A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

his crops from year to year so that the ground itself never becomes exhausted. ‘Here we have... the
principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the
more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very
inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much amusement. One need only hark back to one’s
schooldays... how entertaining to catch a fly and hold it imprisoned under a nutshell... How
entertaining sometimes to listen to the monotonous drip of water from the roof...’
What does the prisoner in solitary confinement actually do? What does the schoolboy do as he
listens to the rain? The answer is that lack of expectation makes him slow down his senses, which
has the effect of amplifying his perceptions. And he produces this ‘slowing down’ by increasing his
attention. It could be compared to a scientist focusing a slide under a microscope, or a man pouring
wine through a funnel so that not a drop shall be lost. The schoolboy ‘funnels’ his attention on to
the beetle under the nutshell. De Sade has the temperament of a spoilt brat; he is too impatient to
‘funnel’ his attention, and then wonders why the experience is so unsatisfying.
This effect is explained by an observation made by Roger Sperry. He noted that the right brain - the
intuitive hemisphere - works at a slower pace than the left. The left brain - the ‘you’ - is the part,
that copes with the world, and it always seem to be in a hurry. The right ambles along casually at its
own pace. The result is that the two halves are always losing contact. Every time ‘you’ become
tense or anxious or over-tired, the gap between them increases and life begins to take on an air of
unreality. This is because it is the business of the right brain to provide experience with a third
dimension of reality. And it can only do this when the two halves are, so to speak, strolling side by
side.
So when the prisoner focuses on the spider, when the schoolboy focuses on the beetle, he is
slowing down the left until it is moving at the same pace as the right. And when this happens, the
experience becomes ‘interesting’. He has, in effect, pressed a switch that alters consciousness from
the left brain ‘thinking mode’ to the right-brain ‘feeling mode’. This also explains why alcohol can
sometimes produce those delightful states of relaxation in which we feel totally contented to rest in
the sensory reality of the present. It halts the impatient forward rush of the left brain and persuades
it to relax. De Sade had discovered that sex can produce the same effect. But neither alcohol nor
sex works all the time; the left brain may simply refuse to slow down.
All this makes it clear that crime is an unfortunate waste-product of human evolution. Human
intelligence involves the power of foresight, and foresight enables a man to calculate how to
achieve comfort, security and pleasure. It also makes him a potential criminal, for the simplest way
to achieve what he wants is to go out and grab it - the method advocated by de Sade.
If Jaynes is correct, this presumably did not apply to our caveman forebears, for their right and left
brains had not yet lost contact. It was only the complexities of civilisation that led man to develop
the independent left brain so that criminality became possible.
We have already seen why de Sade’s approach - the criminal approach - fails to achieve its object.
Its sheer obsessiveness defeats its aims. The manic egoist, driven by resentment, gradually destroys
his own sense of reality. (Panzram is an obvious example.) The result may be self-destruction; but,
if he is lucky, he recognises his mistake in time and reverses his direction. (Many of the saints were
men who began life as ‘sinners’ and egoists; they discovered their mistakes in time.)
All human beings contain an element of the criminal; as Becker points out, every child is a manic
egoist. Fortunately, few of us go as far as Panzram or de Sade. And this is not, as de Sade believes,