Savage Spawn (4 page)

VI

Dissecting Evil

Researchers have identified two distinct components of psychopathy: the
impulsive
aspect, featuring lack of self-control and delay of gratification, failure to respond to long-term punishment, and high levels of sensation and thrill seeking (the fun of crime); and the
interpersonal
aspect, featuring inflated self-
esteem, pathological lying, callousness, unemotionality, detachment, and lack of empathy (other people are garbage) (27).

The Book of Deuteronomy describes a “stubborn and rebellious son” whose incorrigible behavior merits death by stoning (28). Talmudic commentary clarifies that an actual case of incorrigibility meriting execution was improbable and, in fact, may have never occurred (29). Rather, the intention was to present a teaching case—a metaphorical warning of the danger that results when incorrigibility reaches dangerous proportions in a young person.

What is fascinating is how closely the elements that make up the stubborn and rebellious son match our contemporary understanding of psychopathy: extreme lust and gluttony (impulsive factors) and crime (interpersonal factors). Talmudic sages living two thousand years ago realized what some modern scholars have come to learn rather painfully: If extremes of bad behavior are not quelled very early in childhood, they are extremely difficult to reverse.

There are no actual data regarding rates of rehabilitation as they relate to age, but clinical experience has taught us that the older the child, the less pliable his behavior. The optimist in me wants to say,
Never give up on anyone
. But the chances of eliminating entrenched psychopathic behavior in an adolescent are extremely low, if not zero.

Nevertheless, it's important to examine the components of psychopathy in order to tease out how they impact upon crime. Young psychopaths are not a totally homogeneous group and vary in terms of where they fall along the impulsive and interpersonal dimensions. Those high in impulsivity are more likely to be explosive; those loaded on the latter tend to commit cold, cruel, premeditated crimes.

Further complicating the picture, there does exist a very small subset of psychopaths who display
schizoid
symptoms—schizophreniclike weirdness and extreme social isolation that approach but never reach full-blown madness. Schizoid psychopaths are violent hermits who act odd but understand what they are doing and possess the ability to plot, scheme, and evade capture. They are true psychological islands with no need whatsoever for intimacy or social connection. Even in prison they are feared and shunned, and they often exhibit the highest levels of cruelty.

Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski comes across as one of these evil isolates. His deviant behavior began in childhood. Bright enough to elude identification for decades, Kaczynski might very well have stretched his criminal career till the day of his death if his brother hadn't turned him in. As is typical of psychopaths, Kaczynski evinced no remorse and arrogantly attempted to justify his crimes using a combination of neo-Luddite and radical environmentalist pseudophilosophy. However, his writings reveal his primary motive to be hurting and killing other people. Fortunately, schizoid psychopaths are extremely rare—a minority among a minority.

Though variations in psychopathy do exist, psychopaths as a group are
less
variable than normal people. As one veteran detective once told me, “If you've met one career criminal, you've met 'em all. They're out of the cookie cutter.”

This is certainly true of organized serial killers. As a crime novelist, I'm loath to admit this, but the Bundys and Gacys of this world are worlds away from brilliant, charmingly evil Hannibal Lecter. In fact, stripped of their lies and their evasions, real-life serial killers are flat, stereotypical, and downright
boring
—walking versions of Gertrude Stein's classic description of Oakland: There's no
there
, there.

How do they get that way?

No one knows, but two schools of thought have emerged along the same old ideological battle lines that have divided psychology—and its ancestors, philosophy and theology—since their inceptions as formal fields of study:
genetics versus environment
.

The nature-nurture tango probably dates back to the first curious human, but like most megaquestions, it remains an unanswerable parlor game. And like most dichotomies, the controversy has endured well past the point of usefulness. Time and time again, the most reasonable result of nature/nurture research turns out to be the middle ground:
Most human behavior is the result of the interaction between inborn traits and environment.
Scientists will continue to tease out specific proportions of acquired versus inborn influences because scientists are curious people and they need to publish articles in scholarly journals in order to achieve tenure. But these calculations have very little usefulness for public policy.

