Yesterday's post describing the behavior of various serial killers included a fairly graphic description of Edmund Kemper's crimes.
There are a lot of people who worry that they're not nice people, because they said something rude (which they later regretted). Or, because they feel schadenfreude, and wonder if that means they're evil. But these things simply mean they're human.
And if you actually worry about whether you're a decent human being, you're probably not a sociopath anyway. (Sociopaths don't waste their time fretting over such trivialities as right and wrong.)
To get a sense of the utter inhumanity of a sociopath, imagine yourself with your mother's severed head. (Never mind that you were the one who just killed her and cut it off.) How would you react? Would it make you sexually aroused? And would you then want to stick your erection into her lifeless mouth and pump away until you had an orgasm?
Okay, that may be setting the bar for human decency awfully low, and even most sociopaths wouldn't do that. But to get a sense of how utterly without humanity sociopaths are, you have to imagine what it was like to be Edmund Kemper.
The reason so many sociopaths get away with their perfidies is because non-sociopaths can't even conceive of how utterly without remorse or sympathy sociopaths are. Most people simply assume that everybody else is more or less like them. (Which, by the way, is also why most sociopaths often suspect the worst about others.)
Also, note what Kemper said about why he shot his grandparents. Every now and then you hear of a killer who pulled the trigger "just to see what it was like." No one ever believes them because they can't conceive of themselves ever taking a human life out of a mild sense of curiosity.
Normal people, when they hear that, will always assume there was some burning reason the sociopath had that he wants to keep secret. But a sociopath actually will kill out of mild curiosity, simply because they assign zero value to other's lives. (I wrote about this phenomenon here, in 2009.)
Kemper, by the way, is an anomaly among serial killers. After he killed his mother and her friend, he turned himself in to the police. I can't think of another serial killer who's ever done that.
Also, his mother was a horrific woman. She was an abusive alcoholic who forced Edmund, from a very young age, to sleep in the basement by himself, even though he was terrified by the noises that the boilers made. No one deserves her fate. But if anybody did, it would be a monster who creates another monster by forcing a little boy to sleep alone, locked away in a place that terrifies him.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
18 comments:
Sick of all the PC anti-white doodles on Google?
Go here:
http://altrightdoodlesearch.blogspot.com/
Cooler than google.
what you described- how he fucked the severed head of his mother- seems like an expression of power over somebody who made him feel powerless, almost like an act of revenge.
Steven -
I'm sure you're right, and that's what it was. But still, what set him apart as a sociopath was actually his ability to get an erection in those circumstances. Any of us could be pushed into a brutal act of revenge if we were goaded enough. But to get a hard on right after we did it? That's unfathomable for most of us. (Even for a lot of sociopaths, I would think.)
Kemper seems to have been made a monster, not born it, or at least had his sociopathy greatly enhanced by his mother's treatment of him. The fact that he turned himself in shows he had some semblance of a conscious left, which is non-sociopathic. I'm thinking, like the fictional Norman Bates, he could have gone either way but Mommy Dearest pushed him down the stairs of madness.
OT: have you heard about RooshV, his meetups, and the planned protesters? Sabotage, front and center. I'd love it if you publicized it on your page (not even seeking linkage, you can cut and paste if you want):
https://whoresoftheinternet.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/rooshv-february-6th-this-saturday-meetup-protests-and-intimidation-and-how-to-fight-back/
Whorefinder --
Agree, Kemper was made not born.
I'm not really that familiar with Roosh, I know he's one of the guys from the manosphere, one of the PUA's, but I've never followed him, so I'm not going to publicize him. (I do read Heartiste.) Happy to post you comment here, though.
@John Craig:
Also, since his mother was born of her own parents' dysfunction, I'm guessing there's a lot of truth about what Kemper was saying about his grandmother mistreating his grandfather and him.
