by Ian Brady
My present state of psychic evolution should by now be distinct to some; one purpose of these opening chapters is to assist a few in appreciating the routes of my reasoning.
When most people approach middle or old age, as I am, they opt for increasingly greyer decisions, in contrast to the vibrant black and white of younger years. Some obtusely regard the tendency to compromise a sign of wisdom or tolerance. I regard it as selling out, and retirement to the comfortable grazing of the flock.
Thanks largely to authoritarian stupidity and the spectrum of human savagery and absurdity witnessed and experienced by me in decades of imprisonment, and an absence of personal ambition, my relativistic beliefs and philosophy are theri-anthropically preserved in convictions of glacial ice. At this moment I continue to value personal loyalty and friendship even more. The coining of golden rules is not always the prerogative of those with the gold.
We can now resume in a deeper condition of mutual understanding, I hope.
To further early ambitions pragmatically and at maximum speed, I must confess that I selected associates who visibly possessed advanced ‘criminal’ potential.
A test question was, ‘How much money would you kill for, considering you would do it for a pittance in the army?’ The amount chosen was irrelevant. The act of positive choice paramount. Any moral or ethical equivocation I encountered led me to bantering disengagement, when I falsely implied that discussing murder was hypothetical, a philosophical indulgence.
‘I wonder what it’s like to kill?’ many would ask. And, naïvely, ‘Am I capable of killing and getting away with it?’ The stuff of amateur detective novels. Beyond good and evil there is no self-doubt, the opposing values being complementary sides of the same coin. Self-conscious good or evil is equally counterfeit. Spontaneity in the enactment of both is the essential mark of purity and distinction. Only self-flattering poseurs claim predominant ownership of good or evil. Without exception we fluctuate between the two, both qualities being regulated mainly by social conditioning. The vibrancy of evil requires the threat of external force for its containment, and the drive to be good requires narcissistic self-interest or delusions of grandeur.
The majority of people naturally enjoy the idea of running with the fox. But their heads, their pack instinct and keen sense of self-survival, urge them to ride more safely with the hounds.
The vast popularity of crime in the media and entertainment industries suggests most people spend their lives envying the certitude of belief and ability for action possessed by the professional criminal. They are, as it were, impatient for the villain to appear on stage to liven things up. And if he appeared in real life, what then? Shock and trepidation.
For instance, if someone you trusted were to offer to rid you of a lifelong enemy, a nagging wife, an obstacle to your promotion or some other important ambition, giving a complete guarantee that no suspicion would fall upon you, would you feel tempted to accept? I believe most people would initially at least be tempted.
The notion would emotionally attract. Then delayed caution would prompt secondary considerations: (a) is the guarantee genuine? (b) accepting that it is, what if something goes wrong? (c) is someone who makes such a proposal sane or to be trusted and, if not, would I eventually be regarded as a danger and disposed of in similar manner or be blackmailed? (d) can I even afford to show for one moment that I am the sort of person who would seriously contemplate such a proposition?
These and many other imponderables predominantly reflect concern for self, not the criminal act or the fate of the intended, annoying victim. However, I believe the majority of people would eventually, albeit grudgingly, begin to feel deep unease. A sense of stark, disturbing, stomach-churning reality they had never before been forced to experience. A daunting consciousness of alien power and personal responsibility. The absolute prerogative of a Caesar or divinity. To decide someone’s fate with casual ease and indifference. A cold-blooded, primal capability they amorally and even proudly assumed they and everyone else possessed as a birthright.
Most people do possess the capability to kill, when given government permission which obviates or diminishes personal responsibility and penalty. Or in the collective irresponsibility of a mob.
Significantly, in my unorthodox experience, almost everyone, after considerations of self-interest, consciously or subconsciously approaches the academic question of murder on mainly aesthetic grounds. Not moral. They will enthusiastically discuss or ingest every conceivable horrific method of successfully destroying their enemies. Experiencing no moral pang, only keen enjoyment at exploring and contemplating the fatal possibilities and painful variations.
Philosophical parlour games and semantical acrobatics soaring free of moral gravity also proliferate. For instance, if a killer of six proved that he had consciously refrained from killing a dozen other victims he previously had at his mercy, why should the dozen acts of clemency be of lesser moral significance than the six fatalities? Are good and evil primarily matters of arithmetic; is their significance, like success, measured by a stopwatch?
The following moral question is a well-known moral parlour game. Say, before the start of World War II, you were standing beside Hitler with a concealed gun, knowing or believing that fifty million people would die in a future war, would you have killed him? Would you have considered the assassination a criminal act or felt remorse? Would you have realised that, by killing him at that crucial period in history, Hitler would be respected today as one of the world’s greatest statesmen and strategists?
Do you have an inner statute of limitations for your own crimes? As years have passed and you are no longer the person who committed or would repeat such crimes, do you believe you should not be punished? Would you honestly sacrifice yourself simply to satisfy the abstract principle of public deterrent or divine/secular justice? In which case, do you still believe that a captured criminal who has similarly altered with passing years should continue to be punished regardless?
