A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

enables them to bear stress. An equally obvious explanation is that the executive has achieved his
position by developing the ability to cope with problems and bear stress. A British study of people
whose names are listed in Who’s Who showed a similar result: the more distinguished the person,
the greater seemed to be his life expectancy and the better his general level of health. And here we
can see that it is not simply a negative matter of learning to ‘bear stress’. The Nobel Prize winners
and members of the Order of Merit had reasons for overcoming stress, a sense of purpose. The
point is reinforced by a comment made by Dr Jeffrey Gray at a conference of the British
Psychological Society in December 1981: that there is too much emphasis nowadays on lowering
stress with the aid of pills. People should learn to soak up the worries of the job and build up their
tolerance to pressure. Rats who were placed in stress situations and given Librium and Valium
reacted less well than rats who were given no drugs. The latter were ‘toughened up’ and built up an
immunity to stress. The lesson seems to be that all animals can develop resistance to stress; man is
the only animal who has learned to use stress for his own satisfaction.
All this enables us to understand what it is that distinguishes the criminal from the rest of us. Like
the rats fed on Valium, the criminal fails to develop ‘stress resistance’ because he habitually
releases his tensions instead of learning to control them. Criminality is a short-cut, and this applies
to non-violent criminals as much as to violent ones. Crime is essentially the search for ‘the easy
way’.
Considering our natural lack of fellow feeling, it is surprising that cities are not far more violent.
This is because, strangely enough, man is not innately cruel. He is innately social; he responds to
the social advances of other people with sympathy and understanding. Any two people sitting side
by side on a bus can establish a bond of sympathy by merely looking in each other’s eyes. It is far
easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as
we look in one another’s faces we can see the other point of view. The real paradox is that the
Germans who tossed children back into the flames at Oradour were probably good husbands and
affectionate fathers. The Japanese who used schoolboys for bayonet practice and disembowelled a
schoolgirl after raping her probably carried pictures of their own children in their knapsacks.
How is this possible? Are human beings really so much more wicked than tigers and scorpions?
The answer was provided by a series of experiments at Harvard conducted by Professor Stanley
Milgram. His aim was to see whether ‘ordinary people’ could be persuaded to inflict torture. They
were told that the experiment was to find out whether punishment could increase someone’s
learning capacity. The method was to connect the victim to an electric shock machine, then ask the
subject to administer shocks of increasing strength. The ‘victim’ was actually an actor who could
scream convincingly. The subject was told that the shock would cause no permanent damage but
was then give a ‘sample’ shock of 45 volts to prove that the whole thing was genuine. And the
majority of these ‘ordinary people’ allowed themselves to be persuaded to keep on increasing the
shocks up to 500 volts, in spite of horrifying screams, convulsions and pleas for mercy. Only a few
refused to go on. In writing up his results in a book called Obedience to Authority, Milgram points
the moral by quoting an American soldier who took part in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and
who described how, when ordered by Lieutenant Galley, he turned his sub-machine gun on men,
women and children including babies. The news interviewer asked: ‘How do you, a father, shoot
babies?’ and received the reply: ‘I don’t know - it’s just one of those things.’
And these words suddenly enable us to see precisely why human beings are capable of this kind of
behaviour. It is because we have minds, and these minds can overrule our instincts. An animal
cannot disobey its instinct; human beings disobey theirs a hundred times a day. Living in a modern