"Colin Wilson - The Criminal History of Mankind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

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racialist sociology to justify the crimes of his ‘family’. San Francisco’s ‘Zodiac’ killer wrote his letters in
cipher and signed them with signs of the zodiac. John Frazier, a drop-out who slaughtered the family of an
eye surgeon, Victor Ohta, left a letter signed with suits from the Tarot pack. In November 1966, Robert
Smith, an eighteen-year-old student, walked into a beauty parlour in Mesa, Arizona, made five women
and two children lie on the floor, and shot them all in the back of the head. Smith was in no way a
‘problem youngster’; his relations with his parents were good and he was described as an excellent
student. He told the police: ‘I wanted to get known, to get myself a name.’ A woman who walked into a
California hotel room and killed a baseball player who was asleep there - and who was totally unknown to
her - explained to the police: ‘He was famous, and I knew that killing him would make me famous too.’

It is phrases like this that seem to provide a clue. There is a basic desire in all human beings, even the
most modest, to ‘become known’. Montaigne tells us that he is an ordinary man, yet that he feels his
thoughts are worthy of attention; is there anyone who can claim not to recognise the feeling? In fact, is
there anyone in the world who does not secretly feel that he is worthy of a biography? In a book called
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker states that one of the most basic urges in man is the urge to heroism.
‘We are all,’ he says, ‘hopelessly absorbed with ourselves.’ In children, we can see the urge to self-esteem
in its least disguised form. The child shouts his needs at the top of his voice. He does not disguise his
feeling that he is the centre of the world. He strenuously objects if his brother gets a larger piece of cake.
‘He must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a
hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anyone else.’ So
he indulges endless daydreams of heroism.

Then he grows 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

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