The following is the
unedited version of an exposé originally featured in the 1996 edition of V.H.Ironside, The Willers of the Will - now out of print. What is of increasing
relevance to the arguments raised in this book is that Ratlike behaviour
blueprints are also applicable to human organizations, the stock market,
criminal patterns and the spread of ‘domestic’ violence.
“The broad effects which can be obtained by
punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the
sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames
man but does not make him ‘better’.” Nietzsche,
Genealogy of Morals
"I am in favour of war, hanging and Church Establishment!" Macaulay
The State, said Milton, can keep the peace
but it can never make men good or wise. Hence, perhaps the real lesson is that
a society which possesses cathedrals and episcopal palaces, parliaments and
constitutions, criminal and civil jurisdiction, courts and juries, equity and
benevolence, also sins and trespasses with greater sophistication, effort and
skill, adding nothing but fatuous moral criticism to the substance of the
jungle laws that have retained great vitality everywhere in the civilized
world.
What has indeed remained archaic about
it is that between constraining and being constrained it has caught men in the
grip of an invisible rage and entangled them in some decidedly psychotic
forces, unimpeded by any law. Forces which, like the grim ambivalence of lust
and cruelty, are themselves the peculiar increment of paradoxical
self-contradiction and which, almost like something alien, something not human,
makes men strive compulsively and determinedly towards paranoid and deadly
self-destruction. What is not really disputable, in support of the last,
scarcely exaggerated point is,
that if unacceptable demographic densities
are at the root of social tensions, almost certainly they are the sort of
tensions which are at the root of the peculiarly anti-social aggressiveness
which, in much the same way, has been found in laboratory experiments with different
species of animals. This point has been handled well by Desmond Morris, author
of The Naked Ape, who found that “aggressiveness can be increased by raising the density of a group of children. Under crowded
conditions the friendly social interactions between members of a group become
reduced, and the destructive and aggressive patterns show a marked rise in frequency
and intensity.” He also points out “this is significant when one remembers that
in other animals fighting is uses not only to sort out dominance disputes, but
also to increase the spacing-out of the members of the species.”[1]
Another clue, no less certain, is that
intense conflicts between group members is an inevitable social response among
communities of rats in confined circumstances of uncontrolled overbreeding. The
older ones destroy the younger, the stronger mutilate the weaker. Indeed, it passes
as a fact that rats will mutilate themselves. The motive behind this savagery
is no longer economic. Nor is the impulse predatory. The explanation seems to be
– and this may be taken as proof of our own abnormality – that they are no
longer capable of distinguishing between natural and unnatural instincts.
Interestingly, and no doubt quite consistently, if demographic imbalance helps
to account for the behavioural idiosyncrasies which, in this type of social
organization, are merely another example of absolute growth imposing drastic
measures of Malthusian redress, it is on this account by no means inappropriate
to the peculiar circumstances of some of our own overcrowded communities.
Perhaps the point can be confirmed
briefly by reference to a German kindergarden survey on rising levels of infant
aggressiveness. Violence amongst the youngest, it states, is directed not only
against others but increasingly also against themselves, i.e. ‘gegen den
eigenen Körper’.[2] Nor are
we perhaps sufficiently alert to the fact that the conventional sociology of
crime is unlikely to settle the ambiguities surrounding what has meanwhile developed
into the gravest forensic crisis the West has experience, combining as it does,
carnal with homicidal impulses and taking the whole subject out of the strictly
criminological frame of reference by placing it into a psychologically entirely
different category, making it ominous, alien and universal: a most unpropitious
preliminary for a homicidal process of Malthusian attrition. Which is exactly
what would be expected if highly unstable demographic conditions were at the
basis of social tensions. In saying this, of course, I am alluding to the mass psychotic acid-and-knife-crime epidemic currently gripping the London ghettos. But
whatever forensic arguments may be advanced for or against it, rather than
making improbable or ill-informed suggestions, as an analogy one can certainly
say that far more significant and conclusive – to lay down the law on a very
deadly subject – was the insane and senseless killing of a seven-year old girl
who died, stabbed seventy times, as if under the teeth of an enormous rat... 
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