A Criminal History of Mankind (12 page)

This is something that must obviously be taken into account in considering Becker’s argument that all human beings have a craving for ‘heroism’, for ‘primacy’, which seems difficult to reconcile with our fairly stable society, in which most people seem to accept their lack of primacy. This could be, as Becker suggests, because we lose the feeling of primacy as we grow up; but anyone who has ever spent ten minutes waiting for his children in a nursery school will know that the majority of children also seem to accept their lack of ‘primacy’. The ‘dominant five per cent’ applies to children as well as adults.

Now in terms of society, five per cent is an enormous number; for example, in England in the 1980s it amounts to more than three million people. And society has no room for three million ‘leaders’. This means, inevitably, that a huge proportion of the dominant five per cent are never going to achieve any kind of ‘uniqueness’. They are going to spend their lives in positions that are indistinguishable from those of the non-dominant remainder.

In a society with a strong class-structure - peasants and aristocrats, rich and poor - this is not particularly important. The dominant farm-labourer will be content as the village blacksmith or leader of the church choir; he does not expect to become lord of the manor, and he doesn’t resent it if the lord of the manor is far less dominant than he is. But in a society like ours, where working-class boys become pop-idols and where we see our leaders on television every day, the situation is altogether less stable. The ‘average’ member of the dominant five per cent sees no reason why he should not be rich and famous too. He experiences anger and frustration at his lack of ‘primacy’, and is willing to consider unorthodox methods of elbowing his way to the fore. This clearly explains a great deal about the rising levels of crime and violence in our society.

We can also see how large numbers of these dominant individuals develop into ‘Right Men’. In every school with five hundred pupils, there are about twenty-five dominant ones struggling for primacy. Some of these have natural advantages: they are good athletes, good scholars, good debaters. (And there are, of course, plenty of non-dominant pupils who are gifted enough to carry away some of the prizes.) Inevitably, a percentage of the dominant pupils have no particular talent or gift; some may be downright stupid. How is such a person to satisfy his urge to primacy? He will, inevitably, choose to express his dominance in any ways that are possible. If he has good looks or charm, he may be satisfied with the admiration of female pupils. If he has some specific talent which is not regarded as important by his schoolmasters - a good ear for music, a natural gift of observation, a vivid imagination - he may become a lonely ‘outsider’, living in his own private world. (Such individuals may develop into Schuberts, Darwins, Balzacs.) But it is just as likely that he will try to take short-cuts to prominence and become a bully, a cheat or a delinquent.

The main problem of these ungifted ‘outsiders’ is that they are bound to feel that the world has treated them unfairly. And the normal human reaction to a sense of unfairness is an upsurge of self-pity. Self-pity and the sense of injustice make them vulnerable and unstable. And we have only to observe such people to see that they are usually their own worst enemies. Their moods alternate between aggressiveness and sulkiness, both of which alienate those who might otherwise be glad to help them. If they possess some degree of charm or intelligence, they may succeed in making themselves acceptable to other people; but sooner or later the resentment and self-pity break through, and lead to mistrust and rejection.

The very essence of their problem is the question of self-discipline. Dominant human beings are more impatient than others, because they have more vital energy. Impatience leads them to look for short-cuts. When Peter Sellers booked into the RAG Club, he could just as easily have phoned his wife, told her to give the nanny two months wages and sack her, and then got a good night’s sleep. Instead, he behaved in a way that could have caused serious problems for everybody. It is easy to see that if Sellers’s life, from the age of five, consisted of similar short-cuts, by the time he was an adult he would lack the basic equipment to become a normal member of society. Civilisation, as Freud pointed out, demands self-discipline on the part of its members. No one can be licensed to threaten people with carving knives.

All this places us in a better position to answer Fromm’s question: why is man the only creature who kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason? The answer does not lie in his genetic inheritance, nor in some hypothetical death-wish, but in the human need for self-assertion, the craving for ‘primacy’.

