The Essential Colin Wilson

by Colin Wilson

  I had a recent opportunity to observe the mechanism at an amusement park, where a small cinema shows films designed to induce vertigo. The audience has to stand, and the screen is enormous and curved. Carriages surge down switchbacks; toboggans hurtle across the ice and down ski-slopes; the watchers soon begin to feel that the floor is moving underneath their feet. After twenty minutes or so I began to feel that I’d got the hang of it, and could resist the impulse to sway. Even so, the end of the film took me unaware; a car hurtles off a motorway at a tremendous speed and down the exit lane, ramming into a vehicle waiting to pull out into the traffic. My foot went automatically on the brake, and I staggered and fell into the arms of the unfortunate lady standing behind me.

  What had happened is that the suddenness of the final crash pushed me beyond the point at which I had established control. Yet for the previous twenty minutes I had been establishing a higher-than-usual degree of control. Under circumstances like this—and something similar happens to city dwellers every day—we are inclined to feel that all control is ‘relative’ and perhaps therefore futile. And this mistake—which is so easy to make—is the essence of the criminal mentality. The criminal makes the decision to abandon control. He can see no sound reason why he should waste his time establishing a higher level of self-control. Let other people worry about that. The result is bad for society, but far more disastrous for himself. After all, society can absorb a little violence, but for the destabilised individual it means ultimate self-destruction.

  When we observe this continual balancing operation between Force T and Force C, we can grasp its place in the evolution of our species. When deer and lemmings are overcrowded, the result is a rise in the destabilising force which causes the adrenal glands to overwork; beyond a certain point of tension, this results in death. There is no alternative—no possibility of developing the stabilising force. They lack the motivation. When men came together to live in cities, their motive was mutual protection. One result was the development of the abnormalities listed by Desmond Morris and the creation of the ‘criminal type’. But it also led to an increase in the stabilising force, and to a level of self-control beyond that of any other animal.

  It was through this development that man made his most important discovery; that control is not simply a negative virtue. Anyone who has been forced to master some difficult technique—such as playing a musical instrument—knows that learning begins with irritation and frustration; the task seems to be as thankless as breaking in a wild horse. Then, by some unconscious process, control begins to develop. There is a cautious glow of satisfaction as we begin to scent success. Then, quite suddenly, the frustration is transformed into a feeling of power and control. It dawns upon us that when a wild horse ceases to be wild, it becomes an invaluable servant. The stabilising force is not merely a defence system, a means of ‘hanging on’ over bumpy obstacles. It is a power for conquest, for changing our lives.

  Once man has made this discovery, he looks around for new fields to conquer. This explains why we are the only creatures who seek out hardship for the fun of it: who climb mountains ‘because they are there’ and try to establish records for sailing around the world single-handed. We have discovered that an increase in Force C is a pleasure in itself. The late Ludwig Wittgenstein based his later philosophy upon a comparison of games and language and upon the assertion that there is no element that is common to all games—say, to patience, and football, and sailing around the world single-handed. We can see that this is untrue. All games have a common purpose: to increase the stabilising force at the expense of the destabilising force. All games are designed to create stress, and then to give us the pleasure of controlling it. (Hence the saying that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.) Man’s chief evolutionary distinction is that he is the only creature who has learned to thrive on stress. He converts it into creativity, into productive satisfaction. The interesting result is that many people who are subject to a high level of stress are unusually healthy. A medical study at the Bell Telephone Company showed that three times as many ordinary workmen suffered from coronaries as men in higher executive positions. The reason, it was decided, is that higher executives have more ‘status’ than ordinary workmen, and this enables them to bear stress. An equally obvious explanation is that the executive has achieved his position by developing the ability to cope with problems and bear stress. A British study of people whose names are listed in Who’s Who showed a similar result: the more distinguished the person, the greater seemed to be his life expectancy and the better his general level of health. And here we can see that it is not simply a negative matter of learning to ‘bear stress’. The Nobel Prize winners and members of the Order of Merit had reasons for overcoming stress, a sense of purpose. The point is reinforced by a comment made by Dr Jeffrey Gray at a conference of the British Psychological Society in December 1981: that there is too much emphasis nowadays on lowering stress with the aid of pills. People should learn to soak up the worries of the job and build up their tolerance to pressure. Rats who were placed in stress situations and given Librium and Valium reacted less well than rats who were given no drugs. The latter were ‘toughened up’ and built up an immunity to stress. The lesson seems to be that all animals can develop resistance to stress; man is the only animal who has learned to use stress for his own satisfaction.

  All this enables us to understand what it is that distinguishes the criminal from the rest of us. Like the rats fed on Valium, the criminal fails to develop ‘stress resistance’ because he habitually releases his tensions instead of learning to control them. Criminality is a short-cut, and this applies to non-violent criminals as much as to violent ones. Crime is essentially the search for ‘the easy way’.

