The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

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Let us try to summarise these insights.

Crime is the outcome of negative attitudes. Negative attitudes are due to the selectivity of our perceptive mechanisms. A man who had just been reprieved from a firing squad would fling open his senses like windows; he would notice everything, and everything would strike him as beautiful and interesting. As the American gangster and multiple murderer Charlie Birger stood on the scaffold in 1927, he looked wistfully at the sky and said: ‘It is a beautiful world, isn’t it?’ But he had noticed it too late. He should have noticed it earlier; then a number of people would have remained alive.

Once a man has deliberately closed his mind to all kinds of data – like the blueness of the sky – he has left himself connected to external reality by a dangerously thin thread – the thread of his immediate purposes. And, odd as it sounds, he is now living in a kind of cave inside his own head. That cave contains an enormous number of filing cabinets, full of photographs of the outside world, and the walls are covered with ‘maps of reality’ – ideas of how to deal with the problems of living. Religious people have religious maps; politicians have political maps; psychologists have psychological maps. Ordinary people have maps derived from their parents, from people they admire, and from their own experience – the latter usually being the least important. And when confronted by a new situation, each of them skims quickly through a drawerful of old photographs, glances hastily at his maps, and then responds ‘appropriately’.

The photographs he chooses are those that remind him of the present situation. For example, if he is being introduced to a moonfaced stranger with a grey suit and a foreign accent, his memory will throw up photographs of various strangers, and various men with moon faces, grey suits and foreign accents. If he found most of these fairly likeable, then he will feel predisposed to like this new acquaintance – while firmly believing that he is forming a judgement solely on the basis of his present observations. Perhaps, as he is shaking the man’s hand, the stranger smiles and shows a gold tooth which recalls a neighbour who once caught him stealing apples; immediately, he feels an inexplicable twinge of dislike.

All these complex mechanisms have been developed over millions of years of evolution. And it is easy to see that most of us are quite simply overweighted with habit mechanisms. We are like the dinosaurs, whose bodies were so gigantic that it cost them an immense effort to move, Bui with human beings, it is the ‘robot’, the ‘habit-body’ that has become so gigantic and complex that it does most of our living for us. The average human being lives in his habit-body like a mouse in a windmill. As we get older, the mechanism grows more rusty and cumbersome, and we experience less and less of those flashes of freedom – of sheer delight – that make life worth living. This is why, as Gurdjieff says, many people die long before their physical death. They continue to respond to external stimuli, immense, creaking windmills, tenanted only by a dead mouse.

In the light of this assessment, it may seem that the long-term future of the human race looks unpromising. But the comparison with the dinosaur may be misleading. This is not a problem of man’s long-term evolution but of what happens during an individual’s lifetime. As Wordsworth points out, children often see things ‘apparelled in celestial light’; it is with the approach of adulthood that the ‘shades of the prison house begin to close’. And we have seen that this is not as inevitable as Wordsworth thought. It is largely due to ‘faulty blocking’. What is necessary, at this point in evolution, is for man to recognise that he is in charge of his consciousness, that if we can unconsciously close our minds to interesting data, then we can use conscious intelligence to open them again.

What prevents this recognition? The answer can be seen in the following paragraph, which is from a book called Curious Facts:

Mrs Marva Drew, a fifty-one-year-old housewife from Waterloo, Iowa, typed out every number from one to a million after her son’s teacher told him it was impossible to count up to a million. It took her five years and 2,473 sheets of typing paper.

The sheer waste of time takes the breath away. Could anything more dreary, more pointless, more repetitious, be imagined? What could motivate any human being to do anything so futile? Yet the answer is plain enough. A schoolteacher – a figure of authority – told her son it was impossible. She decided that, in this single instance, she would prove she knew better than authority. So she wasted five years of her life. We can see that the attitude of mind is identical to Panzram’s – the defiance of authority – and that the act has the baffling illlogicality that is characteristic of crime. And, like the professor who went to bed instead of attending to his guests, there is also an element that savours of hypnosis. If the lady had had the common sense to say: ‘But schoolteachers are not infallible’, she would have saved herself five years – the equivalent of a prison sentence. But in order to know that, she would have had to change her whole attitude – not merely towards authority, but towards herself. Society had conditioned her to a certain view of authority and, therefore, of herself.

Man has achieved his present position as the ‘lord of creation’ because he is the most social animal on earth. But because he is a social animal, he keeps looking to other people for his cues to action. The key to crime, therefore, lies in man’s history as a social being.

HOW MAN EVOLVED

The following two extracts are examples of sadism, one real, one fictional:

We slept, having given the prize of the night to a tale of Enver Pasha, after the Turks re-took Sharkeui. He went to see it, in a penny steamer, with Prince Jamil and a gorgeous staff. The Bulgars, when they came, had massacred the Turks; as they retired, the Bulgar peasants went too. So the Turks found hardly anyone to kill. A greybeard was led on board for the Commander-in-Chief to bait. At last Enver tired of this. He signed to two of his bravo aides, and throwing open the furnace door, said, ‘Push him in.’ The old man screamed, but the officers were stronger and the door was slammed-to on his jerking body. We turned, feeling sick, to go away, but Enver, his head on one side, listening, halted us. So we listened till there came a crash within the furnace. He smiled and nodded, saying: ‘Their heads always pop like that.’

That night, after a quick round of buggery with Saint-Fond, I withdrew to my apartment. But I couldn’t sleep: so stirred up was I by Clairwil’s violent words and actions, I had to commit a crime of my own.

My heart beating wildly at the evil thoughts racing through my brain, I leapt out of bed and dashed to the servants’ quarters. There I stole a butler’s clothes and a guard’s pistol. Then, looking very much like a gentleman of fashion [the narrator is a woman], I slipped into the night.

At the first street corner to which I came, I stationed myself inside a doorway and waited for someone to pass. The prospect of the crime which I was about to commit thrilled me like nothing I had ever experienced. My body glistened with sweat. My insides churned with the turmoil which precedes sexual congress – a fundamental excitement which honed all my senses to a fine cutting edge. I was aflame, ablaze now, for a victim.

Suddenly, in response to my devil’s prayer, I heard groans – a woman’s voice, soft, low-pitched and mournful. Racing in the direction from which the sounds came, I found a tattered, feeble-looking creature huddled upon a doorstep.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded, drawing closer.

‘One cursed by fate,’ she replied; ‘if you are the harbinger of death, I will embrace you gladly.’

‘What are your difficulties?’ I asked, noticing that, in spite of her grief, she was rather a comely creature.

‘My husband has been put in jail, my babies are starving; now this house on whose steps I sit, this house which once was mine, has been taken away from me.’

‘By fuck!’ I cheered. The sexual heat welling up inside my body had become almost unbearable. ‘Come now, let me put your talents to the test.’

So saying, I seized her by the hair and jerked her to her feet. Wrapping one arm around her waist and urging her hips forward, I jammed the pistol barrel into her vagina. ‘Goodbye, bitch,’ I said softly. ‘Here’s a fucking you’ll never forget.’ Whereupon, pulling the trigger, I sent her spinning off into eternity.