A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: ‘One in twenty.’ ‘Is that exact or approximate?’
asked Shaw. ‘Exact.’ And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason,
precisely five per cent - one in twenty - of any animal group are dominant - have leadership
qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated
out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in a separate
compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.
This is something that must obviously be taken into account in considering Becker’s argument that
all human beings have a craving for ‘heroism’, for ‘primacy’, which seems difficult to reconcile
with our fairly stable society, in which most people seem to accept their lack of primacy. This
could be, as Becker suggests, because we lose the feeling of primacy as we grow up; but anyone
who has ever spent ten minutes waiting for his children in a nursery school will know that the
majority of children also seem to accept their lack of ‘primacy’. The ‘dominant five per cent’
applies to children as well as adults.
Now in terms of society, five per cent is an enormous number; for example, in England in the
1980s it amounts to more than three million people. And society has no room for three million
‘leaders’. This means, inevitably, that a huge proportion of the dominant five per cent are never
going to achieve any kind of ‘uniqueness’. They are going to spend their lives in positions that are
indistinguishable from those of the non-dominant remainder.
In a society with a strong class-structure - peasants and aristocrats, rich and poor - this is not
particularly important. The dominant farm-labourer will be content as the village blacksmith or
leader of the church choir; he does not expect to become lord of the manor, and he doesn’t resent it
if the lord of the manor is far less dominant than he is. But in a society like ours, where workingclass
boys become pop-idols and where we see our leaders on television every day, the situation is
altogether less stable. The ‘average’ member of the dominant five per cent sees no reason why he
should not be rich and famous too. He experiences anger and frustration at his lack of ‘primacy’,
and is willing to consider unorthodox methods of elbowing his way to the fore. This clearly
explains a great deal about the rising levels of crime and violence in our society.
We can also see how large numbers of these dominant individuals develop into ‘Right Men’. In
every school with five hundred pupils, there are about twenty-five dominant ones struggling for
primacy. Some of these have natural advantages: they are good athletes, good scholars, good
debaters. (And there are, of course, plenty of non-dominant pupils who are gifted enough to carry
away some of the prizes.) Inevitably, a percentage of the dominant pupils have no particular talent
or gift; some may be downright stupid. How is such a person to satisfy his urge to primacy? He
will, inevitably, choose to express his dominance in any ways that are possible. If he has good
looks or charm, he may be satisfied with the admiration of female pupils. If he has some specific
talent which is not regarded as important by his schoolmasters - a good ear for music, a natural gift
of observation, a vivid imagination - he may become a lonely ‘outsider’, living in his own private
world. (Such individuals may develop into Schuberts, Darwins, Balzacs.) But it is just as likely that
he will try to take short-cuts to prominence and become a bully, a cheat or a delinquent.
The main problem of these ungifted ‘outsiders’ is that they are bound to feel that the world has
treated them unfairly. And the normal human reaction to a sense of unfairness is an upsurge of selfpity.
Self-pity and the sense of injustice make them vulnerable and unstable. And we have only to
observe such people to see that they are usually their own worst enemies. Their moods alternate
between aggressiveness and sulkiness, both of which alienate those who might otherwise be glad to