The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Two years later, at the age of forty-six, Philip was murdered and his twenty-year-old son Alexander became king. Greece heaved a sigh of relief, convinced they had nothing to fear from this boy. In the following year, rumours of Alexander’s death led to a revolt in Thebes. Alexander descended like a thunderbolt; when the Thebans shouted defiance from their walls, he took the town by storm and massacred all the inhabitants. Unlike his father, Alexander had no sentimental attachment to Thebes.

But he resembled his father in one important respect: he was a romantic who dreamed of far horizons. He crossed the Hellespont and defeated a Persian army – by attacking them without delay, instead of spending two days preparing for the battle as they expected. King Darius of Persia raised another army; Alexander defeated that as easily. The chronicle tells how, after this victory at Issus, Alexander moved into the king’s tent, bathed himself in the royal bath, then stretched out on a silken couch and raised his goblet of wine. ‘So this is what it’s like to be royalty…’ He pressed on into Syria, then into Egypt, where he founded the city of Alexandria. Then he went back and defeated Darius yet again and moved into Babylon. Typically, he treated Darius’s womenfolk with the greatest courtesy, and married one of them. After this, he spent five years wandering around his newly won empire. His men finally begged him to take them home and Alexander marched reluctantly back to Babylon. He was still searching for the city of his dreams. He was planning the invasion of Africa when, at the age of thirty-two, he caught a fever and died.

Modern research has added a valuable piece of information to the history: that Alexander probably died of alcoholism. This provides an important missing piece of the jigsaw. We know that Alexander was a man of extremes; on several occasions he ordered whole towns to be massacred, down to the last woman and child; yet he was also capable of gallantry and generosity. When his friend Hephaestion died, Alexander’s grief was deep and genuine; but he also ordered the crucifixion of the doctor who had attended Hephaestion’s deathbed. After an argument with his foster brother Kleitus, Alexander seized a spear from a guard and ran him through; then, when he realised what he had done, he tried to run it into his own throat. These are the typical extremes of an alcoholic, with his drunken furies and fits of sentimentality and generosity. Above all, the alcoholism confirms the diagnosis of Alexander as a self-divided man, desperately trying to escape the narrowness of left-brain consciousness. He would have been happier if he had been stupider, but he came of a family of intellectual romantics. We have seen that his father studied philosophy at Thebes; and when it came to choosing a tutor for his son, Philip chose Plato’s pupil Aristotle. But Alexander, like Philip, was too emotional, too undisciplined, to enjoy the consolations of philosophy. Wine was for Alexander what cocaine was for Sherlock Holmes: an escape from the boredom of a dismal, dreary, unprofitable world. The story of Alexander crying for fresh worlds to conquer is probably apocryphal; but it catches the essence of his craving for unexplored horizons.

It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common – and undesirable – consequences of ‘unicameralism’. Boredom is a feeling of being ‘dead inside’; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings. Experiments with EEG machines have shown that when we become bored the right cerebral hemisphere begins to display alpha rhythms – the rhythms that appear when the brain is ‘idling’. Robert Ornstein, one of the pioneers of split-brain research, discovered that this happens when someone is doing mental arithmetic. It happens, in fact, during any activity in which we are not really interested. But if the right brain ‘idles’ too much, it goes to sleep. The psychologist Abraham Maslow described a case of a girl who suffered from depression and a sense of meaninglessness; she had even ceased to menstruate. He discovered that she wanted to study sociology and was being forced – by financial necessity – to do a boring, repetitive job. When Maslow suggested that she should go to night school and continue her studies of sociology, her problems promptly vanished. The boredom had caused her right brain to spend most of its time ‘idling’; as soon as she began to think in terms of purpose and motivation, she also began to feel again.

The business of that ‘other self is to add a third dimension – of reality – to human existence. If the brain becomes too obsessed by analysis – grappling with complicated problems or simply impatient over futile tasks, the right yawns and stares gloomily out of the window, and reality becomes oddly unreal. When this happens, we experience an immediate impulse to ‘find something interesting’ to do. A child switches on the television; a woman goes and buys herself a new hat; a man decides to forget the lawn-mowing and go fishing. Alexander looked at the map and planned new conquests. But even conquest has its moment of tedium: long marches, rainy days when nothing happens. As soon as he began to feel bored, Alexander reached for the bottle.

So it seems that, in the case of Alexander at least, we have answered Fromm’s question of why man is the only creature who kills and tortures his own kind. Aggression, like alcohol, readjusts the balance between right and left; it ‘rescues us from our cold reason’, restores that feeling of instinctive purpose. And in recognising this we have also identified one of the basic motivations of all criminality. A bored child can just as easily look around for some mischief to get into; the bored teenager may go and vandalise a telephone box or pull up all the shrubs in a public garden… Even adults may be driven by ‘left-brain isolation’ to curious acts of protest or rebellion. The bored business man seduces his secretary when he doesn’t really find her attractive; the bored housewife goes out shoplifting when her income is more than adequate. Dostoevsky devoted a whole novel, The Possessed, to a study of a man who does scandalous things without any apparent motive, and who admits in his ‘Confession’ that it all sprang out of a sense of having nothing to do with his strength. Gide’s Lafcadio pushes a stranger from a train for much the same reason. In Sartre’s Age of Reason, a student named Boris steals from shops merely for the sake of the excitement.

But when we turn from literature to the real world, it is obvious that no one is going to commit a serious crime merely because he is bored; it fails to provide an adequate explanation for crimes like those of Klaus Gosmann, Ian Brady, Sigvard Thurneman – or even, for that matter, of a fairly straightforward swindler like John Haigh. The essence of crime, as we have seen, is a certain self-consciousness, an awareness of doing ‘wrong’. Strictly speaking, the massacres of Alexander the Great cannot be regarded as crimes. When Alexander ordered the massacre of every inhabitant of an unnamed town in India, it was because they were the descendants of the Greeks who had, a hundred and fifty years earlier, handed over the treasures from the temple of Apollo to the Persian king Xerxes; Alexander felt he was an instrument of divine justice. Even if the massacre had been performed in a spirit of sadistic pleasure, it would still not be semantically accurate to describe it as a crime. The ancient world was full of tyrants who killed for pleasure; Plutarch writes about one Alexander of Pherae, in Thessaly, who buried men alive, ‘and sometimes dressed them in bears’ and boars’ skins, and then baited them with dogs.’ The same tyrant called together the inhabitants of two friendly cities for an assembly, and had them surrounded and cut to pieces. But again, he regarded it as his right to do this kind of thing; so there was no consciousness of crime or guilt. (It is pleasant to record that he was assassinated, with his wife’s connivance.)

By contrast, Klaus Gosmann and Ian Brady committed their crimes with a backward glance of guilt towards society. For all their bravado and defiance, they felt they were doing ‘wrong’. Their mental attitude differed from that of tyrants in the way that the attitude of a schoolboy differs from that of a schoolmaster. Which leads us to the interesting recognition that crime becomes possible only when there is an authority against whom it can be directed. In these early cities, in which the king regarded himself merely as a servant of the gods, crime was probably virtually non-existent. To commit a crime – say theft or murder – a man would have to set himself up against the will of the gods; and under the psychological conditions of a theocracy, this would be tantamount to suicide. It was not until kings became tyrants – that is, men who had seized power in their own name – that the basic psychological condition for crime came into existence. To commit a crime, a man must both recognise authority and regard it with resentment. Crime is, by its essential nature, anti-authoritarian. We can see the way in which this resentment comes to be formed in the following story (quoted by Ludovic Kennedy in A Book of Railway Journeys):