It looks to me like his mother's family had a history of crazed, abusive alpha-women dominating the menfolk into submission. The divorce actually might have saved the father and son if the son had lived with the father from the start. When he was forced to live with his mother and his psycho-sister with no kind father around to commiserate with or to be protected by or just have another male around, the die was cast as far as Kemper becoming some sort of monster. But it also shows one of the cases where divorce actually freed the child from the moorings of a lifetime of abuse---by making him so abused with no outlet to save his ego that he finally revolted against the matriarchy, in a truly devastating way.
Food for thought.
Whorefinder --
It was actually his paternal grandparents, the Kempers, with whom he stayed and whom he killed at age 15. Despite that, though, it does sound as if all of that might have been averted if he had been allowed to live with his father from the start. You've probably seen a picture of the mother, she actually LOOKED like a monster, unlike Edmund himself, who had a deceptively peaceful-looking face.
Spartan said…
I truly love your articles on sociopaths. Do you think sociopaths are a result of nature, nurture, or both?
Spartan --
Thank you very much. I tend to think most sociopaths are a result of (lack of) nurture. (I'm in the nature camp on most other human differences, but in the nurture camp here.) There are genetic predispositions, though, like high testosterone levels (which make one less susceptible to social conditioning and more fearless), and damaged forebrains. But I think that mostly it's caused by the lack of a real bond with another human being in the first year or two of life.
(There are plenty of people who disagree with me on the, btw.)
While the monsters who kill without remorse are the extreme case, if writers and researchers such as Martha Stout are correct, there may be a sort of range of behavior. The real damage to society may come from those sadistic bosses and abusive bureaucrats who add a little bit of hell to the lives of countless numbers every day of their lives.
Luke --
True, serial killers are only the tip of the sociopathic iceberg. The vast majority of sociopaths don't have that sexual kink that causes them to want to kill someone while (or even before) having sex with them, so they express their sociopathy in other ways, exactly as you say, by being sadistic bosses and abusive bureaucrats. And sociopaths do tend to be good at climbing the ladder in organizations, getting as much power as they can, and then abusing it to whatever extent they can get away with.
Sometimes they can be both killers and petty tyrants: Dennis Rader, the BTK ("bind, torture, kill") killer, was a local bureaucrat known in is community for making people miserable by enforcing local property ordinances to the maximum degree.
I just read the paragraph about Kemper in the previous article...wow, he must have really hated his mother.
..................
what do you make of Ted Cruz's daughter's reaction to him?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gplpSfaouP8
Steven --
I wouldn't read too much into Cruz's daughter's finickiness, girls that age can be in bad moods for all sorts of reasons. I would read a lot more into Cruz having reportedly been extremely unpopular at Princeton, and at Harvard Law School, as well as being widely disliked by his fellow senators. That says a lot, and should give anyone pause. I could accept him being unpopular in the Senate and write that off to him not wanting to go along with the business-as-usual McConnell/Boehner/Ryan policies, in fact I might respect him for it. But the stuff about his college and law school classmates has to give you pause.
Do you think Ted Cruz is an Aspie?
- Susan
Susan --
I don't think so. He seems like more of a garden variety narcissistic personality, though I don't really know enough to have a strong opinion.
From what I read online (different articles), it seems like Cruz could have the condition. At the end of one article, there was a commenter (an Aspie) who stated that Cruz seems to be an Aspie. In college and law school, Cruz was seen as arrogant, rigid in his thinking, lacking in social skills, etc. In one article, a fellow second year law student gave him a ride from New York to Cambridge (she didn't know Cruz very well) and during the drive, Cruz asked her what her IQ was. When she told him that she didn't know, he then asked her what her SAT score was, noting that IQ was closely related to the SAT. A weird conversation to have with someone that you're are hitching a ride from and whom you barely know.
- Susan
Susan --
You could be right. Those all do sound like vaguely Aspie-ish behaviors.
reminds me of mark zuckerzombieberg - ie. an invasive alien species. the zombie apocalypse is upon us.
Post a Comment