The Essential Colin Wilson (38 page)

And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of
highly dominant
people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals—or human beings—seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: ‘One in twenty.’ ‘Is that exact or approximate?’ asked Shaw. ‘Exact.’ And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent—one in twenty—of any animal group are dominant—have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in a separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.

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 RAC 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.

From
The Mind Parasites
, 1967

The Mind Parasites
is based upon the notion that some kind of parasite or life-vampire lives in the depths of the human mind, and steals our energies. In the opening chapter of the book, the narrator's friend Karel Weissman commits suicide. Many months after his death, the narrator discovers among his papers a secret journal, under the title
Historical Reflections
.
The journal describes Weissman's realization of the existence of the mind parasites. The problem the narrator has to solve in the remainder of the book is: how can human beings fight against a parasite which already knows what they are thinking the moment they think it? What follows is an extract from the journal.

It was in 1990 that I entered the field of industrial psychology as the assistant of Professor Ames at Trans-world Cosmetics. I immediately discovered a curious and nightmarish situation. I knew, of course, that 'industrial neurosis' had become a serious matter—so much so that special industrial courts had been set up to deal with offenders who sabotaged machinery or killed or injured workmates. But only a few people were aware of the sheer size of the problem. The murder rate in large factories and similar concerns had increased to
twice
that of the rest of the population. In one cigarette factory in America, eight foremen and two high executives were killed in the course of a single year; in seven of these cases, the murderer committed suicide immediately after the attack.

The Industrial Plastics Corporation of Iceland had decided to try the experiment of an 'open air' factory, spread over many acres, so that the workers had no sense of overcrowding or confinement; energy fields were used instead of walls. At first, the experiment was highly successful; but within two years, the factory's rate of industrial crime and neurosis had risen to equal the national average.

These figures never reached the national press. Psychologists reasoned—correctly—that to publicize them would make things worse. They reasoned that it would be best to treat each case as one would an outbreak of fire that must be isolated.

The more I considered this problem, the more I felt that we had no real idea of its cause. My colleagues were frankly defeated by it, as Dr Ames admitted to me during my first week at Trans-world Cosmetics. He said that it was difficult to get to the root of the problem, because it seemed to have so many roots—the population explosion, overcrowding in cities, the individual's feeling of insignificance and increasing sense of living in a vacuum, the lack of adventure in modern life, collapse of religion . . . and so on. He said he wasn't sure that industry wasn't treating the problem in entirely the wrong way. It was spending more money on psychiatrists, on improving working conditions—in short, in making the workers feel like patients. But since our living depended on this mistake, it was hardly up to us to suggest a change.

And so I turned to history to find my answers. And the answers, when I found them, made me feel like suicide. For, according to history, all this was completely inevitable. Civilization was getting top heavy; it was bound to fall over. Yet the one thing this conclusion failed to take into account was the human power of self-renewal. By the same reasoning, Mozart was bound to commit suicide because his life was so miserable. But he didn't.

What was destroying the human power of self-renewal?

I cannot explain quite how I came to believe that there might be a
single cause
. It was something dawned on me slowly, over many years. It was simply that I came to feel increasingly strongly that the figures for industrial crime were out of all proportion to the so-called 'historical causes'. It was as if I were the head of a firm who begins to feel instinctively that his accountant is cooking the books, although he has no idea how it is being done.

And then, one day, I began to suspect the existence of the mind vampires. And from then on, everything confirmed my guess.

It happened first when I was considering the use of mescalin and lysergic acid for curing industrial neurosis. Fundamentally, of course, the effect of these drugs is no different from that of alcohol or tobacco; they have the effect of unwinding us. A man who is overworked has got himself into a habit of tension, and he cannot break the habit by merely willing. A glass of whisky or a cigarette will reach down into his motor levels and release the tension.

But man has far deeper habits than overwork. Through millions of years of evolution, he has developed all kinds of habits for survival. If any of these habits get out of control, the result is mental illness. For example, man has a habit of being prepared for enemies; but if he allows it to dominate his life, he becomes a paranoiac.

One of man's deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren't take his eyes off the world around him. Another one, with the same cause, is his refusal to notice beauty, because he prefers to concentrate on practical problems. These habits are so deeply ingrained that alcohol and tobacco cannot reach them. But mescalin can. It can reach down to man's most atavistic levels, and release the automatic tensions that make him a slave to his own boredom and to the world around him.

Now I must confess that I was inclined to blame these atavistic habits for the problem of the world suicide rate and the industrial crime rate. Man has to learn to relax, or he becomes overwrought and dangerous. He must learn to contact his own deepest levels in order to re-energize his consciousness. So it seemed to me that drugs of the mescalin group might provide the answer.

So far, the use of these drugs had been avoided in industrial psychology, for an obvious reason: mescalin relaxes a man to a point where work becomes impossible. He wants to do nothing but contemplate the beauty of the world and the mysteries of his own mind.

I felt that there was no reason to reach this limit. A tiny quantity of mescalin, administered in the right way, might release a man's creative forces without plunging him into a stupor. After all, man's ancestors of two thousand years ago were almost colour-blind because they were in a subconscious habit of ignoring colour. Life was so difficult and dangerous that they couldn't afford to notice it. Yet modern man has succeeded in losing this old habit of colour-blindness without losing any of his drive and vitality. It is all a matter of balance.

And so I inaugurated a series of experiments with drugs of the mescalin group. And my first results were so alarming that my engagement with Trans-world Cosmetics was terminated abruptly. Five out of my ten subjects committed suicide within days. Another two had a total mental collapse that drove them into a madhouse.

I was baffled. I had experimented with mescalin on myself in my university days, but I found the results uninteresting. A mescalin holiday is all very pleasant, but it all depends whether you enjoy holidays. I do not; I find work too interesting.