Like any other rigidly structured organization with a restricted philosophy, clear-cut objectives, and its own alien, harsh environment, the U.S. armed forces have been shown to produce dramatic changes in personality. For World War II, every branch of the service turned out its breed of instant soldiers and officers. During those years, however, when the word "War!" commanded the utmost urgency and national support, American life moved at a slower, more deliberate pace. Most soldiers had numerous sources of help in confronting the emotional difficulties connected with mustering out when their tours of duty ended. Some branches of the service had specific programs and timetables for reintegrating their soldiers with society; the GI Bill offered generous benefits for continuing education and professional training; and a grateful public heaped on most returning soldiers the added rewards of a hero's welcome. Only recently, with the acceleration of American life and the wrenching controversy surrounding the Vietnam War, have American soldiers faced personal battles even greater than their military conflicts. And only since the sixties have large numbers of them discovered that making the transition back into civilian life can be a lonely, painful, and frighteningly difficult ordeal.
From our perspective, there is catastrophic potential in the conflict that has arisen between almost every young American's growing awareness and the rigorous training and intense experiences he may undergo in military service. David Berkowitz seems to have succumbed to this. Berkowitz's induction into the army marked the complete severenee of the individual from his past. During basic training, America's modern prototype of depersonalization, he performed admirably and he was shipped over to Korea, where, in a clerk-typist position with considerable responsibility, Berkowitz displayed fast thinking, a good appearance, and natural ability. Few Americans who haven't been there, however, can possibly appreciate the hidden emotional hazards of the peacetime limbo existence of American troops in Korea. In that environment lurked psychological dangers which in many ways exceeded those of combat itself. From stories we had heard about life in Korea, it was easy for us to understand how a "fat little Jewish boy" from the Bronx could find himself adrift and cut loose from reality.
This is apparently what happened to David Berkowitz in Korea. During his years there he was pummeled by a barrage of new ideas, experiences, and decisions, tossed back and forth in this sealed environment until the unique configuration of personal strengths, sensitivities, and vulnerabilities that made up his personality was literally shaken apart. In a series of handwritten letters to a former girlfriend from various army posts in Korea, Berkowitz described how easy it was to "get hooked" on the LSD and morphine that were readily available to American soldiers. In this foreign, free-floating army world, Berkowitz, until then a gentle young man and a vocal pacifist, was court-martialed because of a confrontation in a chow line with a superior officer who demanded to know why he wasn't wearing a gun.
"I said I didn't bring it to the field and I refuse to bring it to the field," Berkowitz wrote at the time. "Well all hell broke out after that. They just can't tell me when to carry a gun. I explained it to them but it didn't do much good. I also explained it to the chaplain. And guess what, he's with me all the way. He never carried a gun in his life."
From the concern he expressed frequently in his letters, it seemed clear to us that the gun incident set off a crisis of both conscience and consciousness in Berkowitz. After that, he became heavily involved in the rampant drug scene among American soldiers in Korea and got caught up in the peace, love, and rock music culture that was as popular among Korean military units at the time as it was among young Americans in the United States. Like Charles Manson, David Berkowitz had his rock interests and satanic influences, and it is likely that in a suggestible psychedelic state he read undue apocalyptic significance into the lyrics of a rock album by the popular group Black Sabbath.
His army buddies were the first to detect Berkowitz's transformation. "There seemed to be a personality change," another soldier who knew Berkowitz in Korea reported. "He tried talking to me about it. He used to say, 'If it makes you feel good, do what you want to do. Don't ask me to accept you. Do what makes you feel good.' " His letters changed, too. He began writing about changing colors, dark red and purple hues, and "things" coming at him from mists. In phrases familiar to us, he described the same feelings of detachment that characterized so many victims of snapping and information disease we had interviewed.
"When I look in the mirror all I see is one green soldier staring at me," he wrote his girl friend. "I feel like a robot being told when and where I can do things."
The sentiments expressed in Berkowitz's letters suggest that drug use was at most, as with Leslie Van Houten, only an indirect cause of his later violent acts, just one factor among many new experiences and emotional pressures that made him vulnerable to distorted ideals and delusions -- both paranoid and messianic. Yet it could be argued convincingly, as Berkowitz himself declared, that drugs provided him with a rare source of release from the countless tortures of military life in Korea. In that environment there is little doubt that drugs contributed to the free-for-all of reality and fantasy taking place in Berkowitz's mind. His letters of that time, rampant with misspellings and bad grammar, demonstrate the extent of his confusion.
I must truly admitt [sic] to myself that unless I don't manage somehow
to find a way to temporarily escape this lousy life, I will become
really insane. So it doesn't hurt to escape [on drugs] once and awhile
or often, to straighten out my distorted messed up mind. . . . 'Why
dope you ask.' Because it is to damn boring here. Where all a bunch
of humanold robots, so we feel.