As already indicated, law-abiding souls must have their victims, too, experiencing no guilt at how pleasurable it feels to punish others for crimes they themselves have contemplated or succeeded in getting away with. Further, in punishing others for these crimes, they actually feel they are making retribution of some sort for their own. That’s why punishing others subconsciously feels so good.
Beneath the civilised veneer, man remains the supreme predator. Cursed with what he believes is understanding, his true soul blossoms godlike in the heart of the nuclear inferno. Again, only does punishment and retaliation frighten him, not the crime.
Practically everyone believes they could write a book or compose a song if only they put their mind to it. They believe this simply because they can easily comprehend the finished products of others. It is not until they attempt the task of creation themselves that they become conscious of their own limitations, lack of imagination, abysmal powers of self-expression and how unaccustomed they are to thinking deeply about anything at all.
Becoming aware of the vast gap that exists between understanding and personal creativity — and the intellectual effort required to capture and express a complex idea in simple terms — is humiliating.
The art of psychological profiling is also subject to a misapprehension as to its complexity. As soon as something is interpreted for them, readers or listeners tell themselves it was obvious anyway. They blithely credit themselves with the author’s insight or common sense, in a psychic precinct most people self-protectively avoid approaching anyway, in case they bump into themselves in the dark alleyways of the mind.
Had they been asked to interpret the psychological aspects of a murder, the result would probably have been a long confused silence. The subconscious defensive inertia to self-analysis combines with a social reticence to admit, even remotely, of sharing and understanding the psychological drives and thought patterns of a serial killer.
In liberal guises, the law-abiding masses will assure you that they d
o wish to understand, but that such atrocities are far beyond their pristine comprehension and delicate sensibilities, even if they work quite happily in armaments or biological warfare industries. Distance ameliorates any responsibility for monumental carnage, but the act of an individual killer shoves the spilled guts right under their noses.
Bad manners is the crime.
CHAPTER THREE
This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe, Is boundless better, boundless worse.
Tennyson (1809–1892)
Deep thought is anathema to most people. They are too self-absorbed, too deeply immersed in their own immediate appetites and mundane problems to exercise a spark of originality or a capacity for extended abstract cogitation, and are content to regurgitate second-hand or generally popular opinion. Such people seek safety in the stale clichés and platitudes programmed into them since childhood.
Television interviews with the so-called ‘average man in the street’ suggest that he is facile in almost every respect, prone to say what he believes ‘nice’ people would expect him to say, displaying a social awareness that would flatter Attila the Hun. In effect, an aspiring clone.
If you disagree with this general assessment, perhaps you should think again. We all believe we are unique. Relatively speaking, that is of course correct. Likewise we may regard someone as a ‘character,’ but that does not necessarily mean that they possess character.
Many serial killers think in terms of such adverse value distinction all the time. Their superiority complex is, it could be argued, paradoxically a symbol of inferiority. A closed mind. Almost completely self-consumed, insular in a psychopathic or psychotic stasis; they, much like patronising politicians, can pass public muster, but privately devalue others around them by habit or reflex. They regard people generally as obstacles to be surmounted by all available means, their victims appreciated intrinsically as existential commodities.
‘Good morning, sir. Why have you put out your lamp?’
‘Those are the orders,’ replied the lamplighter.
‘Good morning.’
‘What are the orders?’
‘The orders are that I put out my lamp. Good evening.’
And he lighted his lamp again.
‘And why have you just lighted it again?’
‘Those are the orders,’ replied the lamplighter.
‘I do not understand,’ said the little prince.
‘There is nothing to understand,’ said the lamplighter. ‘Orders
are orders. Good morning.’ And he put out his lamp.
— The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Policemen, penal psychiatrists, prison guards, pulp authors, TV crime pundits, newspaper reporters and other failed academics and social misfits who make a profitable, parasitic living from the crimes of others, may condescendingly claim special insight into the criminal mind — and why not? — since they have no doubt vicariously enjoyed committing every crime under the sun in thought and spirit themselves, and perhaps many in actuality.
Those who make a make a ‘respectable’ living from crime are in many respects more corrupt, culpable and self-deluded than the criminals themselves.
Therefore, by virtue of extensive study of the human animal, I might counterclaim insight into the mind of the serial academic and commercial crime scavenger. The self-appointed scholastic expert but practical amateur. Or the penal dustbin men, too inadequate to make a living in the real world, bolstering their insecurity by locking people up. Policemen who lack the intellect and nerve to commit their own crimes but feel free to steal and extort stolen money from criminals. And, last but beastlier, the local and national politicians who graft a career from loudly condemning criminals and crime — as a general rule the more corrupt a politician is, the more vociferously they condemn and exploit criminals to divert attention from their own iniquity. In short, corrupt police, judges, lawyers, judges, customs men, etc., who are on the take are not particular whether their bribes originate from drugs, prostitution, murder, gambling, robbery, extortion, or whatever other criminal pursuit, so long as the dirt doesn’t show under their nails.
