Some serial killers are above average intelligence or higher, and others just aren’t very bright and have a great deal of luck. They rely on their ability to seem normal to everyone else to help mask themselves in society.
Yep, that’s exactly right.
If there is some genetic component to being a sociopath, it would be more accurate to say that those folks represent part of the continuum of what it means to be human. They are undeniably part of our species, so on a scientific level you’d have to do all sorts of logical tap dancing to define them out the label “human”. But it could well be that we all have a potential to be sociopaths (to some extent), and it just takes the right* combination of environmental factors to set that potential off.
What an interesting topic to be discussing on Christmas…
*or wrong, depending on your perspective.
My guess is that’s probably true. A drug addict will behave quite sociopathically to get more drugs. I bet most people would behave pretty sociopathically if they were starving to death and needed food.
“human, alas, all too human!” - Nietzsche said it best. The capacity for heinousness is there in all of us. All that makes a difference is the lever to pull - the classic “orders”, torture, drugs, the madness of crowds - or, like some serial killers, a different mindset. “Broken” isn’t quite the right word for it, though, IMO, I think “flawed” comes closer - a flawed diamond is still whole, but it’s twisted inside. A flawed diamond is still categorically a diamond. A serial killer is still categorically human.
A look at genocide and atrocity throughout history shows that a lot of people will do unspeakable things once certain social constraints are removed.
Dennis Rader (BTK) apparently had sense enough not to kill anyone after Kansas reinstated the death penalty in the 90s (thought after his arrest he said he had been working on a sort of “last hurrah” project). But for someone like him, would death really be the appropiate punishment? Given how his mind regards pain as a huge turn-on, he’d presumably enjoy being executed. That being the case, for him the death penalty would hardly be a punishment. (Kinda like the old “difference between a masochist and a sadist” joke.)
Rader was something of an odd duck among serial killers. He knew full well that his behavior was wrong and took great pains to hide it from the world. Had he not, there would have been many more victims. And/or he would have been caught much sooner. (And the only reason he was found out after thirty-one years was because his massive ego got the better of him. If only he’d kept his mouth shut. . . .)
His wife Paula apparently knew nothing about his “hobby”. There was one close call many years ago. Rader had left out a draft of a poem about one of his victims and Paula found it. He explained it away by saying it was for a class project. (Rader took a degree in Administration of Justice from Wichita State University. This is another indication of how determined he was not to get caught. It appears he took this course of study solely to learn how cops think.)
A few weeks before his arrest, Paula remarked to him, “BTK spells just like you” (he had notorious spelling and usage problems). Apparently Rader has one hell of a poker face.
I dunno, Maastricht, I found the essay somewhat heavyhanded, broadbrushed, and agenda-ridden:
So I went looking to see what other sort of material the site considered important to share with readers, and apparently that material includes suspicions that the site or people connected with it are targets of what they call "COINTELPRO AGENTS " working to stop investigations into UFO coverups, etc.
That little paranoia piece and the internal alarm bells which kept going off as I read the psychopath essay are enough to make me questions the validity and credibility of the site as a whole.
I am not so sure of the site, but the essay jives with other things I have read elsewhere on the nature of Psychopaths. It does explain how their minds work pretty well. There is a group for people who are dealing with the aftermath of having married a psychopath, or been born into a family with one. What they say there tallies with that site. Yeah, I raised my eyebrows at some of the other stuff, but the part written by the doctor (Hervey Cleckley) is solid. ETA: More than one person who write/blog about crime and have studied psychology point to that link to explain how the mind of a psychopath works, also, FWIW.
Adding, in fact the group links to the same two pages I link to. I’ve dealt with a psychopath, what that page says, tallies with what I have seen.
I haven’t gone over the linked essay but the book by Dr. Cleckley is legit and despite being over 50 years old is still highly respected. Some new criteria for psychopath (or sociopath) have come up since then but most of Dr. Cleckley’s criteria are still part of the consensus definition of psycopathy.
On the issues of serial killers being smarter/dumber than ordinary people, I think that a serial killer is no more likely to be smarter or dumber than any other person. A lot of serial killers have been “white trash”, high school drop outs, petty criminals et cetera. Some have been respected businessmen who are described as charming/smart by the people who know them.
Serial killers are often hard to catch because of the nature of their crimes. Most of the time when the police investigate a murder, they start looking at who has connections with the victim, who had reason to kill the victim.
They look at close relatives/friends, they try to find out about disagreements the victim had been in. They look at business associates (legitimate and illegitimate in the case of murdered drug dealers and such), and who had to gain by the death of the victim. The forensic evidence that will most certainly be left at the scene of the crime helps but without some general direction, some guidance in where to focus their investigatory efforts it’s very hard to solve a murder. You may have fingerprints, DNA evidence and et cetera–but without any idea on who to check these records against they may be all but useless. A huge portion of people don’t have their fingerprints in the system, the concept of a comprehensive DNA database is also mostly one of fiction.
Most murders are either crimes of passion or crimes for personal gain, they may often be carried out sloppily due to the heated moment that brought the murder about. This often leads to a murderer who has direct, traceable ties to the victim and one who was not very careful in covering up his tracks.
