A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

World Health Organisation had issued strings containing twenty-eight beads to illiterate peasant
women. There were seven amber beads, seven red ones, seven more amber beads, and seven green
ones; the women were told to move a bead every day. ‘Many women thought that merit resided in
the beads, and moved them around to suit themselves,’ said the newspaper.
This is ‘magical thinking’ - allowing a desire or emotion to convince you of something your reason
tells you to be untrue. In 1960, a labourer named Patrick Byrne entered a women’s hostel in
Birmingham and attacked several women, decapitating one of them; he explained later that he
wanted to ‘get his revenge on women for causing him sexual tension’. This again is magical
thinking. So was Charles Manson’s assertion that he was not guilty because ‘society’ was guilty of
bombing Vietnam. And Sartre offers the example of a girl who is about to be attacked by a man and
who faints - a ‘magical’ attempt to make him go away. This is a good example because it reminds
us that ‘magic’ can be a purely physical reaction. Magical thinking provides a key to the Right
Man.
What causes ‘right mannishness’? Van Vogt suggests that it is because the world has always been
dominated by males. In Italy in 1961, two women were sentenced to prison for adultery. Their
defence was that their husbands had mistresses, and that so do many Italian men. The court
overruled their appeal. In China in 1950, laws were passed to give women more freedom; in 1954,
there were ten thousand murders of wives in one district alone by husbands who objected to their
attempts to take advantage of these laws.
But then, this explanation implies that there is no such thing as a Right Woman - in fact, Van Vogt
says as much. This is untrue. There may be fewer Right Women than Right Men, but they still
exist. The mother of the novelist Turgenev had many of her serfs flogged to death - a clear example
of the ‘magical transfer’ of rage. Elizabeth Duncan, a Californian divorcee, was so outraged when
her son married a nurse, Olga Kupczyk, against her wishes, that she hired two young thugs to kill
her; moreover, when the killers tried to persuade her to hand over the promised fee, she went to the
police and reported them for blackmail - the action that led to the death of all three in the San
Quentin gas chamber. Again, this is a clear case of ‘magical’ - that is to say, totally unrealistic -
thinking. And it shows that the central characteristic of the Right Woman is the same as that of the
Right Man: that she is convinced that having her own way is a law of nature, and that anyone who
opposes this deserves the harshest possible treatment. It is the god (or goddess) syndrome.
Van Vogt also believes that Adler’s ‘organ inferiority’ theory may throw some light on right
mannishness. Adler suggests that if some organ - the heart, liver, kidneys - is damaged early in life,
it may send messages of inferiority to the brain, causing an inferiority complex. This in turn, says
Van Vogt, could lead to the over-compensatory behaviour of the Right Man. He could well be
right. Yet this explanation seems to imply that being a Right Man is rather like being colour blind
or asthmatic - that it can be explained in purely medical terms. And the one thing that becomes
obvious in all case histories of Right Men is that their attacks are not somehow ‘inevitable’; some
of their worst misdemeanours are carefully planned and calculated, and determinedly carried out.
The Right Man does these things because he thinks they will help him to achieve his own way,
which is what interests him.
And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people.
Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of
dominant animals - or human beings - seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked
the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if