The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The first excerpt is from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the second from de Sade’s novel Juliette (here slightly abbreviated, since de Sade enjoys spinning out the woman’s pleas for mercy). It is one of de Sade’s milder inventions. The difference in the quality of the cruelty is immediately apparent. De Sade makes it clear that his Juliette is experiencing intense sexual excitement at the thought of committing murder. It is doubtful whether Enver Pasha experienced anything at all except a kind of savage amusement. Enver’s cruelty is a form of stupidity, springing out of complete lack of imagination. De Sade’s cruelty is totally conscious; in fact, it was the result of too much imagination, of years spent in prison with nothing to do but indulge in erotic daydreams. Yet the essence of the sadism, in both cases, is an inflated ego. The sadist derives from his act the same feeling of power that the Right Man experiences when he gets his own way by shouting and bullying.

This, clearly, is the very essence of crime: the self-absorption and lack of imagination. A delinquent who mugs an old lady or wrecks a telephone kiosk is as absorbed in his own needs as a baby crying to be fed. Freud revealed his own insight into crime when he remarked that a baby would destroy the world if it had the power.

In 1961, two psychiatrists, Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, began to study the mentality of criminals at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in New York. Their initial premise was that men become criminals because of ‘deep-seated psychologic problems’. They became popular with their patients because their attitude was permissive and compassionate. They believed that most criminals are the product of poor social conditions or problems in early childhood, and that with enough insight and understanding they could be ‘cured’. Gradually, they became disillusioned. They noticed that no matter how much ‘insight’ they achieved into the behaviour of a murderer, rapist or child-molester, it made no difference to his actual conduct; as soon as he left the doctor’s office, he went straight back to his previous criminal pattern. He didn’t want to change. Yochelson and Samenow also became increasingly sceptical about the stories told by criminals to justify themselves. They found them amazingly skilful in self-justification – suppressing any material that might lose them sympathy – but the real problem lay in the criminal character. They lied as automatically as breathing. They had a strong desire to make an impression on other people – they were what David Reisman calls ‘other directed’ – and a great deal of their criminal activity sprang from this desire to show off, to ‘look big’. They were also skilful in lying to themselves. Particularly striking is Yochelson’s observation that most criminals – like Bruner’s cat – have developed a psychological ‘shut-off mechanism’, an ability to push inconvenient thoughts out of consciousness – even to forget that they had made certain damaging admissions about themselves at a previous meeting. ‘This,’ as Yochelson observes, ‘meant that responsibility, too, could be shut off.’ In short, the central traits of the criminal personality were weakness, immaturity and self-deception. In the case of the child-molester who was finally ‘cured’, they observed that psychological insight ‘was not responsible for the success, but rather the fact that he applied choice, will and deterrence to a pattern that offended him’ (i.e., got him into trouble). He stopped because he wanted to stop; and most criminals went on being criminals because they could see no reason not to.

Another striking insight relates to sexuality. ‘Almost without exception, the participants in our study were either involved in sexual activity very early or [indulged in] a great deal of sexual thinking…’ The criminal ‘peeks through cracks in doors and peers through keyholes to catch glimpses of mother, sister or a friend’s mother or sister as she dresses, bathes or uses the toilet’. One habitual criminal began engaging in sex games at the age of four, with the daughter of a neighbour who took him to school. Later, he was part of a gang who used to grab girls in alleyways and commit rape – although if the girls showed no objection, they were allowed to go; it was essential that they should cry and struggle.

Most children experience curiosity about sex; in the criminal, it seems to be an obsession that narrows down the focus of his consciousness to the idea of exploring the forbidden, of committing stealthy violations of privacy. His sexuality becomes tinged with violence and his criminality with sex. One of the most puzzling things about many cases of rape is the damage inflicted on the victim, even when she makes no resistance. This is because, in the criminal mind, sex is a form of crime, and crime a form of sex. The passage from de Sade is a remarkable illustration of this connection – Juliette’s intense sexual excitement as she waits to commit a crime. What Yochelson’s observation shows is that there is a sexual component in all crime; the criminal is committing indecent assault on society.

This, then, brings us close to the essence of criminality. It is a combination of egoism, infantilism and sex. No animal is capable of ‘crime’ because for animals sex is as natural as eating and defecating. Moreover, animals become mature as soon as they are fully grown. And, as far as human beings can judge, they seem to lack all sense of ego. With the possible exception of greed, animals lack all the basic qualifications for crime.

But it is important to get all this into perspective. We are speaking as if criminality had always been the same at all times, and this is untrue. Yochelson and Samenow conducted their research in the second half of the twentieth century, and we must bear in mind – as H. G. Wells once pointed out – that the world has changed more in the past century than in the previous five thousand years. Until fairly recently, life was incredibly hard for all but about one per cent of the population. It was an endless battle against starvation, cold and ill-health. As Henry Hazlitt put it in The Conquest of Poverty (New York, 1973):

The ancient world of Greece and Rome… was a world where houses had no chimneys, and rooms, heated in cold weather by a fire on a hearth or a fire-pan in the centre of the room, were filled with smoke whenever a fire was started, and consequently walls, ceiling and furniture were blackened and more or less covered by soot at all times; where light was supplied by smoky oil lamps which, like the houses in which they were used, had no chimneys; and where eye trouble, as a result of all this smoke, was general. Greek dwellings had no heat in winter, no adequate sanitary arrangements, and no washing facilities.

And two thousand years later, things were just as bad:

The dwellings of medieval labourers were hovels – the walls were made of a few boards cemented with wood and leaves. Rushes and leaves or heather made the thatch for the roof. Inside the house there was a single room, or in some cases two rooms, not plastered and without floor, ceiling, chimney, fireplace or bed, and here the owner, his family and his animals lived and died. There was no sewage for the houses, no drainage, except surface drainage for the streets, no water supply beyond that provided by the town pump, and no knowledge of the simplest forms of sanitation…

From I. E. Parmalee Prentice: Hunger and History, quoted by Hazlitt.

And again and again there were appalling famines. In Rome in 436 B.C. it was so bad that thousands of starving people threw themselves into the Tiber; in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a famine approximately every fourteen years, in one of which 20,000 people died in London alone.

In our comfortable twentieth century, we have forgotten the way our ancestors lived for thousands upon thousands of years. Of course there must have been crime in these ages of hardship and poverty; but it was nearly all crime of want. The kind of crime discussed by Yochelson and Samenow is essentially that of a luxury society. The peasant of the Middle Ages had almost no choice; he could not even leave his village without the permission of the local lord. By comparison, modern man – even the poorest tramp – has a thousand choices. And the essence of criminality is that it is the choice of the ‘soft option’. Yochelson and Samenow observed that one of the central characteristics of the criminal is ‘the quest to be an overnight success’. They cite the case of a soldier who had won medals in Korea and who was arrested for robbing a petrol station when he came out of the army. The newspapers treated this as the story of a war hero who found civilian life too harsh and difficult. The truth is that the man had become accustomed to admiration and success and found civilian life an anti-climax; he decided he might as well use his army training in a career of robbery. It seemed to be ‘the soft option’. The decision was typical of the criminal’s short-sightedness, and consequent poor judgement.