In effect, MacDougald set out to change the attitude of criminals by appealing to their intelligence, and by trying to instil into them a fuller understanding of these basic words. He was convinced that the New Testament contains the most comprehensive teaching for a harmonious society, and that in the original Aramaic, the meaning is even more precise than in the English translation. A single example will serve. The Aramaic word for ‘self’ is ‘naphsha’. This, according to MacDougald, means the ‘true self’, a man’s essential being. We have been taught that love of ‘self’ is undesirable, another name for selfishness. Yet the New Testament tells us to love our neighbour as ourself. This seems to suggest that a man should love his ‘self’, and is, MacDougald believes, one of the key concepts of Christianity. In the case of Panzram, it is easy to see what he means. Panzram loathed himself, and said so repeatedly. Yet his autobiography reveals that he was a man of considerable intelligence and integrity, and that these were his ‘essential’ attributes. If Panzram had recognised this, he would never have become a criminal. Even as a criminal, his intelligence would almost certainly have responded to this recognition that he had good reason to love his ‘naphsha’ and should not be ashamed to do so.
MacDougald obtained permission to try out these ideas in the Georgia State Penitentiary at Reidsville. He started from the assumption that prisoners are intelligent enough to grasp the lesson of Bruner’s experiment with the cat: that they are somehow refusing to see and hear certain things. It is a law of nature that each person seeks to achieve his own goals. The trouble with the criminal is that his faulty attitudes cause him to pursue these goals in such a muddled way that he never achieves them. As we have seen in the case of Haigh, the criminal’s ‘cleverness’ is usually a form of stupidity. The criminal’s chief problem is that, like the alcoholic, he feels helpless; nothing ever comes out right. He blames ‘life’. MacDougald set out to show criminals that the real blame lay in their own muddle and confusion, their negative attitudes.
The results were spectacular. Initial tests at the Georgia Institute of Correction showed that sixty-three per cent of prisoners – many of them ‘hard core psychopaths’ (i.e., Panzram-types) – could be rehabilitated in a matter of weeks. Follow-up studies eighteen months later showed that there had been no backsliding. The instructors from MacDougald’s institute (which at that stage was called the Yonan Codex Foundation, the name being that of the Aramaic version of the New Testament MacDougald preferred) began by instructing two prisoners in their methods for two weeks, and then the four of them instructed another twenty-two prisoners, four of whom were also chosen as instructors. Later the course was renamed Emotional Maturity Instruction.
MacDougald offers one remarkable illustration of the way it worked. One prisoner felt intense hostility towards another. Prison morality – as expounded by Jack Abbott – dictates that in a situation like this honour demands that the two of them fight it out, and that if one can kill the other, he does so. The man had concealed a piece of iron pipe in preparation for the showdown; but after a discussion and exploration of the meaning of the concept of forgiveness, this suddenly struck him as absurd. The man was his ‘neighbour’, and his own distorted concepts were urging him to an act that was basically against his own interests. So he bought the other man a sandwich and a coffee and talked the thing over. The two became friends.
At first sight, it looks as if MacDougald had simply found a way of importing old-fashioned evangelism into the prison, but closer examination shows that to presume this is to miss the point. His basic assumption was that most criminals are acting at a level far below their natural capacity and potential. All men have the same need to grow up, to evolve, to achieve their objectives. By treating them as intelligent human beings, by offering them the possibility of some kind of evolution, MacDougald had changed their basic attitudes. In fact, his discovery had been anticipated two decades before by a Hungarian named Alfred Reynolds, who had left Hungary in the 1930s and came to live in England. Reynolds was in Army Intelligence during the war, and in 1945 was given the almost impossible task of ‘de-Nazifying’ young Nazi officers who had been captured. Reynolds has described how, when he first entered the room, there was an atmosphere of cold hostility. They stared at him, prepared – like Bruner’s cat – to ‘cut out’ anything he had to say at the level of the ear-drum. To their surprise, there was no homily on the evils of Nazism. Instead, he asked them to explain to him what they understood by National Socialism. Once they were convinced he really wanted to know, they began to talk. He listened quietly, asked questions, and pointed out contradictions. Within a matter of days, there was not a Nazi left among them.
