Deconstructing Monster Narratives

[trenton]

I have been doing some research on different psychological profiles of criminal offenders, particularly violent offenders. I found some information that challenged the monster narrative and created what some call "moral vertigo" when one can deeply empathize with a perpetrator and see their humanity while simultaneously recognizing the severe harm they cause. I could see the similarities in myself and many of these perpetrators as well as the human vulnerabilities that principate extreme acts. This included sex offenders of various profiles with the most challenging one perhaps being incest cases. In most cases when a parent sexually abuses a child, it is not out of sadism, but out of extreme brokenness and cognitive distortion leading to a twisted sense of harmless love. I found this helpful to me in a way because if such people are not monsters, then I am not a monster either.

I also found the psychological mechanism by which institutional sex scandals emerge which is likely important for prevention. Much of this research is restricted, and potentially over restricted due to the fear of this knowledge being used by dangerous offenders. However, some information that could be used to protect people include the knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities such as a lack of belonging, making a person more likely to be swayed by peer pressure as in the case of some opportunistic or situational offenders. The actions of such offenders are harmful and they must be stopped, but they are still not monsters.

For the most part, perhaps in more that 90% of rape or homicide cases, I could clearly and empirically refute the monster narrative. There are however some extreme cases which seem to have formed the basis of the monster narrative to begin with. This would be profiles such as sadistic offenders or psychopathic serial killers and rapists. I'm almost done reading a book about psychopaths and I seem to be understanding the general patterns.

Starting with sadistic offenders, they are rare but the most dangerous. These are the type who often show early signs of behavioral and developmental problems in childhood. They often start off by torturing animals while using masturbatory reinforcement for intricate sadistic rape fantasies. They are more likely to target random strangers and take sexual pleasure in terrorizing victims for extended periods of time. They often tie their victims up and collect trophies from this person while calibrating their terror to just the right amount to keep the victim from losing consciousness or dying of a heart attack. This profile often has multiple victims and likely contributes to many unsolved murders because most murders are committed by someone you know rather than a stranger, making it more difficult to solve. The sadistic offender is more likely to exhibit traits of psychopathy.

As for my research on psychopaths, I have found some interesting thought patterns they exhibit. They seem to closely mirror my family that deeply traumatized me. For example, my father and his gang would pay money to have sex with children including me. My father exhibited early signs of psychopathy such as animal cruelty and later became a career criminal who would boast about his exploits including using death threats to coerce people for money. Meanwhile, my mother like my father would use love instrumentally while pitting me against the other parent. My mother would treat her suicide threat as a little tiff of no real significance while magnifying anything that could be framed as wrongdoing on my part. My mother may be more of a narcissist than a psychopath compared to my father who showed an absence of moral conscience and little care for his children despite what he would say on the surface. I wrote a document on circumstantial evidence to help law enforcement in cases like those of my father and his gang.

I found that criminal gangs often operate on an inverse moral hierarchy. A person who feels like an outsider to society finds belonging with criminal organizations. From there, these people prove commitment to the gang by performing acts that are universally condemned including child sexual abuse. A father who trafficked his own child would be given strong reputational incentives within the gang by showing his level of commitment to the point that he is not even loyal to his own child. The rape of child is more so about symbolically undermining the society that they hate than it is about the specific child. They take on universal condemnation while causing severe harm to society. This is especially prevalent in cases of school shootings in which the goal is to cause maximum harm to society by targeting its most vulnerable members in a place where they congregate. They pursue infamy by intentionally acting as evil as possible.

I found it interesting that in psychopathy, this person usually attaches no emotional significance to different words or actions. This is what allows them to treat murder with the same degree of significance as what you had for breakfast this morning. For example, "Well, you know, it was like any other ordinary Tuesday. I woke up at my normal time, had some waffles and drove my girlfriend to her job. When I went out for some Starbucks, I later encountered this other guy who was kind of pissing me off. So, I slashed his throat and dumped his body in the river. After that I remembered that a new movie came out in theaters that my girlfriend would love to see. After shooting some hoops at the park, I went with my girlfriend to watch Despicable Me and we loved that movie. We both slept soundly, ready for another day tomorrow." They often insist "I am kind of a 'in the now' kind of guy. I told you I wasn't a serial killer because that was in the past and it is over and done with. But anyway, what's for lunch?"

The sadistic psychopathic serial killer / rapist seems to be the kind of thing that I would call evil. They seem to most closely match the monster narrative, although I can still see their humanity in perhaps brain disruptions or developmental complications which which may have led to this kind of disposition. The moral indifference to having 30+ bodies buried in one's basement creates an act so atrocious that language strains to capture the severity of such acts, hence we call them monsters. However, from their point of view, they are the real victims because nobody understands them. Perhaps, we could in a sense say that such offenders are amoral in that they have no attachment to any moral constraints and thus apply them based on self-interest and survival. The rest is a matter of navigating externally imposed rules based on when it benefits them. This often allows the psychopath to get away with a lot of crimes, especially white collar crimes when they have no regard for the harm caused to the population while enriching themselves.

The fundamental question I seem to be grappling with seems to be "if God is good then why is there evil?" Of course, there are a lot of different perspectives I could take on this issue. In any case, how would you deconstruct the monster narrative? Do you think sadistic psychopathic serial killer / rapists or child sex traffickers are evil? Would you have an argument for why such people are fundamentally good? I'm curious as to how you would address these psychological profiles. I'm not entirely confident for the most extreme offenders who were the source of the monster narrative to begin with.

[Oppositionless]

For these people doing evil is like eating. Is a tiger evil for eating?  The psychopathic mind is very simple, like that of an animal. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Oppositionless

[trenton]

@Oppositionless I guess that does pair with serial rapists who say "i just like to fuck." Animals seem to act like this when they just want to fuck so they gang rape a lone victim and rape them. In the animal kingdom, there are fathers who frequently abandon their children and keep fucking while doing nothing to support the family. The closest parallel to a dead beat dad I could find would be like a lion who sleeps all day while the mother works alone to feed the children.