After everything that transpired during almost two years in Korea, like so many victims of snapping, Berkowitz was fully aware that he had undergone a drastic change of personality. The change frightened him, as did the prospect of returning to his former life in the United States. He expressed those fears in another letter to his girl friend.
"I hope they let me go home in July. You know something, I'm really scared to go. I think the freedom will get to me. . . . Do you know something Iris. I have really changed. To much I think. I don't understand what its all about. . . . "
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In our view, David Berkowitz's letters from Korea provide a dramatic record of his protracted snapping experience. When he returned to the U.S. in early 1973, he was as unstable as a former prisoner of war and as desperate to find an identity as a person who has left a religious cult without being propedy deprogrammed. After Korea, however, Berkowitz was assigned to another clerical position with a military combat brigade stationed at Fort Knox, where he spent over a year trying to accustom himself both to his new personality and to a new and equally foreign domestic environment. There, like so many of his fellow soldiers who may have been no more sure of their identities than Berkowitz, he settled on a final, surprising, but not completely incomprehensible course of action: he converted to Evangelical Christianity.
"I just asked him to go to church with me one day," said Jim Almond, the fellow soldier who introduced Berkowitz to that old-time religion. "He said, 'I'm a Jew.' "Almond told a reporter, "And I told him I didn't care what he was, did he want to go to church?" Berkowitz accepted Christ on his first visit to the Beth Haven Baptist Church. "Well, we went and he really enjoyed it," said Almond. "He went forward at the invitation [to accept Christ as one's personal savior from sin]. And after the service, he came up to me grinning and laughing and saying, 'Man, I'm saved.' Then we came back that same day for the evening service and he went forward again at the invitation. He told me afterward that he just wanted to make sure it took."
For a while, at least, his renewal appeared to be successful. Berkowitz spent the year after his baptism fervently attending three church services a week and reading Bible stories to little children. Fellow church members described him as "a really fantastic guy with a great personality" and "a grea
t soul-winner" who brought a number of GIs from the base into the Evangelical fold. After over a year of Christian life however, Almond noted, Berkowitz began "backsliding" -- a term used frequently among Born Again Christians. According to Almond, Berkowitz's parents were greatly dismayed when they found out that he had become a Christian, and during this time we can imagine that Berkowitz, anticipating his discharge, began to seek a new anchor for his personality, one that would serve him when he returned to his former life in New York.
But he never found it. Although we can only speculate from the sparse information available, it is very likely that David Berkowitz returned to New York in 1974 in that peculiar twilight zone of floating, poised for the even greater personal catastrophe that lay ahead. Following his return, he drifted through a local community college and a series of uneventful jobs. With his family now relocated in Florida, his former girl friend married, and his old high school friendships long abandoned, he never seemed to find so much as a thread of connection with which to mend his sundered personality.
From all reports, Berkowitz remained detached, withdrawn, lonely, and suggestible, coasting through the everyday world atop a wave that threatened to break at any moment. In that condition, the trivial but penetrating sound of a barking dog was the tiny measure required to send him over the edge. It is our belief that Berkowitz, having depleted his entire reservoir of possible alternatives -- from drugs to Jesus -- had only one remaining source of experience, one pattern of information, to direct his course of action: guns. So, burned-out, drifting, and alone, he slipped all the way into the fantasy world with which his mind had long ago become acquainted. He began hearing voices, receiving messages from God and Satan, and following the commands of a black Labrador retriever who ordered him to launch a reign of tenor on New York as a warning to the world from the demons he perceived.
We believe it unlikely that David Berkowitz derived any satisfaction from the murders he allegedly committed. By that time, he was probably incapable of feeling anything at all, caught in the grips of his delusional frame of mind. Press reports suggest that Son of Sam committed his crimes coolly, carefully going about each adventure and, after some of them, demonstrating the ironic acuity of his twisted state by writing painstakingly neat letters to Jimmy Breslin and other New York journalists which displayed occasional glimpses of wry humor.
It is also a good bet that, if David Berkowitz were to reveal the specific experiences that so drastically altered his personality, his story would not seem all that exceptional. In America today, as Berkowitz himself has tried to explain, there may be countless "Sons of Sam" in the making, frustrated, confused, disconnected individuals who have searched in vain through fields of drugs, religion, and therapy, trying to find some meaning and direction for their lives, looking for themselves and some route to other people -- and discovering only the private horror of snapping.
It is not only impossible to understand the particular transformations of personality illustrated by Leslie Van Houten, Patty Hearst, and now David Berkowitz within the prevailing traditions of psychology, it is also futile to attempt to judge and rehabilitate such people in accordance with the codes of America's legal and penal systems. No social purpose is served by their drawn-out psychiatric and legal battles, and no greater or lesser human good is derived from simply imprisoning them or sentencing them to death.
In our view, Leslie Van Houten, Patty Hearst, and David Berkowitz are not "common criminals," nor can they be dismissed as "human monsters, human mutations." If anything, their tragedies underscore the urgency of acknowledging that snapping is something new and threatening to our society. In their extremes, these cases verify our contention that no one is immune to snapping. Until we in America take steps to find out what happened to Leslie Van Houten, Patty Hearst, and David Berkowitz, to help them and us "make sense out of it all," our society will remain vulnerable to the random blows of others with similar fates.
