The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Clearly, there is some sort of pattern here. But what are the underlying laws that govern it? In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow sent me his book Motivation and Personality (1954), and it was in the fourth chapter, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, that I thought I saw the outline of some kind of general solution to the changing pattern. The chapter had originally been published in 1943 in the Psychological Review, and had achieved the status of a classic among professional psychologists; but for some reason it had never percolated through to the general public. What Maslow proposed in this paper was that human motivation can be described in terms of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ or values. These fall roughly into four categories: physiological needs (basically food), security needs (basically a roof over one’s head), belongingness and love needs (desire for roots, the need to be wanted), and esteem needs (to be liked and respected). And beyond these four levels, Maslow suggested the existence of a fifth category: self-actualisation: the need to know and understand, to create, to solve problems for the fun of it.

When a man is permanently hungry, he can think of nothing else, and his idea of paradise is a place with plenty of food. In fact, if he solves the food problem, he becomes preoccupied with the question of security, a home, ‘territory’. (Every tramp dreams of retiring to a country cottage with roses round the door.) If he solves this problem, the sexual needs become urgent – not simply physical satisfaction, but the need for warmth, security and ‘belonging’. And if this level is satisfied, the next emerges: the need to be liked and admired, the need for self-esteem and the esteem of one’s neighbours. If all these needs are satisfied, the ‘self-actualising’ needs are free to develop (although they do not always do so – Maslow recognised that many people never get beyond level four.)

Now, as I worked on a second study in criminology, A Casebook of Murder, it struck me that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs corresponds roughly to historical periods of crime. Until the first part of the nineteenth century, most crimes were committed out of the simple need for survival – Maslow’s first level. Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh body-snatchers, suffocated their victims and sold the corpses to the medical school for about £7 each. By the mid-nineteenth century the pattern was changing; the industrial revolution had increased prosperity, and suddenly the most notorious crimes are ‘domestic murders’ that take place in respectable middle-class homes: Dr Palmer, Dr Pritchard, Constance Kent, Florence Bravo. (American parallels would include Professor Webster and Lizzie Borden.) These people are committing crimes to safeguard their security. Charlie Peace, housebreaker and murderer, practised burglary to subsidise a respectable middle-class existence that included regular churchgoing and musical evenings with the neighbours.

But even before the end of the century, a new type of crime had emerged: the sex crime. The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 were among the first of this type, and it is significant that the killer’s contemporaries did not recognise them as sex crimes; they argued that the Ripper was ‘morally insane’, as if his actions could only be explained by a combination of wickedness and madness. The Ripper is the first in a long line of ‘maniac’ killers that extends down to Heath and Glatman, and that still throws up appalling examples such as Dean Corll, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. To the crime committed for purely sexual reasons we should also add the increasing number of crimes committed out of jealousy or the desire to get rid of a spouse in favour of a lover – Crippen, Bywaters and Thompson, Snyder and Gray.

So what I had noticed in 1959 was a transition to a new level in the hierarchy: to the crime of ‘self-esteem’. From then on, there was an increasing number of crimes in which the criminal seemed to feel, in a muddled sort of way, that society was somehow to blame for not granting him dignity, justice and recognition of his individuality, and to regard his crime as a legitimate protest. When, in October 1970, Victor Ohta and his family were found murdered in their California home, a note on the doctor’s Rolls-Royce read: ‘Today World War III will begin, as brought to you by the people of the free universe … I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will stop.’ The killer, the twenty-four-year-old drop-out John Linley Frazier, had told witnesses that the Ohta family was ‘too materialistic’ and deserved to die. In fact, Frazier was reacting with the self-centred narcissism of the children described by Becker. (‘You gave him more juice.’ ‘Here’s some more then.’ ‘Now she’s got more juice than me …’) He felt he had a long way to go to achieve ‘security’, while Ohta had a swimming pool and a Rolls-Royce parked in the drive.

The irony is that Ohta himself would serve equally well as an example of Becker’s ‘urge to heroism’. He was the son of Japanese immigrants who had been interned in 1941; but Ohta had finally been allowed to join the American army; his elder brother was killed in the fighting in Europe. Ohta had worked as a railway track-layer and a cab driver to get through medical school, and his success as an eye surgeon came late in life. Ohta achieved his sense of ‘belonging-ness’ through community work; he was one of the founders of the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz – a non-profit-making hospital – and often gave free treatment to patients who could not afford his fees. Frazier was completely unaware of all this. But it would probably have made no difference anyway. He was completely wrapped up in his own little world of narcissism.

Clearly there are many ways in which human beings can satisfy the narcissistic craving for ‘being first’. Ohta’s was balanced and realistic, and he was therefore a valuable member of the community. Frazier’s was childish and unrealistic, and his crimes did no one any good, least of all himself.

Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs developed from his observation of monkeys in the Bronx zoo in the mid-1930s. He was at this time puzzling about the relative merits of Freud and Adler: Freud with his view that all neurosis is sexual in origin, Adler with his belief that man’s life is a fight against a feeling of inferiority and that his mainspring is his ‘will to power’. In the Bronx zoo, he was struck by the dominance behaviour of the monkeys and by the non-stop sex. He was puzzled that sexual behaviour seemed so indiscriminate: males mounted females or other males; females mounted other females and even males. There was also a distinct ‘pecking order’, the more dominant monkeys bullying the less dominant. There seemed to be as much evidence for Freud’s theory as for Adler’s. Then, one day, a revelation burst upon Maslow. Monkey sex looked indiscriminate because the more dominant monkeys mounted the less dominant ones, whether male or female. Maslow concluded, therefore, that Adler was right and Freud was wrong – about this matter at least.

Since dominance behaviour seemed to be the key to monkey psychology, Maslow wondered how far this applied to human beings. He decided to study dominance behaviour in human beings and, since he was a young and heterosexual male, decided that he would prefer to study women rather than men. Besides, he felt that women were usually more honest when it came to talking about their private lives. In 1936, he began a series of interviews with college women; his aim was to find out whether sex and dominance are related. He quickly concluded that they were.

The women tended to fall into three distinct groups: high dominance, medium dominance and low dominance, the high dominance group being the smallest of the three. High dominance women tended to be promiscuous and to enjoy sex for its own sake -in a manner we tend to regard as distinctly masculine. They were more likely to masturbate, sleep with different men, and have lesbian experiences. Medium dominance women were basically romantics; they might have a strong sex drive, but their sexual experience was usually limited. They were looking for ‘Mr Right’, the kind of man who would bring them flowers and take them out for dinner in restaurants with soft lights and sweet music. Low dominance women seemed actively to dislike sex, or to think of it as an unfortunate necessity for producing children. One low dominance woman with a high sex-drive refused to permit her husband sexual intercourse because she disliked children. Low dominance women tended to be prudes who were shocked at nudity and regarded the male sexual organ as disgusting. (High dominance women thought it beautiful.)

Their choice of males was dictated by the dominance group. High dominance women liked high dominance males, the kind who would grab them and hurl them on a bed. They seemed to like their lovers to be athletic, rough and unsentimental. Medium dominance women liked kindly, home-loving males, the kind who smoke a pipe and look calm and reflective. They would prefer a romantic male, but were prepared to settle for a hard worker of reliable habits. Low dominance women were distrustful of all males, although they usually wanted children and recognised that a man had to be pressed into service for this purpose. They preferred the kind of gentle, shy man who would admire them from a distance for years without daring to speak.