A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

The ‘two selves’ of the criminal are present in every human being. When a baby is born, it is little
more than a bundle of desires and appetites; it screams for food, for warmth, for attention. These
are all immediate needs, ‘short-term’ needs. The child ceases to be a baby from the moment his
imagination is touched by some story. From that moment on, he has begun to develop another kind
of need: for experience, for adventure, for distant horizons. These might be labelled ‘long-term’
needs, and most of us find ourselves involved in a continual tug of war between our short-term and
long-term needs. The child experiences the conflict when he feels he ought to save his pocket
money towards a bicycle - to satisfy that longing for distant horizons - while the ‘short-term self
wants to spend it on a visit to the cinema and a box of chocolates.
The adult is, if anything, even worse off. With the need to worry about mortgages, television
licences and the children’s clothes, he almost forgets that distant horizons ever existed. In effect,
we walk about with a microscope attached to one eye and a telescope to the other. But we hardly
ever look through the telescope - that eye tends to remain permanently closed.
And now it becomes possible to see why criminality is related to hypnosis. The criminal is, of
course, a man who is dominated by short-term needs; like a spoilt child, his motto is ‘I want it
now’. But it is one of the peculiarities of consciousness that short-term perception - as seen through
the microscope - slips easily into sleep or hypnosis. This is why animals - who wear a microscope
on both eyes - are so easy to hypnotise. We need the sense of reality - the telescope - to keep us
alert. The chicken’s sense of reality is restricted to scratching for food and sitting on eggs - which is
why a mere chalk line can push its consciousness into total vacuity. And the criminal’s sense of
reality, limited to short-term objectives, also tends to drift into a state akin to hypnosis. To the rest
of us, there is something rather insane about the conduct of a Haigh, putting people into baths of
acid just for the sake of a few thousand pounds. The means seem out of all proportion to the end.
He has lost all ‘sense of reality’.
With their combination of ‘microscope’ and ‘telescope’, human beings were intended by evolution
to be far harder to hypnotise than chickens and rabbits. And indeed, we would be, if we made
proper use of the ‘telescope’ to maintain a sense of reality, of proportion. It is this absurd habit of
keeping one eye almost permanently closed that makes us almost as vulnerable as chickens.
Then why do we do it? Again, we have to look closely at the peculiar workings of the human mind.
When a child is born, he finds himself in a bewildering, frightening world of strange sights and
sounds, none of which he understands. Little by little, he begins to recognise regular patterns,
which he stores inside his head; and in the course of a few years he has collected enough patterns to
create a whole world behind his eyes. So now, when he confronts some new situation, he does not
have to study it in detail; the patterns inside his head enable him to master it in half the time.
But this useful mechanism - like all mechanisms - has a serious disadvantage. As the adult becomes
more skilled at coping with new situations, he scarcely bothers to study them in detail, or to look
for new points of interest. Sitting comfortably in the control room inside his head, he deals with
them by habit. Gradually life and consciousness fall into a mechanical routine. Human beings are
the only creatures who spend ninety-nine per cent of their time inside their own heads. Which
means, of course, that we are only keeping our sense of reality alert for one per cent of the time. It
is hardly surprising that we are so easy to hypnotise.
There is something very odd about the mechanism of hypnosis. It seems to be a method of utilising
the mind’s powers against itself. Students of self-defence are taught how to immobilise an enemy
by placing his legs around a lamp post in a certain position then forcing him to sit on his heels; it