A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

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 minds , 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