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Sympathy for the Devil?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:42 / 13.07.02

Okay, I'll admit it right out. I have an unhealthy fascination with reading about serial killers. Not the details of what they di, but the state of their head while they did it. Partly for sources for writing purposes, but mostly because I'm fascinated by the question "what separates me/us from these people?"

The two books I'm actually thinking of here are both by Brian Masters- "Killing For Company" (about Dennis Nielsen) and "The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer". (Guess you can figure out who that one's about without me drawing a picture).

Both of which made me feel very, very sorry for their subjects. I mean, don't get me wrong, I feel more sorry for their victims and theior families. Masters seems to have a very good way of making you realise that these people were ill.

So question one is- if someone's mentally ill (and kills a whole bunch of people) does that count as evil?

I also recently read Gordon Burns' "Happy Like Murderers", about Rose and Fred West. They seemed horribly unsympathetic people. I came away with the impression that they were evil, rather than ill. (I have yet to read Masters' "She Must Have Known", about Rose West, which may give a more sympathetic, though- I stress this point- never excusatory, if indeed there is such a word- account.)

I'm currently reading "A Father's Story" by Lionel Dahmer, in which he lists many occasions when, as an outsider, you'd say "look, Lionel, your son's a nutter", but, being his dad, he doesn't jump to the same conclusions. He loved his son, for fucksakes.

Hence question two- to what degree should our pity be aimed at the perpetrators as well as the victims? Dahmer and Nielsen, as far as I can tell, wanted to stop. They wanted to be caught. (Nielsen, on one occasion, when he came to his senses and his dog had licked a- previously thought dead- victim back to life- got the guy a cab home.) They didn't want this shit. They didn't wake up one morning and say "Hey, I know what I'll do with my life. I'll kill a bunch of people." Both Nielsen and Dahmer were, as far as I can tell, very lonely people. They just lacked the normal human responses to that situation.

Question three being the biggy... where IS evil? Does it hide within menatl illness? Was Hitler evil, or mad, or both? Does one excuse the other?

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

15:51 / 13.07.02

you should also read the 2 books written by---damn it--the 1st profiler guy for the fbi. A lot of stuff about the mental states, and his ideas about evil.

07:39 / 14.07.02

CM> Brian Masters has a reputation in the UK for being something of a serial killer groupie (and possibly overidentifies with his subjects).

Q1. Well, it all depends what you mean by evil. And that isn't avoiding the question. Clarification is required. I don't think evil is a particularly useful category to look at the world thru. And I'll say why below.

Q2. "to what degree should our pity be aimed at the perpetrators as well as the victims?"

Very little. To say "they didn't want this shit" ignores that both men carried on killing victims over the course of many years and at no point sort serious help for their actions or turned themselves in. Any post-arrest claims to the contrary on their part strikes as exactly the type of self-justification that violent criminals give themselves and others to water down their crimes.

Q3. "what separates me/us from these people?"

Well, put simply, we don't walk around murdering large numbers of people. I am suspicious of the suggestion that by studying grossly abnormal people like Nielsen and Dahmer we learn anything especially profound about general human nature. What is interesting are the ways in which we externalise their crimes thru terms such as 'evil'. They are posited as absolutely other and alien - beyond the pale. And I think that occasionally causes problems in identifying such vicious (but statistically rare) individuals.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:26 / 14.07.02

"What is interesting are the ways in which we externalise their crimes thru terms such as 'evil'. They are posited as absolutely other and alien"- that's kind of what I was getting at, only put somewhat better than I did.

Is it easier to put fuckups like that somewhere OUTSIDE our experience of humanity? Or is it horribly unwise and an evasion of collective responsibility (if there is such a thing)?

10:35 / 14.07.02

I'd seriously question whether Nielson and Dahmer were 'ill'. Despite the occasional claims of their legal teams, neither one displayed a recognisable mental disorder and they would both, without question, have been considered legally 'sane and fit to plead', sane enough to be held accountable for their actions.

