The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [110]
Ubiquitous Fox commentator and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham cites the popularity of 24 as indicating political assent to America’s discarding of decades of international law prohibiting torture, noting that, “[People] love Jack Bauer. In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.” Personally, she said, she found it “soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists.”
What sort of person finds it “soothing” to watch someone being tortured?
If Americans are using their TV remotes to cast virtual votes assenting to the torture of suspected terrorists, that’s not the only sort of remote action we’re taking. This year, for the first time ever, the Air Force is buying more unmanned drone aircraft than conventional fighters and bombers. Many of the drones flying over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are piloted by men sitting in front of computer screens at Creech Air Force base, about halfway between Las Vegas and Death Valley. One of these men, Lt. Col. Gough, described his bifurcated life to journalist Lara Logan: “To go and work and do bad things to bad people . . . and then when I go home and I go to church and try to be a productive member of society, those don’t necessarily mesh well.”61
No, they don’t. Unless you’re a psychopath, of course. And even then, it can be tricky. Dexter has often found it difficult to juggle picking the kids up at school, remembering to get diapers on the way home from work, and disposing of the body he only had time to partially dismember the night before. There just aren’t enough hours in the day!
In summation, I’m afraid I don’t have any grand conclusions to offer. I’m not going to be able to wrap this up neatly, like one of Dexter’s tightly packaged victims. All I know is that the numbness to others’ pain, the anti-empathy that allows Dexter to dispassionately kill people—that condemns Dexter to kill other people—is something we all share, to an increasing degree. It’s a numbness that spreads in us as we progressively disengage from tangible life and death in favor of the virtual. It’s not just an issue for those of us guiding drones over distant deserts. Killing and torturing “bad guys”—even when we’re not sure we’ve got the right ones—is becoming, somehow, ever more soothing to us all.
Christopher Ryan, PhD, is a psychologist. He is co-author (with Cacilda Jethá, MD) of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (sexatdawn.com). He blogs at Psychology Today (blogs.psychologytoday. com/blog/sex-dawn) and at Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com/christopher-ryan).
1
Ochberg, F. M., A. C. Brantley, R. D. Hare, P. D. Houk, R. Ianni, E. James, M. E. O’Toole, and G. Saathoff, “Lethal Predators: Psychopathic, Sadistic, and Sane” in Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You inside the Criminal Mind, 2004.
2
Rule, A., The Stranger Beside Me, 2000.
3
Cullen, D., Columbine, 2010.
4
Hare, R. D., Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us, 1999.
5
Johns, J. H. and H. C. Quay, “The Effect of Social Reward on Verbal Conditioning in Psychopathic and Neurotic Military Offenders,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, Vol. 26, No. 3 (1962): 217-220.
6
Viding et al., “Quantitative genetic studies of antisocial behavior,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2008.
7
Sarchiapone et al., “Association between childhood trauma and aggression in male prisoners,” Psychiatry Research, 2009.
8
Caspi et al., “Physical maltreatment victim to antisocial child: evidence of an environmentally mediated process,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2004. 4 Moran et al., “Predictive value of callous-unemotional traits in a large community sample,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2009.
9
Surely the justice of his deeds could be debated, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.
10
Kochanska, “Multiple