Entertainment itself can be a motive for torture, as at the Roman Colosseum and in blood sports like bearbaiting and cat-burning. Tuchman notes that towns in medieval France would sometimes purchase a condemned criminal from another town so they could entertain their citizens with a public execution.222
Hideous tortures and mutilations can accompany a rampage by soldiers, rioters, or militiamen, especially when they have been released from apprehension and fear, the phenomenon that Randall Collins calls forward panic. These are the atrocities that accompany pogroms, genocides, police brutality, and military routs, including those in tribal warfare.
Finally there are serial killers, the sickos who stalk, kidnap, torture, mutilate, and kill their victims for sexual gratification. Serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are not the same as garden-variety mass murderers.223 Mass murderers include men who run amok, like the enraged postal workers who avenge a humiliation and prove their potency by taking as many people as they can with them in a final suicidal outburst. They also include spree killers, like the Washington, D.C., sniper John Muhammad, who stretch out their vengeance and dominance over several weeks. With serial killers, in contrast, the motive is sadism. They are aroused by the prospect of tormenting, disfiguring, dismembering, eviscerating, and slowly draining the life out of victims with their bare hands. Even the most jaded consumer of human atrocities will find something to shock them in Harold Schechter’s authoritative compendium The Serial Killer Files.
For all its notoriety in rock songs, made-for-TV movies, and Hollywood blockbusters, serial killing is a rare phenomenon. The criminologists James Alan Fox and Jack Levin note that “there may actually be more scholars studying serial murder than there are offenders committing it.”224 And even that small number (like every other tabulation of violence we have examined in this book) has been in decline. In the 1980s, when serial killers were a pop sensation, there were 200 known perpetrators in all, and they killed around 70 victims a year. In the 1990s, there were 141, and in the 2000s, only 61.225 Those figures may be underestimates (because many serial killers prey on runaways, prostitutes, the homeless, and others whose disappearance may not have been reported as murders), but by any reckoning, no more than two or three dozen serial killers can be at large in the United States at any time, and they are collectively responsible for a tiny fraction of the 17,000 homicides that take place every year.226
Serial killing is nothing new. Schechter shows that contrary to a common view that serial killers are the product of our sick society, they have splattered the pages of history for millennia. Caligula, Nero, Bluebeard (probably based on the 15th-century knight Gilles de Rais), Vlad the Impaler, and Jack the Ripper are celebrity examples, and scholars have speculated that legends of werewolves, robber bridegrooms, and demon barbers may have been based on widely retold tales of actual serial killers. All that is new in sadistic killing is the name for the motive, which comes to us courtesy of the most famous serial torturer of all, Donatien Alphonse François, also known as the Marquis de Sade. In earlier centuries serial killers were called murder fiends, bloodthirsty monsters, devils in human shape, or the morally insane.
Though the florid sadism of serial killers is historically rare, the sadism of inquisitors, rampagers, public execution spectators, blood sport fans, and Colosseum audiences is not. And even serial killers don’t end up with their avocation because of any gene, brain lesion, or childhood experience we can identify.227 (They do tend to be victims of childhood sexual and physical abuse, but so are millions of people who don’t grow up to be serial killers.) So it’s conceivable that the pathway to serial killing can shed light on the pathway that leads ordinary people into sadism as well. How can we make sense of this most senseless variety of violence?
The development of sadism requires two things: motives to enjoy the suffering of others, and a removal of the restraints that ordinarily inhibit people from acting on them.
Though it’s painful to admit, human nature comes equipped with at least four motives to take satisfaction in the pain of others. One is a morbid fascination with the vulnerability of living things, a phenomenon perhaps best captured by the word macabre. This is what leads boys to pull the legs off grasshoppers and to fry ants with a magnifying glass. It leads adults to rubberneck at the scene of automobile accidents—a vice that can tie up traffic for miles—and to fork over their disposable income to read and watch gory entertainment. The ultimate motive may be mastery over the living world, including our own safety. The implicit lesson of macabre voyeurism may be “But for the swerve of a steering wheel or an unlocked front door, that could have happened to me.”228
Another appeal of feeling someone’s pain is dominance. It can be enjoyable to see how the mighty have fallen, especially if they have been among your tormenters. And when one is looking downward instead of upward, it’s reassuring to know that you can exercise the power to dominate others should the need arise. The ultimate form of power over someone is the power to cause them pain at will.229
Nowadays neuroscientists will slide people into a magnet to look at just about any human experience. Though no one, to my knowledge, has studied sadism in the scanner, a recent experiment looked at the diluted version, schadenfreude.230 Male Japanese students lay in an MRI machine and were asked to put themselves in the shoes of a schlemiel who longs for a job in a multinational information technology company but earns mediocre grades, flubs his job interview, warms the bench in his baseball club, ends up with a low-paying job in a retail store, lives in a tiny apartment, and has no girlfriend. At his college reunion he meets a classmate who works for a multinational corporation, lives in a luxury condo, owns a fancy car, dines at French restaurants, collects watches, jet-sets to weekend vacation spots, and “has many opportunities to meet girls after work.” The participant also imagines meeting two other classmates, one successful, one unsuccessful, whom the Japanese researchers assumed—correctly, as it turned out—would arouse no envy in the participant because they were women. The participant, still imagining himself the loser, then reads about a string of misfortunes that befall his envied but increasingly Job-like classmate: the classmate is falsely accused of cheating on an exam, he becomes the victim of ugly rumors, his girlfriend has an affair, his company gets into financial trouble, his bonus is small, his car breaks down, his watches are stolen, his apartment building is sprayed with graffiti, he gets food poisoning at the French restaurant, and his vacation is canceled because of a typhoon. The researchers could literally read the gloating off the participants’ brains. As the participants read of the misfortunes of their virtual better (though not of the nonthreatening women), their striatum, the part of the Seeking circuit that underlies wanting and liking, lit up like a Tokyo boulevard. The results were the same when women contemplated the downfall of an enviable female rival.