The whole concept of 'illness' implies a previous state of comparitive 'health' from which one has shifted (usually relatively suddenly) and to which one might - after a period of time - conceivably return. Having read the same accounts as you, Moomin, I can find little to suggest that this is the case with any of your examples.

I'd say their situations - and I include that of Fred and Rose West - are illustrative of that dark, dark hinterland where extremely disordered personality overlaps with extremely disordered upbringing and circumstances (such as mutually-'egging on' relationship) provide opportunity to act out the resultant fantasies.

In this tiny minority of extreme human behaviour, I think the terms 'illness' and 'evil' are equally poor terms of description as far as extrapolating their mental states is concerned. As I say, I tend to think of it more as a set of circumstances resulting in frighteningly extreme - but still human - atrocity. But then, I'm not sure I believe in 'evil'...

15:53 / 14.07.02

i'd be more inclined to use the word 'damaged' rather than 'ill' regarding people like nielsen. i've read brian masters' book on him, and it is a terribly sad story, but yeah, he was killing people for four years and didn't seek to stop it until it was pretty certain he was going to be arrested anyway.

what of the victims? they had a life, they had people who loved them. they have a story, too, which is nearly always overlooked. norman mailer's book on gary gilmore (the executioner's song) was interesting as it protrayed at least something about one of the men he killed - quite unusual. but also, with the to-ing and fro-ing about whether or not to execute gilmore (who caused outrage and confusion by not appealing against his sentence) i remember a bit in the book where one man, a tv man i think, sobbing to gilmore about 'how no one has suffered as much as you'. no thought, then, to the families of the murdered, whose lives had been ripped apart.

i used to think we could find clues as to why people did stuff like nielsen did. some things they do have in common, like often horrific abuse in childhood, and what is referred to as 'faulty wiring'. but much as a perp may have had bad experiences, i can't have much in the way of sympathy with what they do - which is basically dumping their shit on other people in the worst possible way. i do think that parents, though, should be more aware that everything they do and say to their offspring can have a huge effect. i've seen parents be incredibly nasty to or humiliate their children and they act as if it doesn't matter.

i do have more understanding of someone like michael ryan, who shot up hungerford, berkshire, in the mid or late 1980s, before shooting himself at his old school. apparently he'd been badly bullied at school - how many of the 'innocent victims' were those who had made his life hell? this is a different kind of crime, and i certainly don't condone it, either, because there are more constructive ways of getting back at these kinds of people.

gentleman loser

21:44 / 14.07.02

shortfatdyke

I do have more understanding of someone like michael ryan, who shot up hungerford, berkshire, in the mid or late 1980s, before shooting himself at his old school. apparently he'd been badly bullied at school - how many of the 'innocent victims' were those who had made his life hell? this is a different kind of crime, and i certainly don't condone it, either, because there are more constructive ways of getting back at these kinds of people.

If you say so. My experience is that bullies are the ones that end up running things. We live in a culture that rewards it, don't we? I have always had more sympathy for the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, than I did for their victims. Nothing will change my opinion on that because I lived through exactly what they did.

I just didn't have the guts to shoot up my high school. I thought about it a lot, but most people have, haven't they?

I'm glad I didn't, because it would have ruined my life.

22:05 / 14.07.02

Well, thats nice. But they didnt just shoot up the bullies, did they?

Fuck.

22:20 / 14.07.02

If someone's mentally ill (and kills a whole bunch of people) does that count as evil?
It is not for you to decide who is good and who is evil. It is only for you to decide what action you must take to be good.

In other words, the question is not permissible.

To what degree should our pity be aimed at the perpetrators as well as the victims?
Let yourself feel as much pity as possible. It is understandable for one to have no pity at all for those who act so horrendously, and I would not contemptuously view anyone who has no pity for Jeffrey Dahmer.

