Janus Read Free

indications that he is in the process of becoming one.

3

The first step towards a possible therapy is a correct diagnosis of
what went wrong with our species. There have been countless attempts at
such a diagnosis, invoking the Biblical Fall, or Freud's 'death wish',
or the 'territorial imperative' of contemporary ethologists. None of
these carried much conviction, because none of them started from the
hypothesis that homo sapiens may be an aberrant biological species,
an evolutionary misfit, afflicted by an endemic disorder which sets it
apart from all other animal species -- just as language, science and
art set it apart in a positive sense. Yet it is precisely this unpleasant
hypothesis which provides the starting point for the present book.

Evolution has made many mistakes; Julian Huxley compared it to a maze
with an enormous number of blind alleys leading to stagnation or extinction.
For every existing species hundreds have perished in the past; the fossil
record is a waste-basket of the Chief Designer's discarded models. The
evidence from man's past record and from contemporary brain-research both
strongly suggest that at some point during the last explosive stages of
the biological evolution of homo sapiens something went wrong; that there
is a flaw, some potentially fatal engineering error built into our native
equipment -- more specifically, into the circuits of our nervous system --
which would account for the streak of paranoia running through our history.
This is the hideous but plausible hypothesis which any serious inquiry
into man's condition has to face. The best intuitive diagnosticians --
the poets -- have kept telling us that man is mad and has always been so;
but anthropologists, psychiatrists, and students of evolution do not take
poets seriously and keep shutting their eyes to the evidence staring them
in the face. This unwillingness to face reality is of course in itself an
ominous symptom. It could be objected that a madman cannot be expected
to be aware of his own madness. The answer is that he can, because he
is not entirely mad the entire time. In their periods of remission,
schizophrenics have written astonishingly lucid reports of their illness.

I shall now venture to propose a summary list of some of the outstanding
pathological symptoms reflected in the disastrous history of our species,
and then proceed from the symptoms to a discussion of their possible
causes. I have confined the list of symptoms to four main headings.*
* This section is based on The Ghost in the Machine, Part Three,
     and its résumé in a paper read to the Fourteenth Nobel Symposium
     ('The Urge to Self-Destruction', reprinted in The Heel of Achilles).

1. In one of the early chapters of Genesis, there is an episode which
has inspired many great paintings. It is the scene where Abraham ties
his son to a pile of wood and prepares to cut his throat and burn him,
out of sheer love of God. From the beginnings of history we are faced with
a striking phenomenon to which anthropologists have paid far too little
attention: human sacrifice, the ritual killing of children, virgins,
kings and heroes to placate and flatter gods conceived in nightmare
dreams. It was a ubiquitous ritual, which persisted from the prehistoric
dawn to the peak of pre-Columbian civilizations, and in some parts of the
world to the beginning of our century. From South Sea islanders to the
Scandinavian bog people, from the Etruscans to the Aztecs, these practices
arose independently in the most varied cultures, as manifestations of
a delusionary streak in the human psyche to which the whole species was
and is apparently prone. To dismiss the subject as a sinister curiosity
of the past, as is usually done, means to ignore the universality of
the phenomenon, the clues that it provides to the paranoid element in
man's mental make-up and its relevance to his ultimate predicament.

2. Homo sapiens is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack