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Sure, actions are what we punish, but some mental habits aren’t harmless. Research shows that people who regularly rehearse violent or sadistic scenarios that match their own values and desires are far more common in offender groups, while such fantasies are rare in the general population. When someone’s running the “Torture Channel” in their head over and over, and enjoying the programming, the odds of acting it out go up. Like animal cruelty in childhood, it’s not destiny, but it’s a strong enough predictor to treat as a red warning sign. If my wife (if I still had one) told me she often thought about torturing her spouse—and liked the idea—I’d sleep with one eye open and hide all the kitchen utensils.
As I said, I would categorize that as unhealthy behavior, but not evil. I think that in order for evil to be committed, harm to an other is required.
Bad or evil Thoughts become words.
Words become actions.
Actions can be or result, in very evil things.
So when did the evil start? I think that it started with the Thought.
I get it—evil needs a victim. Still, if my wife’s got a scrapbook labeled “Creative Ways to End You,” I’m calling that pre-evil.
Evil curious.
Sin sampler
Doom dabbler
There are some category of thoughts which should create feelings of revulsion in the person. For instance, if someone has thoughts of animal torture, the expected response would be to feel revulsed by those thoughts and think of something else. If someone doesn’t feel revulsed or gets some kind of enjoyment from those thoughts and keeps dealing on them, then that’s probably an indication there’s something wrong with that person. If they don’t mind thinking those thoughts, they might not mind making those thoughts come true
You might as well say that evil starts with Birth, because a moment a person is born, they have the potential to do evil. Personally, that’s a bit to “original sin” for my tastes.
Again, thoughts can be unhealthy, and a person who nurtures unhealthy thoughts can be a very messed-up person. But that person, no matter how messed-up they are, still has free will, and until they make a decision to actually do evil, all that evil exists only as potential.
Is this maybe similar to the fact that people who abuse children have a high probability of having been abused themselves, but among the population of people with a history of childhood abuse, they are not any more likely to be abusers?
I wonder how rare such fantasies are, I really do. I would think that healthy people would be less likely to cop to having such fantasies.
Personally I’ve never derived pleasure from writing about torturing someone beyond the basic satisfaction of having gotten the scene to sort of do what I wanted it to do, to elicit a feeling, which is perhaps not the same thing. And since most of the people who get the torture are the protagonists, I find it really hard to do it to them.
But I’m wired… oddly. I once remarked after watching Constantine I thought the drowning in the bathtub scene was hot. (From what I recall from yonks ago, Constantine had to drown this lady to help her pierce the spiritual veil or whatever - this was not a literal death. But it was filmed like a life-death struggle.) My friend was like, “That’s fucked up."
Yeah, maybe. It has zero impact on anything, though, so I don’t see the point in judging myself for it.
Nor do I. You don’t give serial-killer vibes. I’m not a psychologist, but the gist I get from papers is: liking violent movies or consensual BDSM, or writing gnarly torture scenes (even with some arousal), or even daydreaming about waterboarding your mean boss ≠ red flag. Needing real harm to get aroused (e.g., compulsively watching snuff films) + lousy impulse control = a genuine risk marker. Those markers are overrepresented in offenders and rare in the general public—according to anonymous surveys (if you can believe them) and peer-reviewed studies—so they’re statistically useful, but not destiny. Storytelling and occasional sadistic fantasies are fine; when it turns into an obsession with real-world harm, that’s when the warning light comes on.
What I meant to say was that morally good deeds in everyday life are no counterbalance to the pleasure derived from sadistic fantasies. Enjoying the torment of others, even in one’s imagination, is problematic. I would avoid associating with such a person, as I see enjoying cruelty as at least a problem of mental hygiene. But that is something everyone must decide for themselves.
Then, in my opinion, it will be too late.
I think the trouble is, if the warning light comes on much earlier, it would include a lot of false positives.
People who turn out to be serial killers or child abusers etc may have similarities in their life histories and pre-offence behaviours, but I believe if you were to detect and police those attributes at the early stage, you’d probably find that +90% of the results are people who never turn out to do anything wrong.
What I mean is that there is a built-in compositional fallacy in any inference we might make: for example: Serial killers have a history of bedwetting. Great, so we round up all the kids who do that and we discover it’s 10% of all kids, yet, 10% of the adult population are not serial killers.
You’re right about false positives—that’s the base-rate problem. When the outcome is rare, even a “good” test mostly flags innocent people. If 1 in 100,000 becomes a killer, a 90% test still drowns you in false alarms.
That’s why they don’t police traits; they look at risk markers in context. Big Macs aren’t predictive if everyone likes them (signal ≈ zero). But persistent, chosen sadistic fantasies rehearsed on a loop, or chronic animal cruelty in youth, are overrepresented in offender groups while being uncommon in the general public, so they actually shift the odds (still not destiny). Bed-wetting alone? The Macdonald triad doesn’t hold up; the animal-cruelty part is the one with legs.
Bottom line: don’t round up the bedwetters, but do take “Torture Channel on repeat in your head" seriously. It’s a smoke alarm, not mind-reading—useful for triage, lousy for fortune-telling.
Let’s not get carried away. I’ve never enjoyed torturing anyone in my novels. On the contrary, I find those scenes difficult to write. Nor are those scenes graphic. They are focused on the emotional experience of the protagonist.
Do you oppose action movies on moral grounds?
I wonder where we’re supposed to draw the line. Upon further thought, I would backpedal some stuff I said earlier; I think it could potentially be very bad to have recurrent violent fantasies. This feels like a context- dependent thing to me.
With writing it’s sometimes difficult to separate the pleasure of writing from the thing you’re writing about. I always enjoy writing and it’s not like I enjoy it more when it’s violent content. It’s not those scenes I return to most, it’s the ones about love I enjoy the most.
But I would still not insert moral judgement into this. It seems pointless and probably counterproductive. The more we give people the impression that there are “evil" thoughts to have, the less likely they are to share them, the more isolated they may become, and the more likely they may be to not seek help - if help is what they need.