Both these questions ask, “how should I feel,” and it is important to remember that a feeling in itself is not an action. One may hold the position that we need to execute serial killers need and still have great pity for them. The greatest compassion cannot prevent us from acting rightly. Further, the determination of what is right action cannot be made without compassion. Therefore, we should always strive for the greatest compassion.

12:54 / 15.07.02

Hear, hear, SMS. I agree 100%.

About Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold: I've never been entirely convinced that they were bullied. I feel (and felt at the time) that the media were making excuses for something they couldn't understand, namely that a lot of kids (and not just the ones wearing trenchcoats) feel fucking empty, and that fulfilling violent fantasies fills, at least temporarily, the void that nothing else can. There was a really interesting article in The Atlantic Monthly about this in March. I'll try to dig it up...

Columbine really affected me, for a lot of reasons. I was just barely 20 at the time, and could identify with H & K: Not with their actions, mind, but with their anger and emptiness. I remembered all too well what high school was like, and the fact that my friends, who were all significantly older than me, couldn't identify at all caused a really big rift.

As gentleman loser says, I thought about blowing up my high school (thanks, Heathers...), and I know that many of my friends did, too. That's not, necessarily, a response to bullying: I wasn't bullied at all. What it was, though, was a response to a world and a culture which, I felt, didn't have anything to offer me , which was false and plastic and heartless (hooooo! Call me Holden!). I've since changed my mind about that, but know lots of people who haven't.

To get back on topic a bit, I don't believe in evil. And I do believe in compassion, for all beings. As SMS says, compassion and right action are mutually dependent. People kill for the same reasons that they do everything else: To teach themselves something. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where people feel it's necessary to take such drastic steps...

I really recommend Colin Wilson's League of Assassins (and let me know if you find it: I've been looking for another copy for 10 years...). It deals, mostly, with the Manson family, but has a lot to say about societal responsibility for the creation of murderers...

XXII:X:II = XXX

20:34 / 22.07.02

I understand the identification that many people a couple years younger than me feel. I know that if I were still in high school after the day of the Trenchcoat Mafia, I know I would have started to have been viewed askance, as I walked around in a black overcoat constantly and wrote monthly columns for the school paper that often condemned the jock elite (which made me oh so popular, let me tell you). Yes, I was intensely unhappy about a great many things, and yeah, though my fantasies were more fantastic than something so mundane as blowing people away, I wanted these suburban dipshits impaled around my dinner table. Who of us who turn out to be the more thoughtful ones in life didn't feel this way?

Furthermore, I remember when the FBI caught Ted Kaszinski, aka The Unabomber, and I was reading the major magazine articles about him, while I couldn't condone his actions, I empathized completely with his alienation. This person with so much intelligence teaching at a major university, which meant that he was awash in utter jarheads. (Now Vladimir, that's not a very humanist attitude. Fuck y-- hey, wait, I'M Vladimir! Who're you? Oh, don't even start...) It's lonely at the top, whatever the scale might be, and the resentment flowing to and from can be maddening. At the time, I considered writing a column for my college paper talking about how much I identified with the Unabomber, but I ended up saving it for the parody issue of the paper, putting out my own Manifesto packed with nonsense to exorcise that urge.

02:54 / 23.07.02

Who of us who turn out to be the more thoughtful ones in life didn't feel this way?

I didn't. I would guess that there isn't much of a correlation, actually.

12:13 / 23.07.02

A Criminal History of Mankind, also by Colin Wilson, has a chapter devoted to serial killers and is a good probing of the desires and compulsive motives of killers in general.

Could anybody lluminate me if any of the killers mentioned above was executed?

The Planet of Sound

15:09 / 23.07.02

On a Colin Wilson tangent, there's a very interesting interview with him by Louis Theroux (no less) in the new Idler; he talks about his relationship with Ian Brady. And he wears silly slippers.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:38 / 23.07.02

Ryan shot himself... Klebold & Harris you know about... Dahmer was murdered in prison, and Nielsen is (as far as I know) still alive (that's the UK, though, so execution wasn't an option.)