A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

help them. If they possess some degree of charm or intelligence, they may succeed in making
themselves acceptable to other people; but sooner or later the resentment and self-pity break
through, and lead to mistrust and rejection.
The very essence of their problem is the question of self-discipline. Dominant human beings are
more impatient than others, because they have more vital energy. Impatience leads them to look for
short-cuts. When Peter Sellers booked into the RAG Club, he could just as easily have phoned his
wife, told her to give the nanny two months wages and sack her, and then got a good night’s sleep.
Instead, he behaved in a way that could have caused serious problems for everybody. It is easy to
see that if Sellers’s life, from the age of five, consisted of similar short-cuts, by the time he was an
adult he would lack the basic equipment to become a normal member of society. Civilisation, as
Freud pointed out, demands self-discipline on the part of its members. No one can be licensed to
threaten people with carving knives.
All this places us in a better position to answer Fromm’s question: why is man the only creature
who kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason? The answer does not lie in
his genetic inheritance, nor in some hypothetical death-wish, but in the human need for selfassertion,
the craving for ‘primacy’.
The behaviour of the Right Man enables us to see how this comes about. His feeling that he
‘counts’ more than anyone else leads him to acts of violent self-assertion. But this violence, by its
very nature, cannot achieve any long-term objective. Beethoven once flung a dish of lung soup in
the face of a waiter who annoyed him - typical Right Man behaviour. But Beethoven did not rely
upon violence to assert his ‘primacy’; he realised that his long-term objective could only be
achieved by patience and self-discipline: that is to say, by canalising his energy (another name for
impatience) and directing it in a jet, like a fireman’s hose, into his music. Long discipline deepened
the canal banks until, in the final works, not a drop of energy was wasted.
When the Right Man explodes into violence, all the energy is wasted. Worse still, it destroys the
banks of the canal. So in permitting himself free expression of his negative emotions he is
indulging in a process of slow but sure self-erosion - the emotional counterpart of physical
incontinence. Without proper ‘drainage’, his inner being turns into a kind of swamp or sewage
farm. This is why most of the violent men of history, from Alexander the Great to Stalin, have
ended up as psychotics. Without the power to control their negative emotions, they become
incapable of any state of sustained well-being.
If we are to achieve a true understanding of the nature of criminality, this is the problem that must
be plumbed to its depths: the problem of the psychology of self-destruction.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-DESTRUCTION
In March 1981, Norman Mailer wrote an introduction to a volume of letters by a convicted killer,
Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott had written to Mailer from prison, and his
letters convinced Mailer that this was a man with something important to say about violence. At
thirty-seven, Abbott had spent a quarter of a century behind bars - for cheque offences, bank
robbery, and murder. In solitary confinement he had read history and literature, and become
converted to Communism. Mailer convinced the prison authorities that Abbott had ‘the makings of
a powerful and important American writer’ and that he could make a living from his pen. Abbott