by Colin Wilson
The American Child
In The Hidden Persuaders Packard has a chapter on “The Psycho-Seduction of Children” that sounds some of his most ominous notes. He tells how advertisers set out to make contact with American children, who can not only persuade their parents to buy the advertised products but also help to spread the names of products by getting advertising songs off by heart. Riesman has commented that the advertisers think of their juvenile audience as a potential army of highly trained consumers. Nor is their value limited to potential buying: Packard states that “the Davy Crockett craze of 1955, which gave birth to 300 Davy Crockett products, lured $3,000,000,000 from American pockets.”
The implications are disturbing, and one in particular. So long as this deliberate cultural cheapening continues to pay, so long will the mass manipulators remain actively opposed to any rise in the cultural standard of television and films. A recent case in point was the affair of the horror comics. Their suppression, as Dr. Frederick Wertham’s book on the subject, Seduction of the Innocent, suggests unmistakably, was no mere outbreak of unrealistic American puritanism, on a par with Prohibition and the activities of sundry anti-vice societies. The examples he cites are nauseating; their constant preoccupation with cruelty and brutality could produce nothing in a child but callous and anti-social emotions. It nevertheless took years to suppress these publications effectively. They were making too much money for too many people.
An audience of children can be manipulated far more easily by advertisers than an audience of adults, the reason being that all children are other-directed. All children base their lives and conduct on the insignificance hypothesis: the world belongs to adults. A world in which all adults had some of the characteristics of children would be an advertiser’s dream. But in point of fact this is the world that is now coming into existence, the world of Riesman’s and Whyte’s observation. It is a world in which the organization and society at large play precisely the role in the life of the American adult that the adult plays in the life of the child.
There is an essential unreality in the relationship between a child and an adult. A sympathetic and imaginative adult might just possibly be able to see into the mind of a child, but the child can never have any true knowledge of the world of the grownup. And usually neither can fully comprehend the other. In a tradition-directed society, this void of unreality is taken for granted. The child has to struggle to enter the world of the adult and is usually “kept in his place,” with the result, very frequently, that he retains his attitude of submission to authority well into adulthood. In a recent lecture tour of German universities, I noticed that German students tend to be less questioning, and far less obstreperous, then English students. The reason for this, I was told, lies in the strictness of the school training of the German child; the authority of schoolmasters is absolute until the children are well into their teens. Even with advanced students, freedom is not encouraged as much as it is in England and America.
But however many disadvantages this system may have, it also has advantages, as comparison with American conditions makes clear. From an early age the American child tends to be given considerable freedom; so much so that certain alarmed observers have spoken of America as a child-dominated country. (This also explains why advertisers find the American child such excellent material.) A journalist friend who recently returned from America commented on the frequency of cases in which children have murdered their parents—because they were forbidden to use the car, or to listen to a certain television program, or for some equally trivial motive. These examples are not, of course, cited to argue for or against any particular theory of education. They are offered only as extreme indications of something that must have been apparent to observers of the American scene for many years: that the American child is treated far more like an adult than the European child. Democracy is being extended to the world of the moppets. The void of unreality that must exist between the mind of the adult and that of the child is symbolized by adult authority, in the same way that in Christianity the relation between man and God is symbolized by certain rituals. But the relationship is an imponderable; it cannot be seen and touched. In America, it would seem that democratic thinking has led to a feeling that adult authority has no more foundation in fact than church ritual, and there is thus a tendency to behave as if the void did not exist. The child is assumed to have a far greater capacity for freedom than it may, in actuality, possess. The result is a blurring of the child-adult relationship. A child is granted the same right of self-expression as an adult; thus, the violence and irrationality of the child are carried into the world of action, instead of remaining in the world of fantasy, and lead, in extreme cases, even to murder.
The reason for this is not far to seek. There is more emphasis on child guidance and child psychology in America than in Europe. Most Americans have a considerable respect for the figure of the psychologist—in fact, for any kind of scientist. American magazines devote a great deal of space to articles on “How to Bring Up Your Child,” usually by psychologists. Far more books are published yearly in America on this subject than in England. The American attitude to children is part of the general American attitude to scientific authority. The psychiatrist seems to play a far larger part in cases of juvenile delinquency, and criminal cases generally, in America than in Europe.6
I have tried to argue that this diffidence, which seems to lie at the root of the attitude of the American towards children, is based on a certain failure of realism. There is a void between the mind of the adult and that of the child. A realistic approach would recognize this and accept the responsibility that it implies, the need for authority. It is the same kind of failure of realism that Barrie satirizes in The Admirable Crichton, where the socialist Lord Loam has the servants in to tea.
