Hereditary diathesis is only the immediate cause of any aggressive disorder and it is important for the counsellor to remind the subject that a number of other factors, for example USS (Unemployment Stress Syndrome), ESS (Environmental Stress Syndrome), SEFSS (Socio-Economic and Familial Stress Syndrome), may be needed to trigger the pathological process in persons with the initial diathesis. These may be very remote and thus the VMN-negative subject may be perfectly able to function reasonably well in the ordinary world.
There should be, it is stressed, no imputation of mental illness. To this effect, subjects are usually reminded of the standard work on structural personality tests. These reveal that the Psychopathic Deviance (PD) scale of the old MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) shows that high PD scorers tend to be aggressive; but also that high PD scores are characteristic of professional actors and others who show a significantly above-average level of creativity.
Subjects who persist in regarding themselves as in any way mentally defective are encouraged to assess their condition from the perspective of R. D. Laing, i.e. as a voyage of self-discovery.
Elsewhere it may be considered that society itself may have reason to be glad of these men since one of them may yet turn out to be a Gauguin or a Beethoven. This is not to say that society endorses the acts of people which may have unlooked-for artistic by-products. But at the same time, moral values must be treated not as unquestionably supreme, but only as one value among others.
For Jake it did not make agreeable reading. It was full of phrases which seemed almost to indicate a certain sympathy for these men who had the potential to become violent killers. A sympathy which as a law-enforcement officer she found irritating, and which as a woman and potential victim of violent crime she found outrageous.
When she had finished with the information disk, Jake hauled it out of her PC and, finding that the bedside table, which looked as if it had been constructed from three of Harry Lauder’s walking sticks, was too small for anything other than the baton-shaped lamp resting on it, she threw them both onto the bed with a snort of contempt.
She sat down in front of the window.
So what, if someone decided to kill a few potential psychos? It would save her the time and trouble of catching them. Not to mention the lives of all the innocent women they might eventually kill. Women like Mary Woolnoth. Jake could just picture herself facing the mother of one such victim and saying that her daughter’s murderer was only assessing his condition from what the information disk had referred to as R. D. Laing’s perspective — as a ‘voyage of self-discovery’.
‘Well that’s all right then, Chief Inspector Jakowicz. For a moment there I was really worried that my girl was raped and murdered for no good reason.’
She laughed out loud. It made, she thought, quite a change for someone to concentrate on killing men. Jake was struck by the irony of what she, the expert on serial gynocide, was expected to do. Briefly she entertained herself with visions of the stupid scared bastards accompanying each other home at night. Perhaps she might even issue a warning for men to stay indoors after dark. That would certainly put a severe dent in the well-polished bodywork of the collective male ego. Despite the Minister’s implied threat to her, something told Jake that she might actually enjoy this case.
At first I was a little shocked.
I wandered out of the Brain Research Institute in Victoria Street, having swallowed the two Valium which the counsellor had given me, as well as having agreed to the course of oestrogen tablets and psychotherapy that he had recommended, and went into the Chestnut Tree Café across the road. There I numbly took stock of my new situation in the world.
I remember being so dazed at what had happened that I completely forgot to imagine myself carrying out any mindless acts of violence against the other people in the café. Instead I drank several cups of coffee, ate a plate of cholesterol-free bacon-sandwiches and toyed glumly with the novelty of my new Lombroso-given name.
Situations can be described but not given names. Names are like points; propositions like arrows — they have sense. Maybe we’ll come back to the name. Let’s deal with the situation first.
I left the café and telephoned my own analyst to make an appointment for the next day. When I was back in my flat in Docklands, I stood beside the window for a while, as I often do, and watched the progress of the Thames down Greenwich reach, past the Isle of Dogs. Reality often disappoints and, under the brown fog of a winter noon, the city seemed somehow much less real than of old. And had done so for some time now.
What on earth did people do before there was Reality Approximation? What was there for those who found no substitute for sense to seize and clutch and penetrate? It was only my RA exoskeleton that enabled me to enjoy a world of colour and sensation — a world that resembles the real world, and more. This is the normal way in which I relax after a hard day. It’s no more addictive or a waste of time than television. I can occupy myself with an approximately real experience, often of my own devising, for hours at a time. Usually, I am climbing into the RA equipment the minute I come through the door, but on this occasion I didn’t feel like it at all. It was as much as I could do not to go into the bathroom and slash my wrists.
Can you blame me? From good citizen to social pariah in the space of a single afternoon? I ought to have seen the funny side, I suppose: me, the right-winger, always banging on about law and order, forever raising my voice against the abolitionists who would punish a murderer with nothing worse than a couple of years in a nice warm prison. Me, suddenly catapulted onto the other side of the jurisprudential fence. What a supreme irony. The sheer injustice of it. After all, I voted for them specifically because of their law-enforcement programme. I thought that something like this Lombroso Program would be a good idea. And look what happens: I get given the mark of Cain; on a computer file anyway.
Until that moment I had never given much thought as to which of my personal details appeared on what computers. I dare say I was aware that my bank, my employer, my building societies, my doctor, my dentist, my analyst, and possibly even the police (there was that old parking-ticket) all had information about me. But it never seemed to matter very much. I certainly wasn’t one of those who bleated on about civil liberties and Big Brother when the EC made the carrying of ID cards compulsory. Not even when they added a bar-code containing things like your genetic fingerprint. I have never even read 1984. What’s the point? It’s long past its sell-by-date.
They were reprising an old television series called ‘The Prisoner’ the other night. Very popular with the more disaffected sections of society. ‘I’m not a number, I’m a free man,’ exclaims the granite-jawed hero. Well now I know what he was so upset about. Russell said that there were simple relations between different numbers of things (individuals). But between what numbers? And how is this supposed to be decided? By experience? There is no pre-eminent number. Not number six. And certainly not number one.
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to erase my name and number from those files. I was not persuaded by all the guarantees of confidentiality that had seemed so irrelevant before taking the test. I felt like someone who had been persuaded to give a half-litre of blood in the expectation that it would be used to save a life, only to discover that it was to be fed to a colony of vampire bats in a zoo. Bats, what is more, who might well come and attack me while I was asleep. Because there is no telling what can become of information these days. Any database can become the target of unauthorised entry. Electronic vandalism is rife.