A Criminal History of Mankind (14 page)

He may, if he is very lucky, escape the social consequences of his acts. But he cannot escape the personal consequences. This emerges clearly in a story Lesser tells of Panzram. One day, Lesser went into Panzram’s cell to check the bars. Panzram seemed shocked. ‘Don’t ever do that again. Turning your back on me like that.’ Lesser protested: ‘I knew you wouldn’t harm me.’ ‘You’re the one man I don’t want to kill,’ said Panzram, ‘but I’m so erratic I’m liable to do anything.’ In effect, Panzram had become two persons - or rather, a man and a beast. Panzram was the man who wrote that extremely clear-sighted confession, and who felt the need to warn Lesser. But he had trained his instinct to become a killer as he might have trained an Alsatian dog. When Lesser turned his back, the Alsatian growled and tried to jump.

And now it becomes possible to see precisely what causes that element of self-destructiveness in the violent criminal. He believes that he is opposed to the values of ‘society’, and that he is setting up against these his own individual values. He ends by discovering that, in a completely real and practical sense, he has destroyed his own values and left himself in a kind of vacuum. Maxim Gorky tells the story of a Russian murderer named Vassili Merkhouloff, described to Gorky by the judge L. N. Sviatoukhin. Merkhouloff was an intelligent carter, and also a man of bull-like strength. One day he caught a man stealing sugar from his cart and hit him; the force of the blow killed the man. Sentenced for manslaughter, Merkhouloff was sent to a monastery to do penance. The thought of how easily he had snuffed out a life haunted Merkhouloff; as a priest talked to him about repentance, he could not rid himself of the thought that one violent blow could kill him too. One day after his release, he lost his temper with an idiot girl who was importuning him and struck her with a piece of wood. The blow killed her. He served a term in prison and the obsession now became a torment. When he came out, his new employer was a kindly man, whom Merkhouloff liked. One day, in a kind of frenzy, Merkhouloff overpowered him, tortured and then strangled him. He committed suicide in prison, strangling himself with his chains.

Merkhouloff’s confession to Judge Sviatoukhin makes it clear that he was not insane in any ordinary sense of the word: only obsessed by the thought that if life could be taken away so easily, then human existence
must be meaningless
. He had ceased to believe in the reality of the will, or of human values. ‘I can kill any man I choose and
any man can kill me
...’ That is to say, he had lost not only the sense of his own ‘primacy’ but all sense of his own
necessity
. When he killed his employer, he was driven by the same compulsion that made Panzram afraid of killing Lesser. The ‘decision to lose control’ had made him afraid of
something inside himself
.

The same motivation can be seen in the case of the twenty-two-year-old Steven Judy, executed in the electric chair in Indianapolis in March 1981. Judy had murdered and: strangled a twenty-year-old mother and thrown her three children to their death in a nearby river. A child of a broken home, Judy had committed his first rape at the age of twelve, stabbing the woman repeatedly and severing her finger. He told the jury: ‘You’d better put me to death. Because next time, it might be one of you, or your daughter.’ And before his execution he told his stepmother that he had raped and killed more women than he could remember, leaving a trail of bodies from Texas to Indiana. Like Panzram, Judy opposed every effort to appeal against his death sentence.

It may seem that there is a world of difference between a Russian peasant suffering from ‘obsessive neurosis’ and a young American rapist. But it is important to try to go to the heart of the matter. Human happiness is based upon a feeling of the reality of the will, or the ‘spirit’. When a man looks at something he has made with his own hands, or contemplates some catastrophe he has averted by courage and determination, he experiences a deep sense of satisfaction. Conversely, the feeling of helplessness, of losing control, is a good definition of misery. Physical strength is normally something that a man would be proud of; but when Merkhouloff feels that he can accidentally inflict death it becomes a source of misery. It destroys his relationships with other human beings; he cannot like someone without feeling that a single blow could terminate the relationship. Steven Judy is in the same position. Every time he sees an attractive girl he is tormented by desire; but after killing and raping a number of women, he knows that every twinge of desire is an invitation to risk his freedom and his life. Part of him remains normal, sociable, affectionate; like all human beings, he has the usual needs for security, ‘belonging’, self-esteem. But the killer-Alsatian guarantees that he will never be allowed to satisfy these in the normal way. It has placed him outside the human race.

