A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

unfulfilment is a permanent obstacle to enrichment of awareness; he decided that the simplest
solution to the problem was rape and murder.
Then why do such methods never seem to succeed? Anyone who has any dealing with criminals -
any policeman, lawyer or psychiatrist - will verify that, far from being happier than the rest of us,
most of them seem to be gnawed by a permanent dissatisfaction. The Boston Strangler may have
worked a few of his problems out of his system; but it took him two thousand rapes and a dozen or
so murders, and he paid for these with his freedom and his life. As a method for the enrichment of
consciousness, crime is a failure.
The reason should be obvious. Enrichment depends upon focusing the two ‘beams of perception’;
and ‘meaning perception’ must be as powerful as ‘immediacy perception’. Meaning perception is a
power of the mind; it depends upon a certain mental energy. And this mental energy is precisely
what all criminals lack. They lay far too much emphasis on the physical stimulus in the process of
‘enrichment’. Carl Panzram committed his first burglary at the age of eleven: he was reaching out
for the physical stimulus; so was Steven Judy, who committed his first rape at the age of twelve.
The poet Shelley, on the other hand, recognised from an early age that the answer lay in
strengthening meaning perception. In the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, he wrote:
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine – have I not kept the vow?
beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave...
Shelley grasped that the real answer to enrichment of awareness lies in that action of ‘summoning’
memories to the surface of consciousness, the ‘phantoms of a thousand hours’ which lie inside us.
Proust made the same discovery when he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea and was flooded with
memories of childhood. Proust also experienced the paradoxical sense that man is really a kind of
god: ‘I have ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal...’
The poet also experiences the odd conviction that the physical world around us is not as real as it
looks. Shelley writes:
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats, though unseen, amongst us ...
and Wordsworth describes how he rowed a boat on to Lake Windermere by night and was
overwhelmed by a sense of ‘unknown modes of being’. The man who has once experienced these
insights is never likely to become a criminal, for he never makes the criminal’s mistake of
believing that the physical world is the only reality. He now knows intuitively that the answer lies
in a hidden power behind the eyes.
In fact, even the criminal grasps this, in his own muddled way. As the author of My Secret Life
observes himself in the mirror, he is trying to add a final element of realisation to the experience;
that is, he is attempting to bring his mind to a focus it does not normally achieve. And this, we can
see, is the motivation behind all sex crime. Frederick Baker attempts to achieve it in the rape of a
child, Jack the Ripper in his orgy of sadism, Paul Knowles in his rampage of violence. The Boston
Strangler deliberately arranges his victims in obscene postures so that he can, so to speak,
photograph the scene, engrave it on his consciousness, to be able to ‘summon’ it later to enrich his
awareness. And this element of sharpened perception explains the addictive element in crime. The