The Pattern of Violence
In his study of American juvenile delinquency, The Shook-Up Generation, Harrison Salisbury suggests that the violence of the New York street gangs is perhaps only a reflection of the violence of the modern world. The pattern of their lives is influenced not only by television plays about gangsters and films like Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, but also by international tensions, the cold war, the threat of atomic warfare. The steep rise in juvenile delinquency since the war is usually attributed to the broken homes and the sense of instability caused by that social upheaval. And yet it is difficult to believe that this is the whole explanation. War or no war, modern society was becoming increasingly mechanized. The organization mentality now makes itself felt long before most teenagers have left school. This in itself is not the direct cause of teen-age revolt; German children were brought up to be army-minded, and the army is another organization; nevertheless, juvenile delinquency in Germany before the war was a good deal lower than after it. But military organization depends upon discipline; business ethics is based upon anarchy, shrewdness, and enterprise, the “grab what you can get” system. The American teenager lives in a society that overawes him with its power and wealth, and that tries to browbeat him with the “organization ethic.” And the American educational system, as I have already commented, attempts to teach its pupils to be self-determined at an early age. As Harrison Salisbury points out, the youths who hang around in drugstores today and listen to jazz, or who steal a car to drive to a dance hall a hundred miles away, might have joined a sailing ship to make the run around the Horn a century ago. Adolescence is the time when a desire for inner-direction begins to stir and is not yet held in check by realism. All this contributes to a revolt that lacks direction. This revolt is the essential intermediate stage between the ambitious imaginings of childhood and the adult’s “realistic” surrender to the organization. Salisbury has commented that most of the youths who belong to slum gangs would like to escape from the slums into more decent lives, but that most of them lack the will power needed for the hard struggle it would involve (as well as having no idea of how to go about it).
This problem is n
ot, of course, confined to America. In England, statistics for juvenile delinquency in 1951 had doubled the figure for 1937; 1951 was a peak year, but the figures are still a great deal higher than before the war. Russia also has her “teddy boys,” the stilyagi, although their activities are less violent than those of American delinquents; they confine themselves to wearing American-style clothes (especially colored ties) and listening to American jazz. The brief outbreaks of teen-age violence in Russia after the war were quickly suppressed by armed troops, who were given instructions to fire at any crowds of teen-agers on the streets. The Russian teddy boy, like his American counterpart, is sullen and rebellious about attempts to make him social-minded and professes bored indifference to communist ideology. His attitude shows the same callow and unrealistic attempt to be inner-directed.
He is still in the stage of feeling a certain instinctive rebellion against the insignificance that society is trying to impose upon him. When he learns to accept it, he will be a “good member of society.”
The Psychology of Violence
The rise in juvenile delinquency has been accompanied by a rise in the crime and suicide rates in many countries since the war. In England, 1951 was a peak year for most types of crime; the figures were between two and three times those of the pre-war period. Since then, there has been a slight decline in most types of crime. Crimes of violence and sexual offenses have, however, continued to rise steadily, and in 1955 the number of sexual offenses committed in England and Wales was 17,000, as compared to 5000 before the war. Plainly, the war cannot be entirely to blame, for the tendency is becoming steadily more marked.
The causes are probably too complex to submit to generalization. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that one of the causes might be sought in the increasing trend of other-direction. It is known, for example, that an enormous number of violent psychopaths show the same character pattern: their long periods of submission to a sense of inferiority (or “ordinariness”) are broken by sudden violence. It would seem that there is something about a life lived on a general level of insignificance that makes for outbreaks of violence. This violence may be directed against the self or against society; that is, may result in suicide or in crime. Suicide would appear to be the ultimate expression of self-contempt, and the violence that often accompanies it probably springs from the same cause. (The American Sociological Review survey, already quoted, reveals that one third of the suicides among unskilled workers are accompanied by murder; this is six times the rate among the white-collar class of suicide.) All this points to the idea that the increased other-direction in modern society, and the sense of insignificance that goes with it, may be one of the causes behind the increased crime rate.
This would certainly account for the fact that sexual crimes have shown the steepest rate of increase over the past ten years. Sex and the idea of other-direction are bound closely together. Other-direction is a strong sense of society, of laws and taboos, a sense of constant responsibility to the other people. Inner-direction tends to channel the energies of the individual; other-direction relies on social outlets for them. For all men of strong sexual appetites, any woman is a potential partner. The inner-directed man tends to select his sexual partner (or partners), since selection and purpose are implicit in his inner-direction; other-direction tends to destroy selectivity, to increase passivity. (This can be seen in the case of television addicts, who sit in front of their sets waiting to be entertained, indifferent to what they are watching as long as they are watching something.) Consequently, although all women are potentially sexual partners, the other-directed man is keenly aware of the social taboos that prevent his desires from finding satisfaction. If he revolts against his sense of insignificance, his lack of inner-direction, the revolt will tend to express itself as a defiance of taboos, a deliberate contravention of laws, in a crime of violence or a sexual offense. (When the hero of Henri Barbusse’s L’Enfer says, “It is not a woman I want: it is all women,” he is expressing the typical attitude of the bewildered other-directed man.)
