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The Killer Within (Pics of Bob to Follow)
Could you be persuaded to kill an innocent person? I think so.
The fact is, history is crowded with people much like you who have tortured, maimed, and murdered others. I’m not talking about psychopaths like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy. Neither am I talking about the soldier who kills an armed enemy in state-sanctioned warfare. No, I’m talking about your ordinary plebes, proles, burghers, and Joe Blows like you who kill innocent common folk.
In July of 1941 in the small village of Jedwabne, about forty ethnic Poles, almost all Catholic, murdered the male Jews of the village and stacked their bodies inside a barn. Then they forced the Jewish women and children into the barn and set it on fire. They murdered over 340 that day.
These killers who herded the Jews into the barn were, by all accounts, your run-of-the-mill villagers, the neighbors of the Jews themselves.
Let’s say you, right down to the DNA that causes your eyelid to twitch when you’re nervous, had been born into that village. As a young lad, your buddies used to laugh when you called the kid down the street a “Jewboy.” And you listened with fascination as your history teacher lectured on his favorite topic, the nefarious plot revealed by the Protocols of Zion.
Right now, of course, you’re living in the catbird seat and life is easy and non-threatening, so it’s hard to project yourself back to that era. But it’s also hard to escape the conclusion that you are merely an unrealized murderer, and had you lived under the same circumstances as the Poles, you would have been an actual murderer, happy to be among the torch-wielding mob who set fire to the barn.
In fact, history is replete with terrible slaughters done by common men like you (and me, I suppose). I’m not going to tax your patience with multiple examples from pre-modern eras, but let me give you just one. The Vikings of the ninth-century were marauders who traveled up and down the coasts of England and Europe, attacking villages for the loot. If the villagers resisted, the Vikings would kill everyone who stood in their way. If the women resisted, they were killed too — or taken, with their children, as slaves.
According to the clergyman/scholar, Alcuin, when the Vikings looted the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, the Vikings slaughtered the monks at the altar and then trampled their bodies “like dung in the street.”
Unless these Vikings were aliens, they shared humanity with you. So it’s highly likely that if you had grown up in a Viking village, imbibing Viking traditions and ethos with your morning porridge, you would have behaved like the Vikings, killing monks, tradesmen, and yeomen without mercy.
Let’s move to the modern era. In 1978, the messianic nutter, Jim Jones, persuaded 913 of his followers to commit murder and suicide. I think we can call the death of the 276 children murder.
“How could this have happened?” people still ask. (Only a few of Jones’ devotees ran into the jungle rather than commit murder or suicide.) I can sense you shaking your head. “No, no, I wouldn’t have killed my own child.” That’s only because it’s hard to imagine the circumstances that led those mothers to kill their children. But it’s highly likely that in similar circumstances, you would not have been immune to Jim Jones’ appeal — and therefore you would have shared his malignant fantasies.
Pol Pot’s Communist followers, farmers, yeomen, mechanics, and other salt of the earth types, killed their fellow men, a couple million of them, mostly Christians, Buddhist monks, professors, and assorted intellectuals. (Pol Pot died peacefully in his sleep in 1997, a more egregious example of cosmic injustice it’s hard to imagine. Let’s hope he’s roasting in Hell.)
Has this post been a calumny of the human race? No, no. I’m not saying that we Homo sapiens are evil by nature. We’re just infinitely malleable. We’re saints and sinners, predators and prey, lawbreakers and lawmakers. What we depends not just on our individual character, but also on the circumstances of time and place. For every Vlad the Impaler, there is a St. Francis of Assisi.
Endnote: I’ve restricted this discussion largely to male killers. But then we men are almost always the killers, aren’t we? How many women have gone to a workplace or a school and shot up the place? Two in the last thirty-seven years, according to Mother Jones.
There’s also a short list of female serial killers, a list that includes the infamous Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute who shot her truck-driving victims. (The few other female serial killers have almost all been nurses who poisoned their patients.)
Women just don’t take to killing the way we men do. A beautiful woman may slay us with a glance, but she will only rarely garrote us as we lie abed.
You may need some relief after murder and mayhem, so I’m ending with a couple of photos of Bob the dog playing with the buds that he regularly meets on our morning walk. Bob takes no guff from these big dogs, including that Great Dane you see below. Marmaduke chases Bob; Bob chases right back.
