Amerika

From a book by a public prosecutor who handled some of the worst like Rodeny Alcala and Andrew Urdiales:

The “psychopath” in virtually every academic definition, from the SDM-5, to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, to just about every article ever published on the topic, is characterized as having (among other traits) “a lack of empathy.” It seems strange that we would try to define something that almost all of these offenders actually have (a nameless, violent, perverted drive to prey upon others) through the lack of something else (empathy). It seems that the lack of a thing would just take them to neutral. Some psychologists, especially when testifying as defense witnesses, even go so far as to say that the psychopath is incapable of perceiving the fears or feelings of others.

In my humble opinion, based on an admittedly anecdotal sampling of a mere half dozen or so of these individuals, this truly misses the mark. In my experience, these guys are not only perfectly capable of perceiving the emotions of other people, they are highly attuned to them. They lustfully enjoy the imposition of fear, pain, and cruelty on innocent others. Not only do they perceive this suffering, they derive immense sexual gratification by inflicting it.

This driving desire is not the absence of a thing, but a thing in itself. It is a burning, lustful, joyous desire to prey upon, dominate, and then inflict as much fear and pain as possible. We don’t see to have a word for it. Cruelty partially fits, sadism comes close, the German word schadenfreude (taking delight in the suffering of others) is in the balolpark, but there isn’t a term I am aware of that accurately describes what compels these people to do what they do. I believe in science, but the farther back you go in the historical record, the more you encounter a simple word, religious in origin, that may most accurately summarize the mindset of true serial killers. It seems to fit better than anything else: evil. (The Book of Evil: A prosecutor’s Journey Through Love and Death, by Matt Murphy, p. 151)

Perhaps we might look at The Human Problem in this context: human groups avoid fears and embrace symbolism in order to make individuals in that group feel good, therefore are organized by individualism or the prioritization of individual mental state above all else.

Taking this to an extreme, an individualist becomes a full-blown narcissist, bowing to the inherent solipsism of large thinking brains, since these get stronger signals from their own emotions, judgments, feelings, and reactions than they do from external events and objects, which per Plato require cause-effect analysis instead of categorical analysis to understand.

Criminals could be seen to exist on a continuum of narcissism or selfishness which values three things:

• Knowledge: they want you to know that they did the crime. They in fact want to rub it in your face, lord it over you, and traumatize you with that knowledge.
• Impunity: to a degree, they want you to be unable to prove what they did. At some point, they will get caught, but then they want to conceal other crimes and lord those over you.
• Subsidy: like any parasite, they want you to be forced to pay for their existence while they continue to do bad things, whether in or out of prison.

This behavior exists on a spectrum from everyday passive-aggressive bullies through sexual sadists. The bully wants to abuse you, have society punish you if you fight back, and take enough from you that he feels he is living on your dime. The sociopath, psychopath, and sexual sadist exhibit more extreme forms of this behavior.

What Murphy calls “evil” above is not a thing, but the absence of a thing: lack of purpose. That causes people to become parasitic, and because their parasitism is unstable, they need to harm others in order to feel a mental state of being “in control.”

As known psychological wizard William S Burroughs informs us, control is unstable and must be demonstrated in order to feel stable; it is, in the end, a weak form of power.

Control needs time in which to exercise control. Because control also needs opposition or acquiescence; otherwise, it ceases to be control. I control a hypnotized subject (at least partially); I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder – you use it. Consider the distinction, and the impasse implicit here. All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely there would be nothing left to control.

In other words, control needs resistance because control is the pursuit of power for the sake of power itself — a means-over-ends ideology, since power is a means and therefore not logically an end; there can be a goal of having power, but power in itself is methodology alone — and therefore is unstable. It is purposeless like all parasitic notions.

The ancient Greeks understood this as hubris or acting above the natural position into which one fits in the order of nature. Someone seeking power without a goal is a peasant pretending to be a king, end of story.

We each have a role in nature defined by our purpose, normally expressed in the dyad of duty and privilege. When we have a duty, we need some degree of power to achieve it, so we exercise that power. Without a duty, there is no legitimate privilege and no need for power other than power over oneself.

In The Odyssey, after Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, he taunts the giant, telling him who had done this to him. While the blinding is legitimate self-defense of his crew, the taunt insults the order of the world in which the descendants of gods have higher status than mere humans.

The rest of the book consists of Odysseus getting over his fascination with his own cleverness and rediscovering his purpose, which is not (solely) to go to war, but to have a family and to hold his role as a local lord in his province. People depend on him and the order of society depends on him.

He goes home to his house after many adventures showing him the excesses of sensation and ideal, and then clears out the suitors wanting to take his wife and the freeloaders parasitizing his larders. Carnage ensues and asserts the order of things that rejects clever parasites and values humble creators and leaders.

Human cleverness is our eternal downfall. Instead of doing what is logical, we do what makes us feel more important than life itself. We reject reality and the sacred. We become parasites, seeking power and wealth without purpose. This parallels the downfall of civilizations as Plato chronicled:

When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient order of things.

Eventually the gold and silver succumb not to greed but to an inability to agree on purpose, and they begin using wealth as a means of control. Thus the virus passes into another civilization and The Human Problem begins its destruction of the good and replacing anything valuable with another impoverished, insane, corrupt, and dysfunctional society.

Tags: bullies, cleverness, gold and silver races, hubris, matt murphy, odysseus, psychopaths, sexual sadists, sociopaths