by Colin Wilson
To me, it seemed obvious that the answer was for the ‘Outsider’ to stop feeling sorry for himself, and get on with the job of trying to change the world. If he didn’t do it, then nobody else would.
At about this time, 1960, I received a letter from an American professor of psychology called Abraham Maslow. He explained that he had got tired of studying sick people, because they talked about nothing but their sickness, and decided to study healthy people instead. And he quickly learned something that no one had discovered so far: healthy people had with great frequency what they called ‘peak experiences’, experiences of sudden tremendous happiness. Typical was his story of a young mother who was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when she suddenly thought, ‘My God, aren’t I lucky?’ and went into the peak experience.
He also made another interesting discovery: when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began remembering and talking about their own peak experiences, and they began having peak experiences all the time. The capacity for peak experiences is obviously quite basic and normal in human beings. Until we recognise this, we are selling ourselves short.
But Maslow said something else that struck me as relevant to the problem of crime. He talked about what he called the ‘hierarchy of needs’. As they evolve, human beings pass through certain levels of need. If you are so poor that you have difficulty getting enough to eat, then you will find it hard to think about anything but food. But when people have enough to eat, then the next level emerges: for a roof over your head. Every tramp dreams of retiring to a cottage with roses round the door.
If that need is satisfied, then the next level emerges—the sexual level. This is not merely the need for sex, but the need to love and be cared for.
If this is satisfied, the next level is self-esteem, the need to be liked and respected by one’s fellows, and if possible to be admired. This is the level of the ‘wannabe’ that we have encountered so frequently in this book. As I thought about this, I saw the same levels emerging in the development of society in the past few centuries—and in the types of crime in those societies.
In the eighteenth century, the majority of people were at that basic level, the need to get enough to eat. So crime was also basic, most of it connected with robbery.
In the nineteenth century, things had advanced, and there was now a middle class whose chief needs were connected with their homes and domestic security. The crime historian thinks of the mid-nineteenth century as the age of domestic murder. But a new level is also emerging
—the sexual level. In the US, a doctor named H. H. Holmes lures women into his ‘murder castle’—complete with hidden doors and secret rooms—to violate them and dispose of their bodies, and Sunday school teacher Theodore Durrant murders and rapes two young women in San Francisco. In England there is Jack the Ripper, in France, Joseph Vacher, a mentally deranged journeyman who rapes and mutilates peasant women. The age of sex crime has begun, and it escalates in the twentieth century into serial murder.
In the 1920s, the next level, the self-esteem level, makes its tentative appearance with Leopold and Loeb, the wealthy students who wish to see themselves as intellectual supermen. But self-esteem crime gets into its stride in the 1950s, with Melvin Rees, and in the 1960s with the Moors Murders and Charles Manson. Self-esteem criminals need to impose their will on other people. DeBardeleben belongs to this type; so does Leonard Lake and Jack Unterweger.
But beyond that, Maslow posits the next level of the hierarchy of needs: self-actualisation. Not all people rise to this level, but in our society, the number of self-actualisers increases steadily. It is, of course, the creative level, but not necessarily artistic or intellectual creation. It may be somebody who enjoys putting ships in bottles or making dolls. Maslow knew a woman who was so good at bringing up children that when her own were grown up she went on adopting more, just for the sheer pleasure it gave her.
And of course, there is no category of violent crime associated with the self-actualisation level. The two are a contradiction in terms. This explains why no creative artist has ever committed a premeditated murder—which would seem to imply that at the next level of social evolution, crime will naturally decrease.
There is another interesting mechanism of change that points towards the same conclusion: what the biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘formative causation’, which, in effect, guarantees the increase in the number of self-actualisers. Formative causation takes place through the influence of a factor that Sheldrake has labelled ‘morphogenetic fields’, which you might compare to the field around a magnet, which can be communicated to other magnets.
The wing of a bird or the tentacle of an octopus is shaped by a kind of electrical ‘mould’—just like the moulds into which we pour jellies—which is why many creatures can regrow a limb that has been cut off. These ‘moulds’ seem to be magnetic fields, which shape the living molecules just as a magnet can ‘shape’ iron filings into a pattern. Sheldrake suggests that these ‘fields’ can be used to explain some rather odd observations made by biologists.
For example, in 1920 the psychologist William McDougal performed an experiment at Harvard to see if baby rats could inherit abilities developed by their parents (the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ that Darwinists regard as such a fearful heresy). He put white rats into a tank of water from which they could escape up one of two gangplanks. One gangplank had an electric current running through it, and the first generation of rats soon learned to choose the other one. Then McDougal tried the same experiment on their children, and then on their grandchildren, and so on. And he found that each generation learned more quickly than its parents—that is, he had proved that the inheritance of acquired characteristics does occur.
Now when a scientist performs an experiment on a group of animals, he always keeps an exactly similar group who are not subjected to experiments; these are called the ‘control group’—the purpose being to have a ready standard of comparison. When a colleague of McDougal’s—W. E. Agar of Melbourne—repeated his experiment, he also decided to test the control group at the end of several generations. To his baffled astonishment, these also showed the same ability to learn more quickly. And that was impossible, for they had merely been sitting passively in cages. It looked as if the control rats had learned by some kind of telepathy.
Not telepathy, says Sheldrake, but by ‘morphic resonance’. The control group of rats ‘picked up’ the morphogenetic field of the trained rats in the same way that an iron bar can pick up the electrical field of a coil of wire and turn into a magnet: simple induction.