The behaviour of the Right Man enables us to see how this comes about. His feeling that he ‘counts’ more than anyone else leads him to acts of violent self-assertion. But this violence, by its very nature, cannot achieve any long-term objective. Beethoven once flung a dish of lung soup in the face of a waiter who annoyed him - typical Right Man behaviour. But Beethoven did not rely upon violence to assert his ‘primacy’; he realised that his long-term objective could only be achieved by patience and self-discipline: that is to say, by
canalising
his energy (another name for impatience) and directing it in a jet, like a fireman’s hose, into his music. Long discipline deepened the canal banks until, in the final works, not a drop of energy was wasted.

When the Right Man explodes into violence,
all
the energy is wasted. Worse still, it destroys the banks of the canal. So in permitting himself free expression of his negative emotions he is indulging in a process of slow but sure self-erosion - the emotional counterpart of physical incontinence. Without proper ‘drainage’, his inner being turns into a kind of swamp or sewage farm. This is why most of the violent men of history, from Alexander the Great to Stalin, have ended up as psychotics. Without the power to control their negative emotions, they become incapable of any state of sustained well-being.

If we are to achieve a true understanding of the nature of criminality, this is the problem that must be plumbed to its depths: the problem of the psychology of self-destruction.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

In March 1981, Norman Mailer wrote an introduction to a volume of letters by a convicted killer, Jack Henry Abbott,
In the Belly of the Beast
. Abbott had written to Mailer from prison, and his letters convinced Mailer that this was a man with something important to say about violence. At thirty-seven, Abbott had spent a quarter of a century behind bars - for cheque offences, bank robbery, and murder. In solitary confinement he had read history and literature, and become converted to Communism. Mailer convinced the prison authorities that Abbott had ‘the makings of a powerful and important American writer’ and that he could make a living from his pen. Abbott was paroled. The book was published and became a best seller. A few weeks later, in a New York restaurant, he became involved in an argument with a waiter - an out-of-work actor named Richard Adan - when Adan told him he was not allowed to use the staff toilet. Abbott quietly asked Adan if they could go outside to resolve the incident; there he produced a knife and stabbed him in the heart. After several months on the run, he was caught, and returned to prison - where, presumably, he will now spend the rest of his life.

The murder seems incomprehensible. If Abbott had become involved in a fight with Adan, and pulled a knife in the heat of the moment, it would be easy enough to understand - Abbott had become accustomed to violence and split-second reactions. But when he quietly asked his two female companions to wait, and then walked outside, he must have known that he intended to kill Adan. He must also have known that he was throwing away all he had managed to achieve. Yet this was the man who wrote: ‘I have been desperate to escape for so many years now, it is routine for me to try to escape. My eyes, my brain, seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.’

Abbott’s book is a depressing document; it is easy to see why Mailer felt so much sympathy. After a childhood spent in foster homes - presumably because his parents had deserted him - Abbott was sent to a reformatory at the age of twelve for failure to adjust to foster homes. At eighteen he was sent to jail for writing a dud cheque; he escaped and robbed a bank, and received another sentence. When he killed a fellow inmate in a fight he was sentenced to another fourteen years. The rage and frustration are understandable. He describes how he would spend whole days kicking the walls of his cell and screaming with rage. ‘I was so choked with rage... I could hardly talk, even when I was calm; I stuttered badly. I used to throw my tray as casually as you would toss a balled-up scrap of paper in a trash can - but would do it with a tray full of food at the face of a guard.’ When being sentenced for killing the other prisoner, he threw a pitcher of water at the face of the judge. He wrote of the warders: ‘The pigs in the state and federal prisons... treat me so violently, I cannot possibly imagine a time I could have anything but the deepest, aching, searing hatred for them. I can’t begin to tell you what they do to me. If I were weaker by a hair, they would destroy me.’

