A Criminal History of Mankind Read Free

up and has to learn to be a realist, to recognise that, on a world-scale, he is a nobody. Apparently he comes to terms with this recognition; but deep down inside, the feeling of uniqueness remains. Becker says that if everyone honestly admitted his desire to be a hero, and demanded some kind of satisfaction, it would shake society to its foundations. Only very simple primitive societies can give their members this sense of uniqueness, of being known to all. ‘The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism ...’.
    Becker’s words certainly bring a flash of insight into all kinds of phenomena, from industrial unrest to political terrorism. They are an expression of this half-buried need to be somebody, and of a revolt against a society that denies it. When Herbert Mills decided to commit a ‘perfect murder’, he was trying to provide himself with a reason for that sense of uniqueness. In an increasing number of criminal cases, we have to learn to see beyond the stated motivation -social injustice or whatever - to this primary need. There was a weird, surrealistic air about Charles Manson’s self-justifications in court; he seemed to be saying that he was not responsible for the death of eight people because society was guilty of far worse things than that. Closer examination of the evidence reveals that Manson felt that he had as much right to be famous as the Beatles or Bob Dylan (he had tried hard to interest record companies in tapes he had recorded); in planning Helter Skelter, the revolution that would transform American society, he was asserting his primacy, his uniqueness.
    I was struck by the difference between these typical crimes of the late sixties - Manson, the Moors murders, Frazier, Zodiac - and the typical crimes of ten or twenty years earlier - Haigh, Heath, Christie, Chessman, Glatman. John Christie killed girls for sexual purposes - he seems to have been impotent if the woman was conscious - and walled them up in a cupboard in his kitchen. The cupboard is somehow a symbol of this type of crime - the place where skeletons are hidden by people who are anxious to appear normal and respectable. Manson’s ‘family’ sat around the television, gloating over the news bulletin that announced the killings in Sharon Tate’s home. The last thing they wanted was for their crimes to be hidden.
    Clearly, there is some sort of pattern here. But what are the underlying laws that govern it? In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow sent me his book Motivation and Personality (1954), and it was in the fourth chapter, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, that I thought I saw the outline of some kind of general solution to the changing pattern. The chapter had originally been published in 1943 in the Psychological Review , and had achieved the status of a classic among professional psychologists; but for some reason it had never percolated through to the general public. What Maslow proposed in this paper was that human motivation can be described in terms of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ or values. These fall roughly into four categories: physiological needs (basically food), security needs (basically a roof over one’s head), belongingness and love needs (desire for roots, the need to be wanted), and esteem needs (to be liked and respected). And beyond these four levels, Maslow suggested the existence of a fifth category: self-actualisation: the need to know and understand, to create, to solve problems for the fun of it.
    When a man is permanently hungry, he can think of nothing else, and his idea of paradise is a place with plenty of food. In fact, if he solves the food problem, he becomes preoccupied with the question of security, a home, ‘territory’. (Every tramp dreams of retiring to a country cottage with roses round the door.) If he solves this problem, the sexual needs become urgent -