Human Nature: The Inner Psychopath

Sometimes it seems that our human capacity for cruelty is as great as that for kindness. News headlines echo and emphasize the crimes committed daily by our brothers and sisters. Movies and TV shows popularize, and explore the fascination of bringing pain to others. Not a weekend passes without release of another horror movie, promising more blood and gore and greater cruelty than the last and while expletives are censored on television, at any hour you can find fictional police drama's with stories of heinous crimes, whole series set around serial killers and this darker part of our nature. While the pages of history are filled and often shaped by this darkness and in our hearts, it is a lack of proper fear and respect for this weakness, a lack of awareness that is making the problem worse. While each of us has the potential for greatness and this is where most focus their attention, if we neglect an understanding of our weakness we will be doomed by it.

"You don't understand these things because your not underthe influence of factor x." (Dennis Rader, BTK Killer in taunting 1978 letter to police, errors included)

Surely when Rader penned those words he was fulfilling his self satisfying desire for dominating social control, and not actually attempting to answer the question of what makes him what he is. However, it approximates the internal justification so many make in trying to explain such unforgivable behavior. We call them demons, because we cannot understand them as humans, but murderers come from across the human spectrum, from every age, class and culture and have since the beginning of human history. In this age of individual empowerment, they too have found how to use the tools to devastating effect. While they may have had the support of millions there is no doubt today that the actions of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and countless others were, like serial murders, self promoting for purposes of social control. While the lives and actions of Mao and Rader were as different in other ways as any two can be, both share the characteristic of living almost entirely for themselves. There is no empathy for their victims, there is nothing greater than themselves.

Each one of us feels this pull in one way or another. Whether it is the desire to pick on a weaker individual, or the more silent oppression of vicious angry frustrated thoughts that go unspoken to those that pass us by, the capacity for cruelty is alive in each of us. We watch these horror movies, and crime dramas, because they excite us, because the titillation of evil thoughts and self glorification is a more effective emotional control than others. While our intuitive desire for control is nothing new, and cruelty older than humanity, technology has made the act of ending life so simple that we risk the ending of life as we know it and not only from the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation, but from the increasing frequency of life shattering acts including school shootings, suicide bombings, genocides and other violent crimes.

Changing these things doesn't require us to roll back technological progress, but it means we must take the time to move forward in our collective understanding of the human mind. Otherwise, this sacrifice of self awareness for gratification will be our end.