The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Yet it is de Sade who can provide us with the deepest insight into the question: why is man the only creature who kills and tortures his own kind? This is because de Sade is, in himself, a kind of one-man textbook of criminology. His view of human beings is determinedly materialistic and pessimistic. If he were alive to see the rising crime figures of the late twentieth century, he would laugh sarcastically and say: I told you so. For, according to de Sade, man is a being who was created accidentally by Nature, and who has only two basic urges: survival and satisfaction of his desires. This situation is bound to produce a conflict of interests. The hungry tiger needs food; the antelope often has no choice about becoming its dinner. Human society has its own equivalent of tigers and antelopes: the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. The haves not only use their superior strength (or wealth) to satisfy their desires; they also use their cunning to convince the have-nots that there are moral laws that forbid robbery and murder. Sooner or later, says de Sade, the have-nots are bound to discover that moral laws are an invention of the rich; then they will try and take what they want, and the crime rate will soar…

According to de Sade, man’s basic desire is to become a god. And if any man could become a god, he would experiment with every kind of pleasure: eat things he had always wanted to eat, do things he had always wanted to do, take revenge on old enemies, torment people he loathed. Above all, he would satisfy his sexual desires with everyone who aroused them, probably a hundred times a day. Can any human being honestly declare that he would behave differently? If not, then the point is proved. Man is naturally a criminal, but fear of punishment forces him to restrain his desires…

If we accept de Sade’s materialistic premises – which, after all, are the same as those of many modern scientists and philosophers – then his arguments are difficult to refute. Yet there is one obvious point at which they are open to objection. The satisfaction of every casual desire does not seem to guarantee happiness. Desires seem to be subject to the ‘law of diminishing returns’. A man who could satisfy every desire the moment it arose would probably end by committing suicide out of boredom. This was de Sade’s own problem. As a wealthy and reasonably good-looking young man, he had tried all the ‘normal’ sexual pleasures before he was in his mid-teens. He spent the rest of his life in pursuit of ‘the forbidden’, the ultimate sexual pleasure. And the harder he tried, the more it seemed to recede from him. The perversions became so extreme that they became wild and grotesque – almost funny.

When we examine this ‘infinite regress’, we can pin it down to what might be called ‘the fallacy of simple experience’ – de Sade’s conviction that experience satisfies the senses in the same straightforward way that food satisfies the stomach. When I am empty, food is bound to have the effect of filling my stomach – this is a physical law. Yet even so, I might find it appetising, or boring, or even nauseating, depending on my state of mind. We all know that good digestion is fifty per cent ‘mental’. And sex is a great deal more than fifty per cent. In the wrong mood, sexual fulfilment is a will o’ the wisp, flickering in the distance and then vanishing. De Sade’s conviction that there is an ‘ultimately satisfying’ sexual experience -if only we had the moral courage to try and find it – is an illusion.

The answer to de Sade is contained in a passage in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or:

The history of [boredom] can be traced to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase in population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased and the people were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand…

The fallacy here lies in the notion that the answer to boredom lies in distraction, in looking for something ‘interesting’ to do. De Sade’s work is a kind of sexual tower of Babel. The true answer to boredom, says Kierkegaard, lies in the ‘rotation method’, the method by which a farmer changes his crops from year to year so that the ground itself never becomes exhausted. ‘Here we have… the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much amusement. One need only hark back to one’s schooldays… how entertaining to catch a fly and hold it imprisoned under a nutshell… How entertaining sometimes to listen to the monotonous drip of water from the roof…’

What does the prisoner in solitary confinement actually do? What does the schoolboy do as he listens to the rain? The answer is that lack of expectation makes him slow down his senses, which has the effect of amplifying his perceptions. And he produces this ‘slowing down’ by increasing his attention. It could be compared to a scientist focusing a slide under a microscope, or a man pouring wine through a funnel so that not a drop shall be lost. The schoolboy ‘funnels’ his attention on to the beetle under the nutshell. De Sade has the temperament of a spoilt brat; he is too impatient to ‘funnel’ his attention, and then wonders why the experience is so unsatisfying.

This effect is explained by an observation made by Roger Sperry. He noted that the right brain – the intuitive hemisphere – works at a slower pace than the left. The left brain – the ‘you’ – is the part, that copes with the world, and it always seem to be in a hurry. The right ambles along casually at its own pace. The result is that the two halves are always losing contact. Every time ‘you’ become tense or anxious or over-tired, the gap between them increases and life begins to take on an air of unreality. This is because it is the business of the right brain to provide experience with a third dimension of reality. And it can only do this when the two halves are, so to speak, strolling side by side.

So when the prisoner focuses on the spider, when the schoolboy focuses on the beetle, he is slowing down the left until it is moving at the same pace as the right. And when this happens, the experience becomes ‘interesting’. He has, in effect, pressed a switch that alters consciousness from the left brain ‘thinking mode’ to the right-brain ‘feeling mode’. This also explains why alcohol can sometimes produce those delightful states of relaxation in which we feel totally contented to rest in the sensory reality of the present. It halts the impatient forward rush of the left brain and persuades it to relax. De Sade had discovered that sex can produce the same effect. But neither alcohol nor sex works all the time; the left brain may simply refuse to slow down.

All this makes it clear that crime is an unfortunate waste-product of human evolution. Human intelligence involves the power of foresight, and foresight enables a man to calculate how to achieve comfort, security and pleasure. It also makes him a potential criminal, for the simplest way to achieve what he wants is to go out and grab it – the method advocated by de Sade.

If Jaynes is correct, this presumably did not apply to our caveman forebears, for their right and left brains had not yet lost contact. It was only the complexities of civilisation that led man to develop the independent left brain so that criminality became possible.

We have already seen why de Sade’s approach – the criminal approach – fails to achieve its object. Its sheer obsessiveness defeats its aims. The manic egoist, driven by resentment, gradually destroys his own sense of reality. (Panzram is an obvious example.) The result may be self-destruction; but, if he is lucky, he recognises his mistake in time and reverses his direction. (Many of the saints were men who began life as ‘sinners’ and egoists; they discovered their mistakes in time.)

All human beings contain an element of the criminal; as Becker points out, every child is a manic egoist. Fortunately, few of us go as far as Panzram or de Sade. And this is not, as de Sade believes, because we are intimidated by society and its laws. It is because we are intelligent enough to recognise Kierkegaard’s ‘principle of limitation’. This is not a recent development; it seems to be as old as man’s recorded history. The ‘principle of limitation’ – the recognition that human happiness depends upon self-discipline – can be found in Hindu scriptures dating from 1000 B.C., and is present in pyramid texts and early writings from Mesopotamia. Man may be a criminal animal; but he is also a religious animal. And the religion seems to be far older than the criminality.