reality. Thomas Mann has a short story called ‘Disillusionment’ that might have been conceived as an illustration of that text. The central character explains that his whole life has been spoilt by boredom, by a ‘great and general disappointment’ with all his experience. Literature and art had led him to expect marvels and prodigies, and everything has been a let-down. ‘Is that all?’ Death, he believes, will be the final anti-climax, the greatest disappointment of all… We can see that his problem is not that life is a disappointment, but that he never experiences life. His ‘life’ is lived inside his own head. He is in a more or less permanent state of hypnosis. And, by its very nature, this state tends to be self-propagating. Lack of expectation – or negative expectation – induces ‘hypnosis’, and a man in a condition of hypnosis is susceptible to negative suggestion, which prolongs the hypnosis. It is a vicious circle.

As soon as we become aware of this mechanism, it becomes easy to observe it in ourselves. If, for example, I am feeling ill, trying not to be physically sick, I can observe how almost any thought can push me in one direction or another. The mere mention of food is enough to make me wonder what I ever saw in it. Yet it is equally easy for me to ‘snap out’ of it. I hear a pattering noise on the windowpane and think: ‘Can it be raining?’ And when my attention comes back to my stomach, I am no longer feeling sick. The rain has rescued me from my claustrophobic mental world, re-established my connection with reality.

And now it becomes possible to see how a Panzram or Merkhouloff becomes locked into an attitude of self-destruction. His negative mental attitudes cut him off from reality like a leaden shutter. There would be no point in telling Merkhouloff that his fear of killing someone by accident is absurd; his anxiety has made him ‘unreachable’, like the girl Pauline, encountered in the first chapter, who was told to go and embrace the Abbé and could not be made to abandon the idea, even by the man who had implanted the suggestion. Panzram’s tragedy was not that he was a social reject who was inevitably driven to violence and crime; it was that he was trapped in a state of ‘negative suggestibility’ so that he was totally unable to utilise his potential as a human being.

But is this necessarily so? For the criminologist, this is obviously the most important question of all. The answer, quite clearly, should be no. If the mind is the slayer of reality, it should also be the creator – or, at least, the amplifier – of reality. If the problem of criminality is due to negative attitudes, then it should be possible to solve it through positive attitudes. Panzram may have been resentful and vicious; but he was also highly intelligent. This in itself should have enabled him to break out of the vicious circle.

The revolutionary idea of ‘curing’ criminals by a change of attitude was not only suggested but demonstrated and proved by an American penologist named Dan MacDougald. His involvement in rehabilitation came about by accident. In the mid-1950s, MacDougald, who is a lawyer, was approached by farmers who wanted to complain about the Federal authorities. The authorities were overloading the Buford Dam in Georgia so that the overflow often ruined crops and drowned cattle. Their case seemed so reasonable and logical that MacDougald had no doubt it should be easily settled. To his surprise, it seemed practically impossible to persuade the authorities to listen. The engineers in charge of the dam told him you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and it took three years of arguing, and a cost of $46,000, to get things changed.

What baffled MacDougald was that it seemed so difficult to get through to the authorities; it was just as if they had put their hands over their ears. And he began to see the outline of an explanation when he heard about an experiment performed at Harvard by Dr Jerome Bruner. Bruner was trying to determine the way stimuli are conveyed to the brain. It was known that they travel along nerve fibres by means of electrical impulses, and the experimenters had put electrodes in the nervous system – they were using a cat for their experiments – so that they could see exactly what nervous impulses were passing at any given moment. They discovered that if a cat was placed in a quiet room and a sharp click was sounded in its ear, this click could be traced as it moved along the nerves all the way to the cortex.

They then tried placing a bell jar containing two lively white mice in front of the cat. The click was again sounded. And, oddly enough, their apparatus recorded no electrical impulse in the nerve. That seemed absurd. They could believe that the cat was ignoring the impulse as it gazed intently at the mice. But if the eardrum vibrated, then the impulse should have been carried along the nerve and registered on their oscilloscope. It looked as if the cat was somehow turning off the sound at the eardrum. What was actually happening, other experimenters discovered later, was that the cat sends counter-impulses to inhibit the sound – to block the nerve fibre, so to speak.

MacDougald also came across the astonishing piece of information that the five senses pick up about ten thousand ‘units of information’ per second and that all this information is forwarded to a processing system in the brain. But the mind can only use about seven out of the ten thousand. The other 9,993 units of information have to be ignored. This is why the mind has such an efficient ‘filter’ system. As I sit here, typing this page, my body is recording thousands of sensations. My feet are rather cold. I cut my thumb this morning and the end still hurts. My chin tingles faintly from the aftershave I put on it. I feel the pressure of the chair, the pressure of my clothes, the slight breeze from the open door and dozens of other minor sensations that I can focus on if I choose to. But when I am writing, I do not choose; I ignore them all. Or rather, my excellent inhibitory system does the work for me. If someone severed my inhibitory fibres, I would be unable to concentrate.

MacDougald’s dazzling insight was that this explained not only the indifference of the Federal authorities but the anti-social behaviour of criminals. The criminal is essentially a man whose judgement on life is negative. He thinks he will only get what he wants by grabbing it. And he is literally blind to all the things that contradict his negative view of existence. Dickens’s Scrooge is a good example of what MacDougald calls ‘negative blocking’. A lonely childhood has convinced him that the world is an unpleasant place, so that his attitude to life is unyielding and defensive: ‘Christmas, humbug!’ The girl to whom he was once engaged puts her finger on his problem when she says: ‘You fear the world too much.’ He is thoroughly miserable in his cheerless room, yet is unaware of any other possibility. He is trapped in ‘immediacy’, the world of the microscope. All the ghost of Christmas Past has to do is to show him his own childhood; the ice around his heart melts and the ‘faulty blocking vanishes’. ‘He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts.’ The sheer multiplicity of the world begins to break through.

We can also see that Scrooge’s ‘faulty blocking’ would be reflected in his understanding of words. If a psychologist had presented him with an association test containing words such as ‘Christmas’, ‘kindliness’, ‘charity’, ‘love’, ‘neighbourliness’, his associations would have been words like ‘humbug’, ‘gullibility’, ‘stupidity’, ‘feeble-mindedness’ and ‘nuisance’. The three ghosts alter and broaden his understanding of these words.

This was the basis of MacDougald’s own solution to the problem of ‘unblocking’ criminals. He cites William James, who remarked: ‘The greatest discovery of my generation is the fact that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.’ The key to a man’s attitudes lies in his understanding of words, says MacDougald. And where crime is concerned, the keywords are those associated with religion: love, sin, neighbour, punishment, responsibility, and so on. The anti-social personality’s understanding of such words is often incomplete or contradictory. For example, most alcoholics agree that their situation is largely their own fault; yet they go on to deny that their failures are their own responsibility; they are inclined to lay the blame elsewhere. Clearly, their understanding of the notion of responsibility is vague and contradictory.