But the implication - that the violence was a response to intolerable pressures - is contradicted by his tendency to romanticise the criminal. ‘There is something else... it is the mantle of pride, integrity, honour. It is the high esteem we naturally have for violence, force. It is what makes us effective, men whose judgement impinges on others, on the world. Dangerous killers who act alone and without emotion, who act with calculation and principles with acts of murder... that usually evade prosecution by law: this is a state-raised convict’s conception of manhood in the highest sense.’ But this is a schoolboy’s conception of heroism. It makes us aware that the talk about ‘manhood in the highest sense’ is romantic verbiage. A dead waiter lying on the pavement is hardly a proof of pride, integrity and honour; killing Richard Adan was about as heroic as strangling a baby.

The killing only becomes understandable when we recall Van Vogt’s comment on the violent man: that he has made the decision to be out of control in a particular area. Abbott made the decision to be out of control in the area of wounds to his self-esteem (and no doubt the presence of two women companions reinforced the decision). In short, we are back in the realm of ‘magical thinking’ - that is, thinking in which an emotion has been allowed to distort the sense of reality. The result of magical thinking is some completely inappropriate action that cannot possibly achieve the desired result - like the ostrich burying its head in the sand to make the enemy ‘go away’ (in fact, a gross libel on the ostrich, but an apt simile all the same). There is always an absurd, slightly comic element in magical thinking, like Bernard Shaw’s description of his father ‘with an imperfectly wrapped-up goose under one arm and a ham in the same condition under the other... butting at the garden wall in the belief that he was pushing open the gate, and transforming his tall hat into a concertina in the process...’ But only for the onlooker. For the man beating his head against the brick wall, or the bee hurtling itself at the windowpane, the situation is grimly serious.

In a sense, the bee is behaving perfectly logically; it is only trying to escape towards the light, and can see no reason why it should not do so. We can see that one of its basic premises - that light cannot pass through solid objects - is mistaken, and that if it wants to achieve its objective it must change its direction. But the bee, conditioned by millions of years of evolution, is in no position to revise its instinct.

Human beings
can
change direction - which is why the behaviour of the violent man strikes us as so absurd. He seems determined to smash his way through the sheet of glass or destroy himself in the process. Yet to him this is not self-destruction so much as his own stubborn and quirky notion of courage.
The violent man’s problem lies in his own logic
- that is, in his concept of what is a normal and rational response to the challenges of his existence. The premises of this logic contain a mistaken assumption - like the bee’s assumption that the window-pane is unreal because it is invisible.

Abbott offers us a clue to his own premises in the list of men to whom he dedicates the book. Most of them are ‘criminal rebels’, and the first on the list is Carl Panzram, whose career exemplifies the logic of self-destruction.

Panzram, like Abbott, became a writer in prison; but in 1928 his autobiography was regarded as too horrifying to publish and had to wait more than forty years before it finally appeared in print. Panzram was awaiting trial for housebreaking; his confession revealed him as one of the worst mass murderers in American criminal history. The odd thing is that most of these murders were ‘motiveless’. He killed out of resentment, a desire for revenge on society. Panzram’s basic philosophy was that life is a bad joke and that most human beings are too stupid or corrupt to live.

His is a classic case of a man beating his head against a brick wall. His father, a Minnesota farmer, had deserted the family when Carl was a child. At eleven, Carl burgled the house of a well-to-do neighbour and was sent to reform school. He was a rebellious boy and was violently beaten. Because he was a ‘dominant male’, the beatings only deepened the desire to avenge the injustice. He would have agreed with the painter Gauguin who said: ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’

Travelling around the country on freight trains, the young Panzram was sexually violated by four hoboes. The experience suggested a new method of expressing his aggression.’... whenever I met [a hobo] who wasn’t too rusty looking I would make him raise his hands and drop his pants. I wasn’t very particular either. I rode them old and young, tall and short, white and black.’ When a brakesman caught Panzram and two other hoboes in a railway truck Panzram drew his revolver and raped the man, then forced the other two hoboes to do the same at gunpoint. It was his way of telling ‘authority’ what he thought of it.