You have the right to remain silent…
Isn’t it curious.. the first thing agents of law enforcement do upon your arrest is to remind you of the human tendency to blurt out a confession. It is as though, against all the combined forces of your better judgment, including the instinct for survival, you harbored a traitor hell bent on dobbing you in.
And you do…
Conscience.
Having your Miranda rights read to you stems from the case of one Ernesto Miranda who confessed to kidnapping and rape charges while in custody. His lawyers sought to overturn his conviction after they learned during a cross-examination that Miranda wasn’t told he had the right to be protected from self incrimination.
In fact the halls of jurisprudence are filled with examples of people being their own worst enemies. An episode of Judge Judy has the defendant angrily condemn himself while the plaintiff tallies the contents of her stolen purse.
‘Keys, ten dollars, a driver’s license..’
‘There was no driver’s license in the purse!’ he yells out. But… how could he know that unless he had taken the purse? The whole case lasts under a minute.
More serious is the example of Robert Durst, subject of the documentary, ‘The Jinx’, who pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and looked as though he might be headed for acquittal until he took a bathroom break and forgot his mike was still on,
‘There you are. You are caught. What the hell did I do? Why, killed them all of course.’
He tried to wriggle out of it.. if only he had not also kindly supplied the police with a sample of his handwriting at the scene of the crime he might have gotten clean away…
Throughout the debacle of the Russia Collusion you see one conspirator after another inadvertently putting his foot in it, all the way from Trump calmly admitting on live TV that he fired James Comey to obstruct his investigation, through Rudy Giuliani saying, ‘I never said there was no collusion., ‘ to Roger Stone giving the Nixon salute on the courthouse steps after his indictment, a gesture which means the opposite of the plea he had just submitted to the judge.
Literature has a number of famous examples, the best of which is Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘Tell Tale Heart’. A man commits a murder and has gotten away with it.. The police are walking away….
‘‘ Suddenly I could bear it no longer. I pointed at the boards and cried, “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him. But why does his heart not stop beating?! Why does it not stop!?”
In ancient times we have the story of King Midas who was cursed with ass’s ears. He tried to keep it a secret. Nobody knew but his barber who whispered the secret into the ground and buried it there, but reeds grew up and as the wind blew between them the secret was teased into the breeze…..
How does this happen? Shakespeare explains..
” An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d, burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage: So of concealed sorrow may be said; Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage: But when the heart’s attorney once is mute, the client breaks, as desperate in his suit.” Venus and Adonis.
Something in us defies our own best efforts to lead an easier life. In mythology this is embodied by the dreadful Furies, three dark goddesses in the service of Hades who met out justice and rectify any imbalance in it’s scales.
What this means is that Conscience is not a part of you. It is an autonomous complex with its own agenda. It cares not a hoot for conscious intention or self preservation. Given space and time they have their way and find some form of expression, perhaps in moments of crisis or moral jeopardy.
‘‘All men are liars, certainly. I just let them sit there and lie…. then they begin to tell the truth.” Jung (quoted by Elizabeth Sargeant)
A curious detail to do with the Furies is that the three goddesses have four collective names (Furies, Erinyes, Eumenides, Semnai). They are representatives of what the Alchemists call ‘the problem of three and four’. Three into four won’t go and so the problem of three and four is an expression of the difficulty of bringing the opposites of consciousness and the Unconscious together. They could equally have called it the problem of oil and water, how to find common ground or some kind of bridge between worlds.
Conscience is one such bridge because the Furies are messengers as well as dispensers of justice. They answer directly to Hades and so if they turn up on your doorstep it’s because Hades wants a word. Their retribution is also a form of communication.
Fortunately, the Furies also take orders from Persephone who has a tad more bedside manner and so their justice tends to be of the poetic variety, something you might learn from as well as being left to dangle.
Dying of a heart attack, James Washington of Tennessee told police that he had “to get something off my conscience”. He revealed that he had killed a woman 17 years earlier. The Furies arranged for his miraculous recovery to full health, just in time for his new 51-year jail sentence for murder.
In ancient Greece, Orestes was driven mad by the Furies for killing his mother Clytemnestra, something he was required to do by ancient law since she killed his father Agamemnon who then had to be avenged. Orestes appeals to Athena who eventually acquits him but she asks the Furies to stay on and be patrons of the city.
The goddess of Wisdom understands humanity needs its sense of guilt because it has within it the power to transform omnipotence into a sense of human proportion. Guilt is necessary for the integration of the personality. It makes us aware of limitation, of the possibility of being and doing wrong without which self awareness is impossible. In fact guilt can protect us from….
“a disturbing form of narcissistic personality where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized” H Rosenfeld.
As for Ernesto Miranda, though his case was set aside by the Supreme Court ruling, he was retried and sent to jail. After being released, he was fatally stabbed in a bar fight. His suspected killer was read his Miranda rights and didn’t answer questions from police. He was never convicted.