The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [108]
A couple of weeks before, I’d found myself unable to bash a salmon’s head against the rocks when we’d caught one while camping along a remote river. But after half an hour on that slime-line, gutting, beheading, and slicing fins from fish after fish as they came down the conveyor belt, all feeling had gone—from my frozen fingers to my overwhelmed conscience. I went on gutting fish eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, until there were no more fish to gut. By then (about six weeks later), any random jumble of shapes (a sleeping bag crumpled in the tent, the folds of someone’s sweater, clouds converging in the sky) looked like fish guts to me. Whatever was beautiful and sacred in a salmon was lost to me, forever. (No sushi for me!)
But there’s nothing evil in that, is there? They’re just fish, after all. Similarly, people working in slaughterhouses mechanistically ripping the guts out of pigs, cows, chickens, and lambs occasionally remind themselves that these are—or were—“ just” animals. And laboratory workers smearing shampoo into kittens’ eyes or studying how much social isolation it takes to kill infant primates no doubt murmur the same self-justifying mantra as they search for sleep at night.
Evil is like pornography: impossible to define, but we know it when we see it. Don’t we?
A recent text52 on forensic psychology outlines four motivational systems that inspire serial killers:
1. Visionarykillers have just lost it. They’re convinced God, Satan, the neighbor’s dog, or The Beatles are telling them to kill, and really, who’s gonna argue with The Beatles?
2. Hedonistic types get off on the killing, normally in one of three ways:
• lust (the torture excites them sexually),
• thrill (they do it for the adrenaline rush), and
• comfort (they do it for the money).
3. Power/control types are drawn by the ability to flick the switch from life to death.
4. And lastly, we have Dexter’s motivational type: mission-oriented . Mission-oriented killers see themselves as making the world a better place by eliminating certain types of people: prostitutes, blacks, savages, heathens, homosexuals, Catholics, Jews, Armenians, Hutus, Tutsis, infidels, terrorists . . . the enemy.
What is Dexter’s mission, then? To eliminate those “who deserve it.” His Code is designed to prevent mistakes, much as the legal system is designed to avoid the execution of innocent convicts. But our legal system is as fallible as Harry’s Code. The Innocence Project, a legal organization using DNA testing to uncover wrongful convictions, has exonerated 252 people since 1989. On average, these innocent men spent thirteen years in prison. Seventeen of them were on death row.53
“Mistakes,” as they say, “were made.”
But a few hundred innocent men in prison is nothing compared to the so-called “collateral damage” we willingly accept in what we persist in calling “war,” though war is rarely formally declared any more these days.
In Blackwater, his explosive exposé of one of the mercenary armies employed by the United States in Iraq, journalist Jeremy Scahill documents the deaths of scores of innocent Iraqi civilians at the hands of trigger-happy thugs for hire. But these represent just a tiny fraction of the overall civilian death toll in the latest Iraq war and occupation by U.S. forces, totaling well over 95,000.54
And the beat goes on. Drone attacks, coordinated by Blackwater employees (now renamed “Xe”), the Air Force, and the CIA have killed scores, if not hundreds, more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a country with which the U.S. is not even at war. Today, as I write this, The New York Times is reporting that, “American troops raked a large passenger bus with gun-fire near Kandahar . . . killing and wounding civilians . . .” Let’s face it: we’re more than willing to accept the sacrifice of innocent civilians in pursuit of our mission.
And what is our mission? Just like Dexter’s, it is to eliminate those who seem to “deserve it.”
“But Dexter is a criminal,” some