Second-rate authors and journalists hacking towards media prominence via the serial killer risk nothing by the encouragement of crime through commercial exploitation and sensationalism. Like tail-notes to a comet, they seek by association to share the historical longevity certain serial killers achieve in the collective subconscious. Academics in this category, resenting dependency upon the savage, transmute their salacious guilt and lack of self-esteem into sanctimonious vilification of the specific killer chosen as their personal vehicle to fame and fortune.
Police chiefs are subject to the same self-aggrandizement syndrome, habitually fighting amongst themselves not only to claim major personal credit for capturing the serial killer, but also to cash in by having a book ghostwritten about their own imaginary powers of detection — though in reality, most criminals are caught through police informers.
Even eminent judges jostle unashamedly for the distinction of trying particularly notorious murderers, hoping to be remembered in something other than infrequently read, dusty tomes of jurisprudence.
Such is the competitive alchemy of fame and infamy . . . the stroke of a bloody axe often outliving that of the pen.
As previously intimated, the serial killer is unavoidably a failure in many normal walks of life. Particularly if stoical acceptance of tedious subsistence is the prime criterion commonly sought and admired. He lacks the patience to compromise and bear the stultifying lassitude of ordinary modern life. He — or she, though women’s lib prefers to claim less than equality in the field of murder — wants more NOW, without wasting time on social decorum or strategy, in what is clearly perceived an extremely uncertain and short life.
This acute awareness in the serial killer of precious time passing creates an existential urgency which counterproductively sublimates the knowledge that one mistake may deprive him of life, or terminate the freedom he hungers to exercise. In actuality, subconsciously or consciously, the serial killer has emotionally chosen to live one day as a lion, rather than decades as a sheep.
Once he believes that if he does not determine his own destiny some fool will determine it for him, the dice cannot be recalled. Legality and morality are transmuted almost magically beyond strictly irrelevant human barriers. No one had better try to hinder his riding roughshod over such impediments to existential fulfilment. He has declared war.
Psychologically, there may be some social conditioning which still hinders his obsessive and, therefore, contradictory quest for spontaneity. A debilitating metaphysical impulse may still stubbornly inhabit his subconscious. An impulse which paradoxically compels him to openly challenge a Supreme Being he consciously does not believe exists and, in some instances, may wish did, so that he might either smite the antithetic entity directly, or beg for a forgiveness he would never stoop to ask from man. At this initial stage, some serial killers may still retain the common human tendency to luxuriate in fear-induced guilt.
But once the killer has committed the first or second act of homicide, unchallenged by any divine or increasingly contemptible secular power, he will gradually accept his own acts as normal, or supranormal, and those of the rest of humanity as subnormal and weak. He will in effect begin to regard society in much the same way as professional soldiers do an enemy state. He has created a microcosmic state of his own in which he alone governs, becoming as careless with other people’s lives as are most rulers.
The serial killer perhaps attains a degree of amoral, ruthless detachment on par with, say, a state-security doctor employed to ensure a prisoner under torture does not die before divulging the information sought. By a process of logical extension, the killer sees himself as following the example of society’s legalised killers, only freelance. But he considers himself superior to legal killers in that he accepts responsibility and the risk of penalty from which the officially
sanctioned are exempt. He might also validly come to the conclusion that crime is a logical variant of capitalist free enterprise, simply a lucrative and often exciting form of illegal self-employment.
I personally can testify to having had boundless energy for criminal pursuits, just like any avid businessman could work from dawn till dusk on projects offering high financial or existential rewards. Crime is a natural extension of laissez-faire culture.
Having a passion for travel, my long journeys from city to city to recruit and organise the required labour and logistics of a crime were acutely stimulating, an aesthetic bonus. I particularly enjoyed the old-world romanticism of travelling by steam locomotive, and the mysterious, sooty atmosphere of railway stations vibrant with bustle and purpose. I also experienced a unique sense of licence when taking anonymous possession of a fresh city from which I would be departing the same night. The kinetic panache of total possibility. Several authors independently likened my passion for travel and certain other traits and characteristics to that of Stavrogin, the pivotal figure in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (a.k.a. The Devils), a satire on the revolutionary mind.
Whether the comparison holds any validity or truth does not trouble me one way or the other, and in fact affords the opportunity to underline some salient psychological points, being an ardent admirer of all Dostoevsky’s works and their unique psychological depths.
Most intelligent people have the tendency to believe they are masters of their own destiny to a greater or lesser degree. As to whether this concomitantly signifies a greater or lesser degree of insanity or sanity is an imponderable to other than the wilfully blind. Further, whether any individual’s beliefs are considered sane or insane by others is of no basic relevance to the individual concerned.
Peripherally, we all change with time, but the deeply held central beliefs forming the gravitational core of each unique personality rarely undergo significant modification. Whole nations and individuals regularly defend their beliefs to the death. Sometimes the victors are admired and venerated, and sometimes the defeated. Transient historical perspective is as fickle and modish as morality and legality, sanity and insanity. Acceptance of society’s idiosyncratic norms can be accounted a virtue one moment, a crime the next, and only the individual has the supreme right to decide which, and accept the consequences of his/her considered acts.