Incredibly, this seems to work not only with living creatures but with crystals. New chemicals, when synthesised for the first time, are often extremely difficult to crystallise. But as soon as one of them has been crystallised in any laboratory in the world, it becomes easier to crystallise in all the others. At first, it was suspected that scientists travelling from one laboratory to another might be carrying fragments of crystals in their clothes or beards—or even that tiny quantities are carried in the atmosphere. Both explanations seem highly unlikely. The likeliest, Sheldrake suggests, is a process of ‘induction’ through morphogenetic fields.
A series of experiments has been performed to test the Sheldrake hypothesis and has produced positive results. At Yale, Professor Gary Schwartz found that people who do not know Hebrew were able to distinguish between real words in Hebrew and false words—because Jews all over the world already know the genuine words. Alan Pickering of Hatfield Polytechnic obtained the same result using Persian script. In another experiment, English-speaking people were asked to memorise two rhymes in a foreign language—one a well-known nursery rhyme, one a newly composed rhyme. The result—as the hypothesis of formative causation predicts—is that they learned the traditional rhyme more easily than the newly composed one.
We can see that this must also be true of self-actualisation. When the number of self-actualisers in a society ha
s increased beyond a certain critical mass, it will go on increasing by the action of morphogenetic fields.
Which explains why, on the whole, I do not share the current pessimism about the way the world is going. Human beings seem to have an odd ability to solve apparently intractable problems with a mixture of determination and serendipity; faced with such problems, they seem to have the ability to set unknown forces in motion. Or, as Buckminster Fuller put it: ‘I seem to be a verb.’
Crime is a disintegrative force. Self-actualisation is an integrative force. And the lesson of history is that it is the integrative force that finally prevails.
Images
An 1888 Punch cartoon satirises the police’s inability to find the Whitechapel murderer. The nineteenth century saw the advent of the ‘sex crime’. Self-confessed ‘Boston Strangler’, Albert DeSalvo, minutes after his capture on 25 February 1967. Described as ‘charming’ by many people who met him, DeSalvo may be the only serial killer who killed his way to some kind of ‘maturity’. (Associated Press) Confessed murderer Harvey Glatman, at right, stands over bones, in San Diego, California, 31 October 1958, which he told officers were those of Shirley Ann Bridgeford. Bridgeford was one of three women he was charged with strangling. Often assuming the persona of Johnny Glenn, magazine photographer, Glatman was a fantasist whose crimes were the outcome of sexual frustration. (Associated Press) William Heirens stands in his cell on 5 September 1946, in the Cook County Jail in Chicago, after he was sentenced to serve three consecutive life terms for the murder of a little girl and two women. Heirens, although he claims to have been railroaded by the police, has been behind bars more than fifty years in the sensational Chicago murder case in which ‘Catch me before I kill more’ was left scrawled in lipstick on a bathroom mirror. (Associated Press) The gruesome Tate and LaBianca slayings of 1969 shocked the American public. Here, the accused Charles Manson walks into the courtroom in Santa Monica, California, on 13 October 1970. When his name was called to enter his plea, Manson stood, folded his arms, and turned his back on the judge. Susan Atkins, seated, a fanatic member of his family of followers, did the same. (Associated Press) David Berkowitz, aka the ‘Son of Sam’, during an interview at Attica prison in New York in 1979. Berkowitz killed six people and wounded seven others in New York City in 1976 and 1977. He claimed to have been driven by an ‘unknown urge to kill’. (Associated Press) With cigarette dangling from his mouth and his long hair disheveled, Paul John Knowles appears to be the archetypal criminal. In 1974, the Florida parolee was charged and convicted of six slayings in several states. (Associated Press) With his good looks and easy charm, Ted Bundy, shown here in Pensacola in 1977, seemed an unlikely serial killer. Bundy was convicted of three Florida slayings, although authorities considered him a suspect in as many as thirty-six killings, mostly in the Northwest. (Associated Press) The lonely, frigid countryside outside Anchorage, Alaska, proved to be the perfect setting for Robert Hansen’s deadly games. If a prostitute did not satisfy him, he would take her to a remote spot, release her, and then hunt her down as if she were a game animal. (Shawn Clark/Shutterstock) Wayne Williams poses along the fence line at Valdosta State Prison in Georgia. His 1982 conviction for the slayings of two adults, and the decision by authorities to blame him for the murders of 22 others without taking him to trial for those crimes, officially ended what became known throughout the world as the ‘Atlanta child murders’. (Associated Press) Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor hold their son, Lonnie Bond Jr. All three are believed to have been murdered by Charles Ng and his accomplice Leonard Lake. One of California’s longest and costliest homicide cases started in 1998, more than thirteen years after Charles Ng’s arrest for shoplifting led to his prosecution for serial murder. (Associated Press/Detroit Free Press) Gary Ridgway prepares to leave the courtroom where he was sentenced in King County, Washington. Ridgway received a life sentence for each of 48 counts of murder in what became known as the ‘Green River Killer’ serial murder case that began in 1982 and was the largest unsolved serial murder case in American history. (Associated Press/Joshua Trujillo, Seattle Post-Intelligencer) Despite royal conspiracy theorists claims, and a number of books that name him as a plausible suspect, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, was not Jack the Ripper. Reputable historians and most ‘Ripperologists’ discount these theories as highly unlikely, if not downright preposterous. A marriage truly made in hell. Pictured here during happy times are serial killers Rosemary and Fred West. The couple took pleasure in molesting their own daughters, raping young women, and together killing at least twelve victims, including Fred’s daughter Heather. West hanged himself in his jail cell and Rosemary was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole. (Associated Press) Although she presents an image of blonde sweetness, driven by a desire to present her fiance with a ‘surrogate virgin’, Canada’s most notorious female criminal, Karla Homolka, presented her husband, Paul Bernardo, with schoolgirls to rape—and then kill. (Associated Press/Frank Gunn)