Serial killers get off on the murder itself, and they also tend to enjoy the planning phase. They target random people who might fit their definition of an ideal target. They aren’t really smarter than your average murderer, but since they actually plan the murder out and typically have no connection to the victim, they are instantly much harder to track down.
I don’t believe at all that a valid argument can be constructed against a proposition by saying, “That’s just what X would WANT you to do!” There’s perfectly good reasons to oppose the death penalty – irreversible outcome, moral objections, etc – but “playing into a bad guy’s last wishes” is giving bad guys too much say in the matter.
If a vicious, inhuman killer or a genocidal maniac wants to go out by lethal injection, then it appears we have a confluence of interests. The end result is one less waste of a human on the planet. Like if Osama bin Laden wants to become a martyr, I say we help him out, as opposed to deny him the opportunity.
Actually, for the times they were in, they were normal. Don’t judge someone from a different culture by our standards. We don’t find it normal, but that is not our culture at this time and place [although if a current modern culture practices slavery, they may consider it normal in this time and for their culture.]
Interesting point. Also, BTK wasn’t into pain per se including his own pain. He was into the pain of OTHERS as part of his elaborately planned projects.
And anyway, the death penalty isn’t supposed to cause undue pain so as to not be cruel and unusual punishment. Some legal arguments against it in fact are based on the very assertion that some forms of it are painful.
Why not ? In many ways, our present culture really is superior to those of the past. We are simply better people than they were. Judging someone because they dress funny in your eyes isn’t the same as judging them because they enslave others. When the British condemned and stopped the traditional Indian practice of burning widows alive, they, in that particular instance, were superior to the people of India; they weren’t just “different”.
And quite often, the people of the past did things that they knew were wrong, or had the tools to know was wrong if they cared to look. Do not assume the people of the past were innocent morons who were pure hearted but did bad things because they didn’t know better. They were just as capable of rationalizing things that went against their own ethics, but wanted to get away with as we are.
Nonsense. We may be ‘better’ because we do not practice slavery, but do not get on your high horse and try to make me believe that the average roman citizen knew that it was wrong to keep slaves. Since we stopped being hunter/gatherers, and small family group subsistance farmers we kept slaves. To be honest, no machinery, unless you want to live hand to mouth marginal you had to have a workforce. Agriculture is a labor intense industry.
We know it is wrong to keep slaves, because we have the leisure to do so. Since the industrial revolution, we have not had to put the same labor force into the fields to keep fed. For shits and grins, a little googling found me the 1880 census where the writer mentions that it takes 2 moldboard plows a day to plow 1.5 acres [an area of roughly 300 feet by 450 feet] and as a comparison, it takes 1 acre to produce 24 to 35 bushels of wheat [texas wheat yeild which is 44 lbs of wheat flour per bushel.] The average person in the middle ages consumed about 2-3 lbs bread or other grain product per day [bread, gruel, porridge] so stop and think about how much land has to be farmed to support the population at any given time. Do keep in mind that other than the romans [who had a killer transportation system in place] that you pretty much had to farm locally so you could get to the food before it rotted.
Historically, they had always practiced slavery, they saw no problems with slavery, and it was pretty much a world wide institution. Everybody did it, and pretty much unless you were on the slave end of the stick you thought nothing about it.
To put it into perspective, imagine some time 1000 years in the future, when we can vat grow protein how barbaric we would be considered for thinking nothing about going out and shooting Bambi and chowing down. How horrible we are for keeping countless animals just to kill and eat them … How horrible, didnt we realize how wrong it was to eat meat from a living being [and yes I know there are vegans out there who preach that … but that is not the accepted norm at this time. ]
We have the leisure to consider slavery bad, but that is after a LOT of work had been replaced by machinery. We are no better than they were. If we did not have an industrial revolution to change things, we would still have a human workforce in the fields and they would be slaves. We might pretty up the term and call them serfs, and make laws about how they had to be maintained oh, wait - romans had laws on the treatment of slaves, as did america…and most of medieval europe. Nope, I guess we arent actually better. We just have the leisure to be better.
I’m of two minds about that. It’s an interesting issue; on the one hand, to assume that everything is a wash and it’s all cultural relativity would be, as you said, not giving enough credit to people who may very well have known better. On the other hand, I think judging another time or culture by our standards should be done with great care. I’d say many of the colonial powers judged native cultures by their own standards seeing them as savages and more like animals when it turned out that maybe those indigenous cultures just had different perspectives.
I’ve always thought it’s an interesting question as to whether or not we’re better off for technological, medical, and “social” advances in every single aspect without exception, in all cases. I think it’s something of an open question.
aruvqan: We have more then leisure, we have technology. Our wheat yeilds more, on less acres planted than the grain the Roman’s relied on.
But doesn’t that mean that we end up with more leisure because our technology allows us to produce more, with less, faster?
I tend towards your view. I’d add the caveat that during those time of transition, there seemed to then be voices on both sides of the issue. At that point, maybe greed and other such considerations can be figured in for one side. Maybe. And of course, hubris and rationalization and so forth.
What’s your thoughts on the period right before the Civil War and the abolitionist movement vs. slavery apologists, etc.? I know there were lots of other overlapping considerations at play, but surely there was someone at the time that sincerely believed slavery to be evil like the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin? No?