  Considering our natural lack of fellow feeling, it is surprising that cities are not far more violent. This is because, strangely enough, man is not innately cruel. He is innately social; he responds to the social advances of other people with sympathy and understanding. Any two people sitting side by side on a bus can establish a bond of sympathy by merely looking in each other’s eyes. It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person—because as soon as we look in one another’s faces we can see the other point of view. The real paradox is that the Germans who tossed children back into the flames at Oradour were probably good husbands and affectionate fathers. The Japanese who used schoolboys for bayonet practice and disembowelled a schoolgirl after raping her probably carried pictures of their own children in their knapsacks.

  How is this possible? Are human beings really so much more wicked than tigers and scorpions? The answer was provided by a series of experiments at Harvard conducted by Professor Stanley Milgram. His aim was to see whether ‘ordinary people’ could be persuaded to inflict torture. They were told that the experiment was to find out whether punishment could increase someone’s learning capacity. The method was to connect the victim to an electric shock machine, then ask the subject to administer shocks of increasing strength. The ‘victim’ was actually an actor who could scream convincingly. The subject was told that the shock would cause no permanent damage but was then give a ‘sample’ shock of 45 volts to prove that the whole thing was genuine. And the majority of these ‘ordinary people’ allowed themselves to be persuaded to keep on increasing the shocks up to 500 volts, in spite of horrifying screams, convulsions and pleas for mercy. Only a few refused to go on. In writing up his results in a book called Obedience to Authority, Milgram points the moral by quoting an American soldier who took part in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and who described how, when ordered by Lieutenant Galley, he turned his sub-machine gun on men, women and children including babies. The news interviewer asked: ‘How do you, a father, shoot babies?’ and received the reply: ‘I don’t know—it’s just one of those things.’

  And these words suddenly enable us to see precisely why human beings are capable of this kind of behaviour. It is because we have m
inds, and these minds can overrule our instincts. An animal cannot disobey its instinct; human beings disobey theirs a hundred times a day. Living in a modern city, with its impersonality and overcrowding, is already a basic violation of natural instinct. So when Lieutenant Galley told the man to shoot women and children, he did what civilisation had taught him to do since childhood—allowed his mind to overrule his instinct.

  The rape of Nanking illustrates the same point. Rhodes Farmer wrote in Shanghai Harvest, A Diary of Three Years in the China War (published in 1945): ‘To the Japanese soldiers at the end of four months of hard fighting, Nanking promised a last fling of debauchery before they returned to their highly disciplined lives back home in Japan.’ But this shows a failure to understand the Japanese character. The Japanese Yearbook for 1946 comes closer when it says: ‘By 7 December, the outer defences of Nanking were under attack, and a week later, Japanese anger at the stubborn Chinese defence of Shanghai burst upon Nanking in an appalling reign of terror.’ In fact, the Chinese resistance—ever since their unexpected stand at Lukouchiao in July 1937—had caused the Japanese to ‘lose face’, and they were in a hard and unforgiving mood when they entered Nanking. But then, we also need to understand why this loss of face mattered so much, and this involves understanding the deep religious traditionalism of the Japanese character. The historian Arnold Toynbee has pointed out, in East to West (pp. 69-71) that if the town of Bromsgrove had happened to be in Japan, the Japanese would know exactly why it was so named, because they would have maintained a sacred grove to the memory of the war-god Brom. And there would probably be a Buddhist temple next door to the pagan shrine, and the priest and the parson of the temple would be on excellent terms. When, in the nineteenth century, the Japanese decided to ‘Westernize’, they poured all this religious emotion into the cult of the Emperor, who was worshipped as a god. The war that began in 1937, and ended in 1945 with the dropping of two atom bombs, was an upsurge of intense patriotic feeling similar to the Nazi upsurge in Germany. The outnumbered Japanese troops felt they were fighting for their Emperor-God, and that their cause was just. This is why the stubborn Chinese resistance placed them in such an unforgiving frame of mind. Like Milgram’s subjects, they felt they were administering a salutary shock-treatment; but in this case, anger turned insensitivity into cruelty.

  Wells, oddly enough, failed to grasp this curiously impersonal element in human cruelty. Having seized upon the notion that slum conditions produce frustration, he continues with a lengthy analysis of human cruelty and sadism, citing as typical the case of Marshal Gilles de Rais, who killed over two hundred children in sexual orgies in the fifteenth century. In fact, de Rais’s perversions throw very little light on the nature of ordinary human beings, whose sexual tastes are more straightforward. The Japanese who burnt Nanking, the Germans who destroyed Oradour, were not sexual perverts; they had probably never done anything of the sort before, and would never do anything of the sort again. They were simply releasing their aggression in obedience to authority.