For these criminals are victims, too, victims of something that our society does not yet fully understand. And we have a lot to learn from them.
16 The Future of Personality
We have to touch people.
-- Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man
As we write this final chapter, a new book on the controversy surrounding the Unification Church echoes Moon's claim that all great religions go through "disruptive stages" in their early years.
The FBI recently conducted raids on Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles and Washington, charging that the cult had infiltrated both the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service and had stolen documents relating to government inquiries into the organization's operations. Scientology lawyers quickly took the case to court, claiming that the raid was conducted illegally, and won the return of the seized material, along with a gag order preventing the govemment from revealing what they had uncovered.
The once-tiny Children of God, which now claims that its 8,000 missionaries have made over two million conversions, has expanded its operations into Western Europe, the Canary Islands, and North Africa. Leaders of the cult are reportedly encouraging their more attractive women members to become "Happy Hookers for Jesus," not to raise more money for the wealthy group, the leaders swear, but solely to "show people God's love."
Werner Erhard has launched a new campaign to end world hunger in a nationwide lecture tour before audiences expected to number in the hundreds of thousands. Ticket price: $6.00.
The TM organization is now offering courses in levitation which supposedly enable advanced meditators to rise up in the air and, as many report, fly. According to one TM "executive governor," more than five thousand Americans have already learned the new TM "Sidhis" -- the word means 'perfection' -- technique, which is taught in a series of sixteen week-long courses that costs approximately $4,800 per person. These are only a few of many signs we have observed that the groups, movements, and cultural trends discussed in this book are not about to go away. On the contrary, they seem to be gaining in both reach and strength.
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Toward the end of our own travels, we were especially disturbed by our visit to a town in the Pacific Northwest. There we encountered the spread of a new mass therapy called Lifespring, that sounded to us like a high-priced replica of est and that was apparently being test-marketed on a broad local scale in this progressive medium-sized city.
Everywhere we went that week, in restaurants, barber shops, and private gatherings, we heard about and witnessed firsthand the striking effects of this powerful new mass-group technique which, according to several Lifespring veterans, a team of psychologists had refined from Werner Erhard's basic prototype. People we spoke to seemed to be in a state of perpetual ecstasy, filled with glowing praise for the Lifespring "experience," which, we were told, could run to $650 for a single weekend, depending on the potency of the particular package. "I've been high for a year and a half, and I haven't come down yet," we were told by a hairdresser in a local unisex barber shop, yet both he and the young man sitting in his chair, another happy Lifespring graduate, adamantly refused to tell us what went on in the training sessions. In a familiar refrain, the customer informed us that it was something we could only experience for ourselves. "How can you describe the taste of a strawberry," he said, "to someone who has never tasted one?" The barber at the adjacent chair concurred. Although he hadn't yet attended Lifespring, he had been on the waiting list for several months, he explained. To answer our questions, he offered us the same cryptic sales pitch he had been given by a number of Lifespring veterans, a phrase that we were to hear repeated time after time throughout that week by people who wished to assure us that Lifespring wasn't nearly as grueling an emotional experience as est was reported to be. "If est is Listerine," he said enigmatically, "then Lifespring is Lavoris."
Observing the people in this town after four years of research and exploration into the techniques and jargons used by many cults and mass therapies, we questioned whether they were just fe
eling good, high, or happy or whether they might have undergone artificially induced alterations of awareness that could lead to bizarre states of mind.
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Quite apart from Lifespring, however, in the many forms we have seen it take, snapping is so new in our society that many vital distinctions still need to be made on sensitive, delicate questions. The seductive promise of instant resolution for personal problems such as neurosis, despair, aimlessness, and boredom -- whether through cults or mass therapies -- continues to pose a threat to our society, but any attempt to curb these activities raises questions of constitutional rights and individual prerogatives. Many people continue to ask, "If it feels good, why not?" and, "What can possibly be wrong, if it makes me happy?" -- even if their pursuit of happiness may lead to potentially devastating states of disorientation, detachment, delusion, and withdrawal. Well aware of the controversial nature of this issue, we discussed these questions and others with lawyers and concerned citizens around the country, addressing ourselves not to the belief, psychology, social purpose, or even business practices of any particular cult or group, but solely to the methods by which human awareness may be manipulated.
How do we defend ourselves against a phenomenon as new and challenging as snapping? It is our belief that the best way to combat snapping, in cults, in groups, or in everyday life, is to understand it, to be apprised of the ways in which the mind may be subtly attacked and of the threats to each individual's awareness posed by new and intense experiences and by the extraordinary pressures of modern life. An individual who understands this will be more capable of recognizing possibly damaging patterns of experience and combinations of events and of consciously eliminating or minimizing their effects on him.
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