By point of illustration, let's say, purely hypothetically, that we discover criminality to be 30 percent environmentally related and 70 percent genetic. Where does this lead us proactively? Do we forget about child rearing and schooling because most bad behavior is inherited? Or do we redouble our efforts to improve the environment because 30 percent is a large chunk? Even if we opt to design programs, there's no reason to weigh them 30 percent toward environmental change to 70 percent toward genetic manipulation, because there's no reason to assume that proportion of cause has anything to do with proportion of optimal solution. The same would hold true if the environment played only a 10 percent role, because a tenth of something as important as criminality bears close attention.

Nevertheless, the nature/nurture debate rages within the pages of academic journals and on talk shows. And once again, “scientific” opinions are often influenced more by political attitudes and personal preconceptions than by facts.

Environmental determinism—the nurture side—has tended to be favored by those scholars who see themselves as social liberals, because belief in a strong governmental role in improving the quality of life depends upon the conviction that human behavior is tractable. Similarly, those mavens adhering to either libertarian or anarchic views that denigrate the role of government, or fiscally conservative ideologues with a jaundiced view of economic and social tinkering, are comfortable attributing human behavior to DNA-mediated brain chemistry because the resultant social pessimism goes a long way in justifying refusal to fund social programs.

Time and time again these two extreme views butt heads in the dreary corridors of government like a pair of deranged rams. When politics rears its ugly head, truth suffers.

But the average person understands. You don't need a Ph.D. or a think-tank job to figure it out.

It's both.

Does any reasonable person deny that environment strongly affects people? Or that inborn factors are a total wash? (Actually, during tumultuous times, ideological rigidity
can
lead to some pretty strange mental pretzels. When I was in graduate school during the early 1970s, radical feminist doctrine put forth the view that sex-role behaviors and attitudes—the visible manifestations of femininity and masculinity—were 100 percent learned: Give a boy a doll and he'll abandon cowboys and Indians, hand a girl a rifle and she'll grow up tough and macho. A brief visit to any newborn nursery would have dispelled this nonsense—even casual observation would have revealed differing rates of activity, muscularity, vocal pitch, and so on in the blue versus the pink bassinets. Ditto for the merest exposure to preschools, baby-sitting, or child rearing. But why let reality cloud your dogma?)

With regard to psychopathy, environmental theory has focused upon social factors such as poverty and abuse and psychological issues such as disruption of parent-child attachment, especially during the first two or three years of childhood. Studying the infant-toddler period makes intuitive good sense because much emotional conditioning occurs during this period and one of the most striking aspects of psychopathy is gross abnormality of the emotional system.

During early childhood, the foundations of interpersonal relationships are laid as the baby bonds with parents or caretakers by experiencing satiation of bodily needs, receiving physical and emotional nurturance, and learning to associate physical satisfaction with affection. Toddlers also develop specific strategies of coping with anger, fear, and frustration, and they begin to identify with other people at a rudimentary level and to reciprocate affection. The first signs of altruism and sympathy for others usually appear during toddlerhood, supplanting the infant's inborn narcissism.

Psychopaths make it to adulthood without ever developing the capacity for empathy and sympathy, though they learn to be quite good at imitating both. They view people as objects, which allows them to exploit, manipulate, and inflict high levels of pain on others without regret—what's wrong with cheating or stabbing a
thing
? It's not that they lack an understanding of morality and the rules of conduct—many psychopaths subscribe to some kind of moral code. In fact, imprisoned criminals often spout a strong law-and-order line. It's just that they believe the rules apply to others, not them.

Psychopaths are also quite enthusiastic about defending themselves physically—whether or not defense is necessary—and they display a heightened sense of interpersonal threat, perceiving aggression and hostility in the behavior of others when it doesn't exist (30). Like cornered animals, they are likely to lash out violently when they feel trapped.

