Island (20 page)

“It started,” said Dr. Robert, “nearly forty years ago, while I was studying in London. Started with prison visiting on weekends and reading history whenever I had a free evening. History and prisons,” he repeated. “I discovered that they were closely related. The record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind (that’s Gibbon, isn’t it?) and the place where unsuccessful crimes and follies are visited with a special kind of misfortune. Reading my books and talking to my jailbirds, I found myself asking questions. What kind of people became dangerous delinquents—the grand delinquents of the history books, the little ones of Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubbs? What kinds of people are moved by the lust for power, the passion to bully and domineer? And the ruthless ones, the men and women who know what they want and have no qualms about hurting and killing in order to get it, the monsters who hurt and kill, not for profit, but gratuitously, because hurting and killing are such fun—who
are
they? I used to discuss these questions with the experts—doctors, psychologists, social scientists, teachers. Mantegazza and Galton had gone out of fashion, and most of my experts assured me that the only valid answers to these questions were answers in terms of culture, economics, and the family. It was all a matter of mothers and toilet training, of early conditioning and traumatic environments. I was only half convinced. Mothers and toilet training and the circumambient nonsense—these were obviously important. But were they
all
-important? In the course of my prison visiting I’d begun to see evidence of some kind of a built-in pattern—or rather of two kinds of built-
in patterns; for dangerous delinquents and power-loving troublemakers don’t belong to a single species. Most of them, as I was beginning to realize even then, belong to one or other of two distinct and dissimilar species—the Muscle People and the Peter Pans. I’ve specialized in the treatment of Peter Pans.”

“The boys who never grow up?” Will queried.

“‘Never’ is the wrong word. In real life Peter Pan always ends by growing up. He merely grows up too late—grows up physiologically more slowly than he grows up in terms of birthdays.”

“What about girl Peter Pans?”

“They’re very rare. But the boys are as common as blackberries. You can expect one Peter Pan among every five or six male children. And among problem children, among the boys who can’t read, won’t learn, don’t get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency, seven out of ten turn out, if you take an X ray of the bones of the wrist, to be Peter Pans. The rest are mostly Muscle People of one sort or another.”

“I’m trying to think,” said Will, “of a good historical example of a delinquent Peter Pan.”

“You don’t have to go far afield. The most recent, as well as the best and biggest, was Adolf Hitler.”

“Hitler?” Murugan’s tone was one of shocked astonishment. Hitler was evidently one of his heroes.

“Read the Führer’s biography,” said Dr. Robert. “A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or co-operating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home only in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here,
unfortunately, he couldn’t draw. His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for nonstop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Panic paranoia. Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars—that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf’s retarded maturation. Fortunately most of the boys who grow up too slowly never get a chance of being more than minor delinquents. But even minor delinquents, if there are enough of them, can exact a pretty stiff price. That’s why we try to nip them in the bud—or rather, since we’re dealing with Peter Pans, that’s why we try to make their nipped buds open out and grow.”

“And do you succeed?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “It isn’t hard. Particularly if you start early enough. Between four and a half and five all our children get a thorough examination. Blood tests, psychological tests, somatotyping; then we X ray their wrists and give them an EEG. All the cute little Peter Pans are spotted without fail, and appropriate treatment is started immediately. Within a year practically all of them are perfectly normal. A crop of potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution’s sake, has been transformed into a crop of useful citizens who can be governed
adandena asatthena
—without punishment and without a sword. In your part of the world delinquency is still left to clergymen, social workers and the police. Nonstop sermons and supportive therapy; prison sentences galore. With what results? The delinquency rate goes steadily up and up. No wonder. Words about sibling rivalry and hell and the personality of Jesus are no substitutes for biochemistry. A year in jail won’t cure a Peter Pan of his endocrine disbalance or help the ex-Peter Pan to get rid of his psychological consequences. For Peter-Panic delinquency, what you need is early diagnosis and three pink capsules a day before meals. Given a tolerable environment, the result will be
sweet reasonableness and a modicum of the cardinal virtues within eighteen months. Not to mention a fair chance, where before there hadn’t been the faintest possibility, of eventual
prajnaparamita
and
karuna
, eventual wisdom and compassion. And now get Vijaya to tell you about the Muscle People. As you may perhaps have observed, he’s one of them.” Leaning forward, Dr. Robert thumped the giant’s broad back. “Solid beef!” And he added, “How lucky for us poor shrimps that the animal isn’t savage.”

Vijaya took one hand off the wheel, beat his chest and uttered a loud ferocious roar. “Don’t tease the gorilla,” he said, and laughed good-humoredly. Then, “Think of the other great dictator,” he said to Will, “think of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Hitler’s the supreme example of the delinquent Peter Pan. Stalin’s the supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man. Predestined, by his shape, to be an extravert. Not one of your soft, round, spill-the-beans extraverts who pine for indiscriminate togetherness. No—the trampling, driving extravert, the one who always feels impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility. In his will, Lenin advised his successors to get rid of Stalin: the man was too fond of power and too apt to abuse it. But the advice came too late. Stalin was already so firmly entrenched that he couldn’t be ousted. Ten years later his power was absolute. Trotsky had been scotched; all his old friends had been bumped off. Now, like God among the choiring angels, he was alone in a cozy little heaven peopled only by flatterers and yes-men. And all the time he was ruthlessly busy, liquidating kulaks, organizing collectives, building an armament industry, shifting reluctant millions from farm to factory. Working with a tenacity, a lucid efficiency of which the German Peter Pan, with his apocalyptic phantasies and his fluctuating moods, was utterly incapable. And in the last phase of the war, compare Stalin’s strategy with Hitler’s. Cool calculation pitted against compensatory daydreams, clear-eyed realism against
the rhetorical nonsense that Hitler had finally talked himself into believing. Two monsters, equal in delinquency, but profoundly dissimilar in temperament, in unconscious motivation, and finally in efficiency. Peter Pans are wonderfully good at starting wars and revolutions; but it takes Muscle Men to carry them through to a successful conclusion. Here’s the jungle,” Vijaya added in another tone, waving a hand in the direction of a great cliff of trees that seemed to block their further ascent.