What becomes clear is that the central problem of the criminal is the problem of self-division. And it is easy to see how this comes about. All human beings experience, to some extent, the need for ‘primacy’, the desire to be ‘recognised’. This obviously means to be recognised
among
other human beings; the individual wishes to stand out as a member of a group. There is a great satisfaction in achievement for its own sake; but half the pleasure of achievement lies in the admiration of the other members of the group. Crime obviously demands secrecy. And this explains why so many clever criminals experience a compulsion to talk at length about their crimes once they have been caught. Haigh would probably never have been convicted if he had not boasted to the police about dissolving the bodies of his victims in acid and pouring the sludge out in the garden. Thurneman made his own conviction doubly certain by writing a detailed autobiography of his crimes.

Panzram’s crimes were based upon a conviction that he would never achieve ‘primacy’ in the normal way - by winning the admiration of other people. After the Warden Murphy episode, he tried to live out this conviction with a ruthless and terrifying logic; his murders were a deliberate attempt to crush the ‘human’ part of himself out of existence. Yet it refused to die; maimed, bleeding, horribly mutilated, it still insisted on reminding him that he would like to be a man among other men. The declaration: ‘I’d like to kill the whole human race’ was a kind of suicide.

At this point, it is necessary to look more closely into this paradox of human self-destruction: the paradox of ‘the divided self.

The ‘two selves’ of the criminal are present in every human being. When a baby is born, it is little more than a bundle of desires and appetites; it screams for food, for warmth, for attention. These are all immediate needs, ‘short-term’ needs. The child ceases to be a baby from the moment his imagination is touched by some story. From that moment on, he has begun to develop another kind of need: for experience, for adventure, for distant horizons. These might be labelled ‘long-term’ needs, and most of us find ourselves involved in a continual tug of war between our short-term and long-term needs. The child experiences the conflict when he feels he ought to save his pocket money towards a bicycle - to satisfy that longing for distant horizons - while the ‘short-term self wants to spend it on a visit to the cinema and a box of chocolates.

The adult is, if anything, even worse off. With the need to worry about mortgages, television licences and the children’s clothes, he almost forgets that distant horizons ever existed. In effect, we walk about with a microscope attached to one eye and a telescope to the other. But we hardly ever look through the telescope - that eye tends to remain permanently closed.

And now it becomes possible to see why criminality is related to hypnosis. The criminal is, of course, a man who is dominated by short-term needs; like a spoilt child, his motto is ‘I want it now’. But it is one of the peculiarities of consciousness that short-term perception - as seen through the microscope - slips easily into sleep or hypnosis. This is why animals - who wear a microscope on both eyes - are so easy to hypnotise. We need the
sense of reality
- the telescope - to keep us alert. The chicken’s sense of reality is restricted to scratching for food and sitting on eggs - which is why a mere chalk line can push its consciousness into total vacuity. And the criminal’s sense of reality, limited to short-term objectives, also tends to drift into a state akin to hypnosis. To the rest of us, there is something rather insane about the conduct of a Haigh, putting people into baths of acid just for the sake of a few thousand pounds. The means seem out of all proportion to the end. He has lost all ‘sense of reality’.

With their combination of ‘microscope’ and ‘telescope’, human beings were intended by evolution to be far harder to hypnotise than chickens and rabbits. And indeed, we would be, if we made proper use of the ‘telescope’ to maintain a sense of reality, of proportion. It is this absurd habit of keeping one eye almost permanently closed that makes us almost as vulnerable as chickens.

Then why do we do it? Again, we have to look closely at the peculiar workings of the human mind. When a child is born, he finds himself in a bewildering, frightening world of strange sights and sounds, none of which he understands. Little by little, he begins to recognise regular patterns, which he stores inside his head; and in the course of a few years he has collected enough patterns to create a whole world behind his eyes. So now, when he confronts some new situation, he does not have to study it in detail; the patterns inside his head enable him to master it in half the time.