A third occasion for sadism is revenge, or the sanitized third-party version we call justice. The whole point of moralistic punishment is that the wrongdoer suffers for his sins, and we have already seen that revenge can be sweet. Revenge literally turns off the empathic response in the brain (at least among men), and it is consummated only when the avenger knows that the target knows that his suffering is payback for his misdeeds.231 What better way for the avenger to be certain in that knowledge than to inflict the suffering himself?
Finally, there is sexual sadism. Sadism itself is not a common perversion—among people who indulge in S&M, far more of them are into the M than the S—but milder forms of domination and degradation are not uncommon in pornography, and they may be a by-product of the fact that males are the more ardent and females the more discriminating gender.232 The circuits for sexuality and aggression are intertwined in the limbic system, and both respond to testosterone.233
Male aggression has a sexual component. In interviews, many soldiers describe battlefield routs in explicitly erotic terms. One Vietnam veteran said, “To some people, carrying a gun was like having a p
ermanent hard-on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger.”234 Another agreed: “There is . . . just this incredible sense of power in killing five people.... The only way I can equate it is to ejaculation. Just an incredible sense of relief, you know, that I did this.”235 Institutionalized torture is often sexualized as well. Female Christian martyrs were depicted as having been sexually mutilated, and when the tables were turned in medieval Christendom, the instruments of torture were often directed at women’s erogenous zones.236 As with the martyrologies, later genres of macabre entertainment such as pulp fiction, Grand Guignol, and “true crime” tabloids often put female protagonists in peril of sexual torture and mutilation.237 And government torturers in police states have often been reported to be aroused by their atrocities. Lloyd deMause recounts testimony from a survivor of the Holocaust:The SS camp commander stood close to the whipping post throughout the flogging.... His whole face was already red with lascivious excitement. His hands were plunged deep in his trouser pockets, and it was quite clear that he was masturbating throughout.... On more than thirty occasions, I myself have witnessed SS camp commanders masturbating during floggings.238
If serial killers represent the taste for rough sex taken to an extreme, the gender difference among serial killers, who come in both sexes, is instructive. Schechter is skeptical of self-anointed “profilers” and “mind hunters,” like the Jack Crawford character in Silence of the Lambs, but he allows for one kind of inference from the modus operandi of a serial killer to a characteristic trait: “When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut open, its viscera removed, and its genitals excised, they are justified in making one basic assumption: the perpetrator was a man.”239 It’s not that girls can never grow up to be serial killers; Schechter recounts the stories of several black widows and angels of death. But they go about their pastimes differently. Schechter explains:There are unmistakable parallels between [male serial killers’] kind of violence—phallic-aggressive, penetrative, rapacious, and (insofar as it commonly gratifies itself upon the bodies of strangers) undiscriminating—and the typical pattern of male sexual behavior. For this reason, it is possible to see sadistic mutilation-murder as a grotesque distortion . . . of normal male sexuality....
Female psychopaths are no less depraved than their male counterparts. As a rule, however, brutal penetration is not what turns them on. Their excitement comes—not from violating the bodies of strangers with phallic objects—but from a grotesque, sadistic travesty of intimacy and love: from spooning poisoned medicine into the mouth of a trusting patient, for example, or smothering a sleeping child in its bed. In short, from tenderly turning a friend, family member, or dependent into a corpse—from nurturing them to death.240
With so many sources for sadism, why are there so few sadists? Obviously the mind must be equipped with safety catches against hurting others, and sadism erupts when they are disabled.