Though calm, cool, and excellent sleepers, psychopaths are by no means devoid of emotion. They experience anger and pleasure and boredom at high levels—indeed, they crave and often chase pleasure with a staggering single-mindedness. But anxiety, worry, and ambivalence are muted or absent, though the psychopath can mimic them—role playing of the most malignant variety.

Skillful, intelligent psychopaths can learn kindness, sensitivity, and morality as abstractions and weaknesses to be exploited, but they don't integrate these qualities into their personalities.

Psychopathy, like any other personality dimension, takes time to develop, and young killers such as Johnson and Golden can be thought of as incompletely fashioned criminals: impulsive, unsophisticated, lacking even the flawed judgment of adult psychopaths. Despite clear evidence of premeditation, as master felons the boys were pathetic duds—boasting about their intentions to anyone who'd listen, leaving behind mountains of evidence. No Sherlock was necessary to figure out whodunit. Lacking access to guns, their misdeeds would likely have expressed themselves as some variant of schoolyard bullying, perhaps a knifing. Equipped with a firearms arsenal, their faulty reasoning, low impulse control, and lack of smarts had just the opposite result: mindless carnage.

It seems logical that disruption of the parent-child bonding process has something to do with this emotional warp. The problem is, the kind of data it would take to pinpoint how specific processes of emotional scrambling occur are hard to obtain, for we are generally unable to study and observe large numbers of children and family from the moment of birth through adulthood with the kind of detail necessary to establish causation. Some of the more thought-provoking studies about the biology of psychopathy have been produced in countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where national registries are maintained, but large-scale American data are conspicuously lacking.

One alternative to multigenerational longitudinal research involves studying kids who already exhibit high degrees of aggression, violence, and/or criminality and attempting to relate those characteristics to various measurements of early childhood disruption. Numerous studies have been carried out on the relationship between criminality and abuse, divorce and marital separation, and the intrusion of violence into the child's life, either directly or through the media.

Family breakdown, as exemplified by divorce and separation, is clearly related to a host of psychological problems in children, including school problems, truancy, alcoholism, and drug use, all of which are often precursors of criminal behavior. Childhood aggression seems to predict alcoholism and drug use in adolescence; in turn, substance abuse seems to predict adult criminality, especially when combined with parental alcoholism and drug use (5, 6, 31–33).

Seems
to, because statistics are valid only for groups and are mathematically irrelevant when making predictions about individuals. Statistics can also be monkeyed with easily by experts in order to support whatever conclusions the researcher wants them to buttress.

One example of this is the misuse of a statistical concept commonly bandied about in the popular press:
correlation,
which is a mathematical expression of coexistence between two or more variables.
Correlation is not, by itself, causation.
Correlations simply state probability associations. A positive correlation means that when X is present, Y is more likely to be present. A negative correlation means the presence of X is more probable when Y is absent.

Correlations
can
be causal—smoking cigarettes is both correlated with and a cause of lung cancer. Putting a gun to one's head and pulling the trigger is highly correlated with, and causally linked to, infliction of a fatal wound.

But consider the correlation between blond hair and blue eyes. Both traits coexist at higher-than-chance rates, but neither trait brings about the other. Similarly, itching and wheezing resulting from exposure to an allergen are concomitant symptoms with a shared cause, but they lack a causal connection.

Another poorly understood statistic is the
power
of a correlation—how much variability within a group the correlation actually explains. Mathematically, this is obtained by squaring the correlation. By point of example, let's say we study the relationship between freckles and red hair in a group of people and come up with a correlation of +.60. This means that red-haired people tend to be freckled and vice versa (without saying anything about causality). However, there will also be plenty of red-haired people without freckles as well as freckled people without red hair (statisticians call this “scatter”). Squaring .60 (.60 X .60), we obtain .36, or 36 percent, which means that slightly over a third of the group can be classified as red-haired and freckled. That may still be important, but it's a long way from the majority status implied by the .60 correlation itself. Failure to understand the correlation-squared index is one reason nonscientists are often overly impressed by scientific data.