A moment later they had left the glare of the open hillside and had plunged into a narrow tunnel of green twilight that zigzagged up between walls of tropical foliage. Creepers dangled from the overarching branches and between the trunks of huge trees grew ferns and dark-leaved rhododendrons with a dense profusion of shrubs and bushes that for Will, as he looked about him, were namelessly unfamiliar. The air was stiflingly damp and there was a hot, acrid smell of luxuriant green growth and of that other kind of life which is decay. Muffled by the thick foliage, Will heard the ringing of distant axes, the rhythmic screech of a saw. The road turned yet once more and suddenly the green darkness of the tunnel gave place to sunshine. They had entered a clearing in the forest. Tall and broad-shouldered, half a dozen almost naked woodcutters were engaged in lopping the branches from a newly felled tree. In the sunshine hundreds of blue and amethyst butterflies chased one another, fluttering and soaring in an endless random dance. Over a fire at the further side of the clearing an old man was slowly stirring the contents of an iron caldron. Nearby a small tame deer, fine-limbed and elegantly dappled, was quietly grazing.

“Old friends,” said Vijaya, and shouted something in Palanese. The woodcutters shouted back and waved their hands. Then the road swung sharply to the left and they were climbing again up the green tunnel between the trees.

“Talk of Muscle Men,” said Will as they left the clearing. “Those were really splendid specimens.”

“That kind of physique,” said Vijaya, “is a standing temptation. And yet among all these men—and I’ve worked with scores of them—I’ve never met a single bully, a single potentially dangerous power lover.”

“Which is just another way,” Murugan broke in contemptuously, “of saying that nobody here has any ambition.”

“What’s the explanation?” Will asked.

“Very simple, so far as the Peter Pans are concerned. They’re never given a chance to work up an appetite for power. We cure them of their delinquency before it’s had time to develop. But the Muscle Men are different. They’re just as muscular here, just as tramplingly extraverted, as they are with you. So why don’t they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at the least into domestic tyrants? First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any larger scale. Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence. This means that they always have an alternative—innumerable alternatives—to the pleasure of being the boss. And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations. We canalize this love of power and we deflect it—turn it away from people and on to things. We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform—strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination—but satisfy it at nobody’s expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful.”

“So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people—is that it?”

“Precisely. And when they’ve had enough of the woods, they can go to sea, or try their hands at mining, or take it easy, relatively speaking, on the rice paddies.”

Will Farnaby suddenly laughed.

“What’s the joke?”

“I was thinking of my father. A little woodchopping might have been the making of him—not to mention the salvation of his wretched family. Unfortunately he was an English gentleman. Woodchopping was out of the question.”

“Didn’t he have
any
physical outlet for his energies?”

Will shook his head. “Besides being a gentleman,” he explained, “my father thought he was an intellectual. But an intellectual doesn’t hunt or shoot or play golf; he just thinks and drinks. Apart from brandy, my father’s only amusements were bullying, auction bridge, and the theory of politics. He fancied himself as a twentieth-century version of Lord Acton—the last, lonely philosopher of Liberalism. You should have heard him on the iniquities of the modern omnipotent state! ‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Absolutely
.’ After which he’d down another brandy and go back with renewed gusto to his favorite pastime—trampling on his wife and children.”

“And if Acton himself didn’t behave in that way,” said Dr. Robert, “it was merely because he happened to be virtuous and intelligent. There was nothing in his theories to restrain a delinquent Muscle Man or an untreated Peter Pan from trampling on anyone he could get his feet on. That was Acton’s fatal weakness. As a political theorist he was altogether admirable. As a practical psychologist he was almost nonexistent. He seems to have thought that the power problem could be solved by good social arrangements, supplemented, of course, by sound morality and a spot of revealed religion. But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament. Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that’s obvious. But it’s also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level. On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood. If I can ever find the time, I’d like to write a lit
tle book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics and law.”

“Law,” Will echoed. “I was just going to ask you about law. Are you absolutely swordless and punishmentless? Or do you still need judges and policemen?”

“We still need them,” said Dr. Robert. “But we don’t need nearly so many of them as you do. In the first place, thanks to preventive medicine and preventive education, we don’t commit many crimes. And in the second place, most of the few crimes that are committed are dealt with by the criminal’s MAC. Group therapy within a community that has assumed group responsibility for the delinquent. And in difficult cases the group therapy is supplemented by medical treatment and a course of
moksha
-medicine experiences, directed by somebody with an exceptional degree of insight.”