  Fromm is inclined to make the same mistake. He recognises ‘conformist aggression’—aggression under orders—but feels that human destructiveness is better explained by what he calls ‘malignant aggression’—that is, by sadism. Sadism he defines as the desire to have absolute power over a living being, to have a god-like control. He cites both Himmler and Stalin as examples of sadism, pointing out that both could, at times, show great kindness and consideration. They became ruthless only when their absolute authority was questioned. But this hardly explains the human tendency to destroy their fellows in war. So Fromm is forced to postulate another kind of ‘malignant aggression’, which he calls ‘necrophilia’. By this, he meant roughly what Freud meant by ‘thanatos’ or the death-urge—the human urge to self-destruction. Freud had invented the ‘death wish’ at the time of the First World War in an attempt to explain the slaughter. It was not one of his most convincing ideas, and many of his disciples received it with reservations—after all, anyone can see that most suicides are committed in a state of muddle and confusion, in which a person feels that life is not worth living; so the underlying instinct is for more life, not less. Even a romantic like Keats, who feels he is ‘half in love with easeful death’, is in truth confusing the idea of extinction with that of sleep and rest. If human beings really have an urge to self-destruction, they manage to conceal it very well.

  Fromm nevertheless adopts the Freudian death-wish. He cites a Spanish Civil War general, one of whose favourite slogans was ‘Long live death!’ The same man once shouted at a liberal intellectual: ‘Down with intelligence!’ From this, Fromm argues that militarism has an anti-life element that might be termed necrophilia. But he demolishes his own case by citing two genuine examples of necrophilia from a medical textbook on sexual perversion: both morgue attendants who enjoyed violating female corpses. One of them described how, from the time of adolescence, he masturbated while caressing the bodies of attractive females, then graduated to having intercourse with them. Which raises the question: is this genuinely a case of necrophilia, which means sexual desire directed towards death? Many highly-sexed teenage boys might do the same, given the opportunity. It is not an interest in death as such, but in sex. A genuine necrophile would be one who preferred corpses because they were dead. One of the best known cases of necrophilia, Sergeant Bertrand (whom I discussed in Chapter 6 of my Origins of the Sexual Impulse) was not, in this sense, a true necrophile; for although he dug up and violated newly buried corpses, he also had mistresses who testified to his sexual potency. He is simply an example of a virile man who needed more sex than he could get.

  So Fromm’s whole argument about ‘necrophilia’, and his lengthy demonstration that Hitler was a necrophiliac, collapses under closer analysis. The Spanish general was certainly not a necrophile by any common definition: he was using death in a rather special sense, meaning idealistic self-sacrifice for the good of one’s country. He certainly has nothing whatever in common with a morgue attendant violating female corpses. Hitler was undoubtedly destructive, but there is no evidence that he was self-destructive or had a secret death wish. On the contrary, he was a romantic dreamer who believed that his thousand-year Reich was an expression of health, vitality and sanity. Fromm’s ‘necrophilia’, like Wells’s notion of cruelty, fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of human cruelty; it is not universal enough.

  The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. Another characteristic of both men was a conviction that they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.

  Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A. E. Van Vogt, a writer of science fiction who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length, and in this connection I am indebted to Van Vogt for providing me with a series of five talks broadcast on KPFK radio in 1965. Like his earlier pamphlet A Report on the Violent Male, these have never been printed in book form.

  In 1954, Van Vogt began work on a war novel called The Violent Man, which was set in a Chinese prison camp. The commandant of the camp is one of those savagely authoritarian figures who would instantly, and without hesitation, order the execution of anyone who challenges his authority. Van Vogt was creating the type from observation of men like Hitler and Stalin. And, as he thought about the murderous behaviour of the commandant, he found himself wondering: ‘What could motivate a man like that?’ Why is it that some men believe that anyone who contradicts them is either dishonest or downright wicked? Do they really believe, in the
ir heart of hearts, that they are gods who are incapable of being fallible? If so, are they in some sense insane, like a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar?

  Looking around for examples, it struck Van Vogt that male authoritarian behaviour is far too commonplace to be regarded as insanity. Newspaper headlines tell their own story:

  HUSBAND INVADES CHRISTMAS PARTY AND SHOOTS WIFE

  Grief stricken when she refuses to return to him, he claims.

  ENTERTAINER STABS WIFE TO DEATH—UNFAITHFUL HE SAYS

  Amazed friends say he was unfaithful, not she.

  WIFE RUN OVER IN STREET

  Accident says divorced husband held on suspicion of murder.

  WIFE BADLY BEATEN BY FORMER HUSBAND

  ‘Unfit mother,’ he accuses. Neighbours refute charge, call him a troublemaker.

  HUSBAND FOILED IN ATTEMPT TO PUSH WIFE OVER CLIFF

  Wife reconciles, convinced husband loves her.

  Marriage seems to bring out the ‘authoritarian’ personality in many males, according to Van Vogt’s observation. He brought up the question with a psychologist friend and asked him whether he could offer any examples. The psychologist told him of an interesting case of a husband who had brought his wife along for psychotherapy. He had set her up in a suburban house, and supported her on condition that she had no male friends. Her role, as he saw it, was simply to be a good mother to their son.