The first that comes to mind is empathy. If people feel each other’s pain, then hurting someone else will be felt as hurting oneself. That is why sadism is more thinkable when the victims are demonized or dehumanized beings that lie outside one’s circle of empathy. But as I have mentioned (and as we shall explore in the next chapter), for empathy to be a brake on aggression it has to be more than the habit of inhabiting another person’s mind. After all, sadists often exercise a perverted ingenuity for intuiting how best to torment their victims. An empathic response must specifically include an alignment of one’s own happiness with that of another being, a faculty that is better called sympathy or compassion than empathy. Baumeister points out that an additional emotion has to kick in for sympathy to inhibit behavior: guilt. Guilt, he notes, does not just operate after the fact. Much of our guilt is anticipatory—we refrain from actions that would make us feel bad if we carried them out. 241
Another brake on sadism is a cultural taboo: the conviction that deliberate infliction of pain is not a thinkable option, regardless of whether it engages one’s sympathetic inhibitions. Today torture has been explicitly prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. 242 Unlike ancient, medieval, and early modern times when torture was a form of popular entertainment, today the infliction of torture by governments is almost entirely clandestine, showing that the taboo is widely acknowledged—though like most taboos, it is at times hypocritically flouted. In 2001 the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz addressed this hypocrisy by proposing a legal mechanism designed to eliminate sub rosa torture in democracies.243 The police in a ticking-bomb scenario would have to get a warrant from a disinterested judge before torturing the lifesaving information out of a suspect; all other forms of coercive interrogation would be flatly prohibited. The most common response was outrage. By the very act of examining the taboo on torture, Dershowitz had violated the taboo, and he was widely misunderstood as advocating torture rather than seeking to minimize it.244 Some of the more measured critics argued that the taboo in fact serves a useful function. Better, they said, to deal with a ticking-bomb scenario, should one ever occur, on an ad hoc basis, and perhaps even put up with some clandestine torture, than to place torture on the table as a live option, from which it could swell from ticking bombs to a wider range of real or imagined threats.245
But perhaps the most powerful inhibition against sadism is more elemental: a visceral revulsion against hurting another person. Most primates find the screams of pain of a fellow animal to be aversive, and they will abstain from food if it is accompanied by the sound and sight of a fellow primate being shocked.246 The distress is an expression not of the monkey’s moral scruples but of its dread of making a fellow animal mad as hell. (It also may be a response to whatever external threat would have caused a fellow animal to issue an alarm call.)247 The participants in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, who obeyed instructions to deliver shocks to a bogus fellow participant, were visibly distraught as they heard the shrieks of pain they were inflicting.248 Even in moral philosophers’ hypothetical scenarios like the Trolley Problem, survey-takers recoil from the thought of throwing the fat man in front of the trolley, though they know it would save five innocent lives.249
Testimony on the commission of hands-on violence in the real world is consistent with the results of laboratory studies. As we saw, humans don’t readily consummate mano a mano fisticuffs, and soldiers on the battlefield maybe petrified about pulling the trigger.250 The historian Christopher Browning’s interviews with Nazi reservists who were ordered to shoot Jews at close range showed that their initial reaction was a physical revulsion to what they were doing.251 The reservists did not recollect the trauma of their first murders in the morally colored ways we might expect—neither with guilt at what they were doing, nor with retroactive excuses to mitigate their culpability. Instead they recalled how viscerally upset they were made by the screams, the gore, and the raw feeling of killing people at close range. As Baumeister sums up their testimony, “The first day of mass murder did not prompt them to engage in spiritual soul-searching so much as it made them literally want to vomit.”252
There are barriers to sadism, then, but there must also be workarounds, or sadism would not exist. The crudest workaround is evident during rampages, when a window of opportunity to rout the enemy opens up and any revulsion against hands-on harm is suspended. The most sophisticated workaround may be the willing suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in fictional worlds. One part of the brain allows us to lose ourselves in the story and perhaps indulge in a touch of virtual sadism. The other reminds us that it’s all make-believe, so our inhibitions don’t spoil the pleasure.253
Psychopathy is a lifelong disabling of the inhibitions against sadism. Psychopaths have a blunted response in their amygdala and orbital cortex to signs of distress, together with a marked lack of sympathy with the interests of other people.254 All serial killers are psychopaths, and survivors of brutal government interrogation and punishment often report th
at some of the guards stood out from others in their sadism, presumably the psychopaths.255 Yet most psychopaths are not serial killers or even sadists, and in some environments, such as public spectacles of cruelty in medieval Europe, nearly everyone indulged in sadism. That means we need to identify the pathway that leads people, some more easily than others, toward the infliction of pain for pleasure.
Sadism is literally an acquired taste.256 Government torturers such as police interrogators and prison guards follow a counterintuitive career trajectory. It’s not the rookies who are overly exuberant and the veterans who fine-tune the pain to extract the maximum amount of actionable information. Instead it’s the veterans who torture prisoners beyond any conceivable purpose. They come to enjoy their work. Other forms of sadism also must be cultivated. Most sexual sadists start out wielding the whips and collars as a favor to the more numerous masochists; only gradually do they start to enjoy it. Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next one easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction. One can imagine that when tortures and executions are public and common, as in the European Middle Ages, the acclimatization process can inure an entire population.
It’s often said that people can become desensitized to violence, but that is not what happens when people acquire a taste for torture. They are not oblivious to the suffering of others in the way that the neighbors of a fish-processing plant stop noticing the noisome smell. Sadists take pleasure in the suffering of victims, or, in the case of serial killers, positively crave it.257
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 82