The primary problem here is not the inherent violence of humanity. It is the desire to fit in and go along with our tribe, without asking ourselves if this action makes sense. Those who think for themselves are at risk of being declared traitors by their fellow clansmen.
And that’s how you get the Glencoe Massacre.
Browning has a lot of information on the role of peer pressure and how out worked. It was very important. But I doubt he would call it the primary problem. He didn’t say it in these words, but I think he would disagree with any one factor being labeled “primary.”
Group dynamics, peer pressure, it amounts to the same thing. By accepting an identity within a group, if the group becomes guided towards producing evil, you may follow along. But there are instances where it doesn’t turn out like that.
But to be able to resist effectively, requires joining another group with the same group dynamics but pointed in another direction. People do have agency.
Most people don’t do either one, keep their heads down and wait to see which way the wind blows. And when it changes direction (if it does), then you will claim to have been with the righteous, victorious group all along. Witness the French Resistance.
The best result is never being placed in a situation where you have to choose. And there is agency in that as well.
I see your point, but I don’t agree. I may be misinterpreting your statement, but you seem to imply the tribal instinct is irrational. I think that it is perfectly rational. In fact, it is positively Lockean.
Locke’s fundamental proposition is that people enter into the hypothetical “social contract” for mutual protection. The fundamental problem is that we are individually weak and vulnerable. It is highly unlikely that I am the strongest or most physically formidable man in my general vicinity. Even if I am, I need to sleep, and I’m even less likely to be able to successfully fight two men, let alone three or four.
Collective action and common defense are, therefore, necessary to our individual protection. Thus the rise of tribes or states, for purposes of mutual defense.
It is not irrational to believe that people in another tribe or state wish you harm. All of history teaches that this threat is real.
Further, when violent conflict arises between tribes or states, individual guilt becomes irrelevant. Members of the opposing tribe or state, by virtue of their social contract, are a legitimate threat to me. I could even, quite legitimately, view the opposing tribe or state as something akin to a criminal conspiracy to wage war on me and my people.
I think that Kent’s examples may not strike close enough to home to make his point. It’s not just some Polish villagers in 1941, or Vikings, or the Pol Pot brigade. It’s the Army Air Corps in WWII, intentionally slaughtering German and Japanese civilians by the tens of thousands. Since Vietnam, we have made greater efforts to reduce civilian casualties, but we also have not faced as significant a threat.
What would we do if North Korea used a nuclear weapon on, for instance, Seattle or Portland? Would we retaliate with nuclear destruction of one or more North Korean cities?
I think that we would, and I think that such retaliation would be necessary, despite the fact that it would result in the slaughter of many thousands of “innocent” North Korean civilians.
So, to get back to Kent’s initial question, my answer is “probably yes,” I could be persuaded to kill an innocent person.
The only reason that I qualify this answer with “probably” is the possibility that I might not be able to bring myself to do so, if the event actually presented itself. I do not think that I would be unable to do so, but I have not faced this particular test. I hope that I never will.
It’s easier when all it takes is punching a launch button.
Browning makes a point of how it was easier for the Order Police to take part in the killing of Jews by dividing up their jobs into different components, some of which distanced them from the actual killing. For example, there were a lot more men who were willing to herd Jews onto the trains than who liked taking part in the direct killing. Even though they kind of knew, at some level, that those trains were taking them to the gas chambers, it was easier to keep that out of mind and just concentrate on the job of rounding the people up and herding them. There were plenty who took part in various forms of direct killing, too, but some of the men tried to avoid that work, at least at first. (Thinking of it as “work” was one of the other mechanisms that made it possible for them to do it.)
I’ve been thinking about this lately and I think there is a false argument in there somewhere.
It seems to me that behind many a great serial killer there was a complicit woman. While it’s not terribly common for a woman to commit the act of violence herself, women can certainly exert their influence to get men to commit the violence on their behalf. Is that really not as bad as doing the deed yourself?
I watched a documentary the other night called I Delours. It was an interview with Dolours Price, a member of the IRA who died a few years ago. She was articulate and candid, sometimes sympathetic and other times utterly chilling. She admitted her role in the deaths of suspected informers, including that of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 children. In fact she stated it was four women who came to that woman’s door to take her from her children to her death. They used guile not violence to lure her. Here is a link to the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFwpg4Ff-gM