All he had done, in effect, was to make them aware that all religions and ideologies prevent people from thinking for themselves. He did not criticise Hitler. He simply let them expound Hitler’s doctrines until it began to dawn on them that they had no need to swallow someone else’s ideas – they were perfectly capable of formulating their own. And he did this by turning their de-Nazification session into a kind of debating society. The sheer pleasure of thinking for themselves did the rest.
Reynolds demonstrates that successful rehabilitation does not depend on the nature of the teaching – whether it is religious, moral, political or whatever. It depends solely upon making people use their minds, and thereby making them aware that they have minds. The criminal’s violence springs out of a feeling that nothing less will enable him to achieve his goals. In fact, he is failing to achieve his goals because he proceeds on the negative assumption that they cannot be achieved. And negative assumptions, as we have seen, produce ‘hypnosis’. The moment he substitutes a positive assumption, his ‘controlling ego’ wakes up and takes command. And the sense of a controlling ego is also the sense of self, of naphsha.
Maslow and other psychologists have demonstrated that alcoholics can be cured by inducing a similar recognition with the help of the psychedelic drug LSD. When the notion of using LSD as a cure for alcoholism first occurred to two doctors, Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, their idea was to try and frighten the patient by an experience similar to DT’s. It has been established that many alcoholics begin to recover after ‘hitting rock bottom’, often the experience of delirium tremens, and the doctors soon discovered that a positive LSD trip could be even more effective. LSD, like mescalin, causes a ‘transformation of reality’; sights, sounds, smells, may become more intense. Hoffer and Osmond discovered that if their patients had religious or spiritual experiences under LSD, they were far more likely to be cured than if they had a bad trip, and Maslow made use of the same principle in some of his own experiments. He knew that alcoholics are often more sensitive and intelligent than the average person, and are consequently more likely to be depressed by difficulties and obstructions, and so take refuge in heavy drinking. At first, the drinking produces ‘peak experiences’ which relieve the tension; but very frequently it only produces depression, which leads to still heavier drinking. The whole negative cycle is further complicated by feelings of guilt and helplessness. Maslow questioned his patients about the kind of aesthetic experiences that had given them pleasure before they became alcoholics – music, poetry, painting. Then, under mescalin or LSD, he induced ‘peak experiences’ – feelings of intense happiness and well-being – by means of music, poetry, colours blending on a screen. This method produced many startling cures. And the reason, apparently, was that when the patient experienced a sense of deep relaxation and happiness, it awakened all his hopes, his positive expectations of life. He would also see clearly that these could be best fulfilled if he stayed healthy and determined. He would recognise that to drink heavily to achieve the ‘peak experience’ is counter-productive. The ‘self’ would regain control, and the patient cease to be an alcoholic. In effect, Maslow was doing what MacDougald and Reynolds did: awakening the controlling ego.
But perhaps the most important point to emerge from these considerations is that they apply to everybody, not simply to criminals or alcoholics. All of us spend a large amount of our time in a state akin to hypnosis. All of us spend a large amount of our lives in a state of boredom or ‘directionlessness’. And the insights of MacDougald, Reynolds and Maslow are just as applicable to company directors as to criminals. This has been recognised by Werner Erhard, the founder of the psychotherapeutic method known as est. As described in a biography of Erhard by W. W. Bartley, the essence of est is the recognition of ‘true identity’. The key to Erhard’s thought is the notion of the Self, and the recognition that this Self is able to take charge of the individual’s life and personality. We are not ‘creatures of circumstance’. We only believe we are when we are in a ‘fallen’ or untransformed state. And the essence of this state is the delusion that we are mere products of our mental and emotional activities, as heat is a product of a fire. An important American physician, Howard Miller – of whom we shall speak later – has made the same observation. The ‘essential you’ fails to grasp its own nature; it sits around passively in a corner of the brain, observing the body’s physical and emotional states as if they were as uncontrollable as the weather. The moment any kind of crisis occurs, the ego awakens with a shock and hurls itself into its proper role as the director of consciousness. The situation could be compared to the captain of a ship who has suffered a bout of amnesia, and who sits gloomily in his cabin, staring out of the porthole and wondering why the ship seems to be going in circles. The reason, of course, is that there is nobody on the bridge.