A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

hand that grasps reality. The tighter it grasps, the ‘realler’ the world becomes. And any sudden
‘clenching’ of this fist induces the flash of the peak experience. This is why, as Dr Johnson says,
‘the knowledge that he is to be hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully’. It is
because he is at last using consciousness for its proper purpose, to grip. It is because we so seldom
use it for its proper purpose that the hand remains so feeble. When Maslow’s students began to
think and talk about the peak experience, this knowledge dawned on them instinctively, and they
began to induce peak experiences by a simple clenching of the fist.
‘Clenching’ has the effect of closing the leaks, and closing the leaks has the effect of suddenly
increasing the ‘pressure’ of consciousness. This, as Hesse says, is why concentrating on small
things revitalises us; it closes the leaks. And ‘clenching’ does it instantaneously, bringing a flash of
insight. In the same way crisis so often brings the sense of ‘absurd good news’. It causes
consciousness to ‘clench’, convulsively, making us aware that it has ‘muscles’, and that these
muscles can be used to transform our lives.
Nothing is easier than to verify this statement. All that is necessary is to narrow the eyes, tense the
muscles, make a sudden powerful effort of ‘clenching’ the mind. The result is an instantaneous
twinge of delight. It vanishes almost instantly because the ‘muscle’ is so feeble. But we know that
any muscle can be strengthened by deliberate effort.
We can also observe that as we ‘clench’ the mind, it produces a sense of ‘inwardness’, a
momentary withdrawal into some inner fortress. This is clearly what Kierkegaard meant when he
said ‘Truth is subjectivity’. It is, in fact, a sudden flash of contact with the ‘source of power,
meaning and purpose’ inside us.
And what relevance has all this to the problem of crime? The answer can be seen if we consider
again Dan MacDougald’s cure of ‘hard core psychopaths’ in the Georgia State Penitentiary. A
criminal, as Sartre pointed out, is a man who has become accustomed to thinking of himself as a
criminal; he feels himself to be a victim - of society, of bad luck, of his own violent impulses and
lack of purpose. MacDougald ‘cured’ his criminals by making them recognise that their problems
lay in their own mental attitudes. When he intervened in the case of a prisoner who was planning to
kill another prisoner with an iron bar - to avenge an insult - the convict invited his enemy to have a
sandwich and a coffee, and the situation was resolved; MacDougald had taught him that he was not
trapped in some inevitable fatality, some murderous destiny. He had taught him the secret that has
transformed man from a naked tree dweller to the most highly evolved creature on earth: that man’s
controlling force - ‘Force C’ - is the most important thing about him. As Wells’s Mr Polly
discovered: If you don’t like your life, you can change it.
At the moment, society shares the assumption of the criminal: that nothing much can be done. But
then, all the major transformations of society have started with the few who know better. The
conclusion is inescapable. Only when society recognises that it possesses the power to control
crime will crime be controlled.
Looking back over three million years of human history, we can see that it has been a slow
reprogramming of the human mind, whose first major turning point was the moment when the mind
became aware of itself. When man learned to recognise his own face in a pool and to say I, he
became capable of greatness, and also of criminality.