The case histories of many psychopaths suggest that the other-directed man may release his frustrated desire for inner-direction in a sudden act of violence. A clear example is the case of Peter Kurten, the Düsseldorf sadist, who confessed after his arrest that he had often walked through the streets of Düsseldorf entertaining daydreams of blowing up the whole city with dynamite. Professor Berg, the psychologist who examined Kurten in prison and wrote the classic study of his case, dismissed the hypothesis that Kurten’s crimes sprang from a revenge-mania against society, on the grounds that Kurten later revealed their sexual origin. But if the theory that other-direction makes for sudden violence has any validity, there is nothing incompatible between the two motives.
In other ways, Kurten provides verification of the theory. He was known to his neighbors and workmates as a “quiet, insignificant little man,” and for long after his arrest they continued to believe that the police had made a mistake. They found it impossible to associate him with the series of murders and violent attacks of which he was accused. What none of them knew was that he had spent nearly the whole of his adult life in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. (He was forty-eight when he was executed.)
What emerges clearly from Professor Berg’s study is that Kurten was a man of rare intelligence and honesty, who was deeply interested in his own case and in the urges that led him to kill. He had been brought up against the worst kind of slum background, in a setting of sexual depravity (his father was given a prison sentence for raping Kurten’s sister), and had early been taught the pleasures of inflicting pain by a sadistic dogcatcher. In his long periods of solitary confinement, Kurten, with little else to do, would amuse himself with sexual fantasies that, stimulated by an increasing grudge against society, became steadily more violent.
Under better social conditions, Kurten might have emerged as an intelligent inner-directed person. But, as with Robert Irwin, his inner-direction was constantly frustrated, in his case by a society that exacted long periods of imprisonment as a penalty for his petty crimes. The effect of these periods of frustration and boredom was to destroy his sense of inner-direction.
The circumstances of Kurten’s arrest also tend to verify this interpretation. When he suspected that the police net was closing in on him, he confessed to his wife. She also had had no suspicion of his double life. When he had convinced her, he urged her to give him up and claim the reward money. While he was still engaged in persuading her, he took her out to supper. She could not eat. He finished his share, then ate hers, too. The prospect of arrest stimulated his appetite. The same thing happened on the night before his execution; then he ate an enormous condemned-cell supper and asked for a second helping. Excitement—even the excitement of his own arrest or execution—stimulated his vital functions, including his appetite.
The craving for excitement at any cost (even of misfortune to oneself) is a sign of undeveloped emotions. And an undeveloped inner life is equivalent to other-direction. Kurten’s life of crime was, I would suggest, a result of this urge for stimulation, for escape from other-direction to the temporary heightened intensity of inner-direction. He was a man whose basic need was for inner-direction, who lacked the strength to gain it by intellectual or emotional discipline, and who threw the whole weight of his need for intensity upon his body. But this burden of longing for intensity cannot be borne by the body, which is easily exhausted and demands stronger and stronger stimuli.7 Under different circumstances, Kurten might equally well have become an alcoholic or a drug addict.
It seems likely that the reason why “insignificant” men become capable of violent crimes is that the need for inner-direction becomes suddenly overpowering. The psychopath, lacking intellectual or emotional means of achieving it, throws the burden on his physical appetites. As a person who spends most of his life in an other-directed state, he has no other resources.
I have so far spoken of inner-directed and other-directed type
s as though some people could be clearly labeled inner-directed and others other-directed. But obviously this is not so. Everyone is a combination of the two types. Riesman admits this in The Lonely Crowd, when he says: “the types of character and society dealt with in this book are types; they do not exist in reality, but are a construction, based on a selection of certain historical problems.” It may be true that many people spend their lives in a state of more or less contented other-direction; that others (rarer) have achieved a certain stability of inner-direction; while a third group, basically inner-directed, spend their lives in a state of other-direction with sudden violent outbreaks of rebellion to achieve flashes of inner-direction, after which they may relapse contentedly back to other-direction for a long spell.
Huxley, Orwell, and Zamyatin have all portrayed a society of contented other-directed types; but it is doubtful whether many such people exist outside fiction. The real difference between people is the degree to which they are other-directed or inner-directed. And these terms may cover a host of finer shades that, for the moment, defy definition.
Yet the facts are there to be explained, and until a more subtle hypothesis proves its value, these approximations with all their clumsiness are indispensable. And there would seem to be some connection between other-direction, an assumption of diffidence (or insignificance), and a periodic revolt against it that often expresses itself in violence. If this connection exists, then it may also explain why a society whose character is changing from inner-direction to other-direction builds up a need for violent self-expression which may, under certain circumstances, express itself in wars. I submit this hypothesis as a stopgap until a better one replaces it, which is the role of all hypotheses.