The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Gosmann committed four more murders during the next seven years. One was of a bank director – again at precisely midday – from whose desk Gosmann snatched a few thousand marks. Another was of a doorman in a bank he had just robbed – the man was reaching to his pocket for his glasses when Gosmann fired. And to obtain more weapons, Gosmann shot the widow who ran a gun-shop in Nuremberg and her twenty-nine-year-old son. His next crime was his undoing. In July 1967, he snatched the handbag of a woman in a department store; when she screamed he fired at her but missed. He also fired at a store official who chased him and hit his briefcase. Beaten to the ground, he was thinking; ‘How ridiculous – it can’t be happening.’ He fired one more shot, killing the man who had chased him. Then he was arrested.

Why did Gosmann kill? No doubt a psychiatrist would be able to uncover the roots of the obsessions and emotional disorders that turned his thoughts towards crime. (He revered the memory of his father, an army captain, who had been shot by the Americans at the end of the war.) But the central motivation was undoubtedly the need to bolster his self-esteem. Gosmann felt himself to be weak and inadequate – a thinker who was incapable of action. His crimes were a deliberate attempt to strengthen his identity. And just as some couples enjoy sex more if they can see themselves in a mirror, so Gosmann tried to add a dimension of reality to his crimes by describing them in his diary. In prison he wrote in his journal: ‘I would say there is a great difference between me and Raskolnikov [in Crime and Punishment]. Just as long as I don’t get it in the neck from the judge, I don’t have to consider myself as the perpetrator. Raskolnikov always thought of himself as the perpetrator…’ It is an interesting comment that reveals that even his present situation had not succeeded in rescuing him from his sense of unreality: ‘How ridiculous – it can’t be happening.’ Gosmann did ‘get it in the neck’ from the judge; he was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of release.

In the case of Klaus Gosmann we can see clearly the connection between crime and the sense of identity. If Gosmann had possessed the simple consciousness of an animal, he would have been incapable of crime. Most young people understand that need to deepen the sense of identity, and the feeling of envy and admiration for people of strong personality who seem to ‘know who they are’. (No doubt this was the basis of Gosmann’s admiration of his own father.) A great many of the activities of the young – from wearing strange garments to driving at ninety miles an hour – are attempts to establish the sense of identity. A dog has no such problems. It is entirely lacking in reflective self-consciousness. Consequently, it would be incapable of ‘crime’ in our human sense of the word. Crime is basically the assertion of the ‘I’. ‘I’ strike someone in the face; ‘I’ order the bank clerk to hand over the money; ‘I’ pull the trigger.

Now it should be quite obvious that without this sense of ‘I’, there can be no crime. If your dog chases sheep and you give it a beating, it will in future feel an inhibition about chasing sheep. Even when it is out for a walk on its own, it will remember that chasing sheep is a forbidden activity. Yet a burglar who has spent five years in prison – a far more savage punishment than a good beating – may ignore the inhibition next time he sees an open window. And this is because it is no longer a simple matter of response (crime) and inhibition (punishment). A third element has entered the situation: the burglar’s sense of his own personality, his ego. A sudden opportunity presents him with a challenge – ‘I can probably get away with it’ – and if he gets away with it, there is a feeling of self-congratulation: ‘I did it!’ – the feeling Klaus Gosmann recorded in his diary after his first murder. When man first became capable of that kind of self-congratulation – a fairly common form of self-awareness – he also became capable of crime.

The question of precisely when this happened may seem unanswerable. But a startling and controversial theory has been advanced in a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Dr Julian Jaynes, of Princeton University (published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1976). When it appeared reviews were almost uniformly hostile, and it is easy to understand why. According to Jaynes, the authors of the Old Testament and the Epic of Gilgamesh, of the Iliad and Odyssey, were entirely lacking in what we would call ‘self-consciousness’. Their consciousness looked outward, towards the external world, and they had no power of looking inside themselves. He says of the characters in Homer: ‘We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes… Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind space to introspect upon.’

This is a baffling statement, because we are so accustomed to ‘looking inside ourselves’ when we have to make a decision. ‘Shall I go by train or bus?’ We talk to ourselves, just as we would to another person. And it is hard to imagine how we could make any decision without this kind of introspection. It is true that if I step off the pavement as a bus comes round the corner, I jump back without a moment’s hesitation; but that is a very simple ‘decision’. To decide whether to take a bus or a train, I must form a mental picture of the two alternatives and compare them; I must look inside myself. And it is quite impossible to imagine how King Solomon or Ulysses made up their minds without going through a similar process.

According to Jaynes, the answer is that they heard voices that told them what to do: voices inside their heads. Jaynes first became convinced of this possibility when he had a similar experience. ‘One afternoon I lay down in intellectual despair on a couch. Suddenly, out of an absolute quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my upper right which said, “Include the knower in the known!” It lugged me to my feet, exclaiming, “Hello?” looking for whoever was in the room. The voice had an exact location. No one was there!’ It was an auditory hallucination, and the experience led Jaynes to study the subject. He discovered that a surprisingly large number of ordinary people have had auditory hallucinations. And in ancient texts – such as the Bible and the Iliad – Jaynes found a total lack of evidence for any kind of introspection but an enormous amount for auditory hallucinations – which were interpreted as the voice of God, or one of the gods.

In support of this part of his argument, Jaynes draws upon the relatively new discipline of split-brain research, based upon discoveries made by Roger Sperry in the 1950s (and for which he has since received the Nobel Prize). The brain is divided into two halves, which appear to be mirror-images of each other. The specifically human part of the brain, as we saw in the last chapter, is the part that presses against the top of the skull – the cerebrum. This looks rather like the two halves of a walnut, joined in the middle by a thick bridge of nerves called the corpus callosum.

In the 1930s, it was discovered that attacks of epilepsy could be controlled by severing this bridge, and so preventing the ‘electrical storm’ from spreading from one side to the other. And, oddly enough, it seemed to make no difference whatever to the patient, who went about his business exactly as before. It was Sperry who made the remarkable discovery that the split-brain patient actually turns into two people; but they continue to work in such close cooperation that no one notices. It is only when they are subjected to experiments that prevent them from co-operating that the difference can be observed.

It has been known since the mid-nineteenth century that the left cerebral hemisphere controls our powers of speech and reason, while the right seems to be concerned with intuition and with recognising shapes and patterns. A patient whose left hemisphere has been damaged suffers from impaired speech but can still appreciate art or enjoy music. A patient whose right hemisphere has been damaged can speak perfectly clearly and logically, yet cannot draw the simplest pattern. Oddly enough, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. If someone puts an object – say a key – into the left hand of a split-brain patient (without allowing him to look at it), he knows perfectly well what it is, yet he cannot ‘put a name’ to it. If he is asked: ‘What are you holding in your left hand?’ he has no idea of the answer. For the person called ‘you’ seems to live in the left brain, and has no idea of what is concealed in his left hand.