A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

If his anxiety increases sharply, he suddenly notices how badly he is leaking. He may experience a
continual unpleasant queasiness in the pit of his stomach, and anything that reminds him of his
anxiety causes a ‘sinking feeling’ - a bigger leak still. The reverse can also happen. He has a second
martini, becomes interested in the conversation, and suddenly realises that he is no longer leaking.
But these delightful states of mind only make us aware of how much we normally leak without
even noticing it.
Anything that makes you self-conscious causes a ‘leak’ - for example, someone staring intently at
your feet as you sit on the train and making you wonder whether you have odd socks on. But man’s
whole evolution has been the evolution of self-consciousness. It is hardly surprising that ‘leaking’
has become the major characteristic of the human animal. We have only to look at a cat to see that
its lack of self-consciousness protects it from ‘leaks’.
Anything that arouses our interest, that makes us focus intently, seals the leaks. It does this by
encouraging the two halves of the brain to collaborate without fuss. This explains the
disproportionate part that sex plays in human existence. We can imagine, let us say, a man who is
suddenly confronted by a girl who believes she is alone, and who is hitching up her skirt to
examine a ladder in her stocking. Within a split second, all his ‘leaks’ are sealed, and his attention
is undivided - which is another way of saying that his brain is undivided. All kinds of physical
functions can produce this state of undividedness - eating, drinking, yawning, walking, even
excreting. But few of them do it as instantaneously as sex.
And it is because sex can instantly repair the leaks of divided consciousness that human beings are
so prone to sexual deviation - which, as we have seen, is closely connected with crime. John
Christie was too self-conscious to enjoy normal sexual intercourse - in his home town he had been
known as ‘Can’t-do-it Christie’ and ‘Reggie No-dick’. But if he reduced the girl to
unconsciousness, then his self-consciousness disappeared and he could enjoy sex to the full. This,
in other words, was the only way in which he could unite the two beams of perception, and it
turned him into a mass murderer. ‘Forbiddenness’ would add a new dimension of excitement, and
therefore of objectivity. It is not surprising that he experienced a deep sense of peace after a murder,
and told the police: ‘I had no regrets.’
The same analysis applies to a man who needs to get prostitutes to dress up as nursemaids or
schoolgirls. His meaning perception is so weak in proportion to his immediacy perception that
normal sex crushes his vitality. He feels feeble, inadequate, ‘contingent’. The sight of a schoolgirl
uniform arouses a kind of inner demon; it rubs its hands and chuckles wickedly as it prepares to lift
her skirt; he is no longer feeble and inadequate, but bold and defiant. And this, we can see at a
glance, is the basic psychological mechanism of crime. This is why Knowles went on a crime
rampage after being jilted; he was asserting: ‘I am not a weakling, a social reject. I have the power
to do.’ Through criminal aggression, he was asserting self-respect. The journalist Sandy Fawkes,
who became Knowles’s mistress for a few days, described him in her book Killing Time as an
interesting and intelligent person. It was precisely because he was an intelligent person that he was
racked by the ‘identity crisis’ to which the violence was a response. This explains the whole
phenomenon of the ‘high IQ criminal’ which has become so characteristic of our time.
We can also see that the ‘identity crisis’ is due to the distress the left-brain ego feels at the belief
that it is ‘on its own’. It is unaware that it possesses a powerful helper only a few centimetres away.
This also explains why no poet, artist or composer in history has ever committed a calculated, first-