A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Chicago rapist William Heirens began to experience orgasm as he climbed in through a window.
The French gangster Jacques Mesrine turned from fighting rebels in Algeria to armed robbery; the
sharpened awareness produced by danger had become a drug.
So crime is not, as Wells suggested in The Croquet Player, some horrible legacy of our cave-man
ancestry. It is an attempt to compensate for the narrowed awareness produced by split-brain
differentiation; and, in that sense, it springs from the same source as human creativity. Shakespeare
said that the lunatic, the lover and the poet ‘are of imagination all compact’; he could have added
the criminal to the list. It is a mistake to think of the criminal as inhuman - notwithstanding some of
the examples in the previous chapter. He is, on the contrary, more human than the rest of us; he is
more enmeshed in the basic fallacy that makes most human life an unsatisfactory pursuit of will o’
the wisps. We are all victims of the ‘passive fallacy’, the failure to grasp that, where happiness is
concerned, it is the mind itself that provides that final convulsion of achievement.
Crime is, then, a completely mistaken solution to a problem that accompanies all of us from the
cradle to the grave: the problem of personal evolution. But then, as we have seen in the course of
this book, most human solutions tend to be mistaken - from the paradise of the religious fanatic to
the simplistic materialism of the Marxist. The criminal simply goes farther than most of us in
embracing the wrong solution; and, in doing so, provides the rest of us with a flash of insight into
our own stupidity - the recognition that we are making the same mistake, but - fortunately - on a
smaller scale. This is the real justification for the human interest in crime.
We have seen that this is an evolutionary problem. All animals are trapped in physical immediacy.
Man is lucky to have succeeded in achieving some degree of detachment from it. Instinctively he
has concentrated on developing the power of the mind - meaning perception. His problem is that
his very success has retarded his progress. Civilisation has enabled him to ‘rest on his oars’. He
needs challenge or crisis to get the best out of him, but he built civilisation to protect himself from
challenge and crisis.
Is there a way out of this vicious circle? Consider again this basic problem of the ‘dual self. Our
inner-being may be divided, but we still have the two halves inside our heads, and they are
perfectly capable of co-operation - in fact, they do it all the time. As I write these words, my right
brain provides the insights, my left translates them into language. Of course, when I perform some
simpler function - like eating my breakfast - the left hardly plays any part at all; I can even read a
newspaper as I butter my toast.
And this explains how the problem comes about. For if I happen to be eating my breakfast in a
hotel, and there is a noisy and irritating child at the next table, I cease to function quite so smoothly.
What happens is that the child’s noise distracts my attention from the newspaper, and I - the leftbrain
self - begin to get angry. I cease to enjoy my breakfast and may even develop indigestion. My
left brain has interfered with the smooth functioning of my right brain, my ‘robot’ and my
digestion.
And what exactly happens when it interferes in this way? It causes an internal leak of energy.
When I am relaxed and interested in what I am doing, my energies are ‘funnelled’ quietly and
without waste into the effort I am making. The moment my left brain is distracted by some anxiety,
I begin to ‘leak’. And this is civilised man’s basic problem. He ‘leaks’ all the time without even
noticing it. And the leakage keeps his consciousness at a far lower pressure than it is capable of
attaining.