But this useful mechanism - like all mechanisms - has a serious disadvantage. As the adult becomes more skilled at coping with new situations, he scarcely bothers to study them in detail, or to look for new points of interest. Sitting comfortably in the control room inside his head, he deals with them by
habit
. Gradually life and consciousness fall into a mechanical routine.
Human beings are the only creatures who spend ninety-nine per cent of their time inside their own heads
. Which means, of course, that we are only keeping our sense of reality alert for one per cent of the time. It is hardly surprising that we are so easy to hypnotise.

There is something very odd about the mechanism of hypnosis. It seems to be a method of utilising the mind’s powers
against itself
. Students of self-defence are taught how to immobilise an enemy by placing his legs around a lamp post in a certain position then forcing him to sit on his heels; it ‘locks’ him so that he cannot escape. The hypnotist seems to be able to ‘lock’ the mind in the same way. And the two ‘legs’ that obstruct each other to their mutual disadvantage are
habit
and
self-consciousness
. We have all had the experience of trying to do something under the gaze of another person and doing it badly because we have become self-conscious. This is because when some function - like driving a car - has been handed over to habit, then we do it best when we are not thinking about it. Asking someone to pay attention to a task he normally does mechanically is an infallible way of throwing a spanner in the works. This is exactly what the snake does when it fixes the rabbit with its gaze.

But people can become hypnotised without staring into the eyes of a hypnotist (or listening to his voice). If I go into a room to fetch something and then forget why I went there, I have slipped into one of the commonest forms of ‘hypnosis’. The journey to the room has distracted my attention from my purpose, causing my mind to ‘go blank’. There is a story of an absent-minded professor who went up to his bedroom to change his tie before guests arrived; when he failed to return, his wife went upstairs and found him fast asleep in bed. Removing his tie had made him automatically proceed to get undressed and into bed. We can see here how close absent-mindedness is to hypnosis: the professor behaved as if he had been given a hypnotic command to go to bed. And this came about because, as he went up to change his tie, he was living ‘inside his own head’, connected to reality by a mere thread. The unconscious suggestion that it was time to sleep snapped the thread, just as it might have been snapped by the command of a hypnotist.

It is important to recognise that most of us spend a large proportion of our lives in this state of near-hypnosis. And the chief disadvantage of this state is that it makes us highly susceptible to negative suggestion. Our moods change from minute to minute. The sun comes out; we feel cheerful. It goes behind a cloud; we experience depression. In a modern city, most of the sights and sounds are depressing: the screeching of brakes, the smell of exhaust fumes, the roar of engines, the people jostling for space, the newspaper placards announcing the latest disaster. To a man with a strong sense of purpose, these things would be a matter of indifference, for purpose connects us to reality. But the ‘purposes’ of the modern city dweller are almost entirely a matter of habit. So he spends most of his time bombarded by negative suggestions - often sinking into that state of permanent, undefined anxiety that Kierkegaard called
Angst
and that a modern doctor would simply call nervous depression.

The Hindu scripture says: ‘The mind is the slayer of the real’ - meaning that our mental attitudes cut us off from reality. Thomas Mann has a short story called ‘Disillusionment’ that might have been conceived as an illustration of that text. The central character explains that his whole life has been spoilt by boredom, by a ‘great and general disappointment’ with all his experience. Literature and art had led him to expect marvels and prodigies, and everything has been a let-down. ‘Is that all?’ Death, he believes, will be the final anti-climax, the greatest disappointment of all... We can see that his problem is not that life is a disappointment, but that he never
experiences
life. His ‘life’ is lived inside his own head. He is in a more or less permanent state of hypnosis. And, by its very nature, this state tends to be self-propagating. Lack of expectation - or negative expectation - induces ‘hypnosis’, and a man in a condition of hypnosis is susceptible to negative suggestion, which prolongs the hypnosis. It is a vicious circle.