The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [95]
Dexter and those portrayed in the series share one more fundamental feature.Narcissism—self-love if you like—is ingrained into their psyche. They don’t play by the same rules as everybody else and they don’t obey the expectations of others. They are the centers of their own universes, oblivious to the suffering they inflict; but this focus on self is distorted even further by their tendency toward grandiose ideas—feeling all-powerful and able to achieve everything they set their minds to—tinged with an overwhelming resentment of the world around them. Sadistic serial killers are not known to willingly obey the commands of others unless it serves their own self-centered pursuits.
Given their predilection to sadistic violence and their core of narcissism, you would think I would be diagnosing these psychopathic serial killers as the ultimate in “evil.” But they aren’t the ones I worry about when I go to sleep at night. I worry about those of us who are normal.
I don’t mean people who just appear normal. After all, Harry showed Dexter how to hide his psychopathic tendencies and how to appear to be an ordinary person. Appearing “normal”—whatever normal may be—is undoubtedly part of the art of being a successful psychopath. (What Jeff Lindsay and the writers who developed the series have achieved, more than in perhaps any other fictional portrayal of psychopaths, is to create a character who blends the gory, clinical actions of a psychopath with the day-to-day activities of a normal person.) Like Dexter, Miller was a nondescript fellow who easily blended in with any crowd. He was a family man, church deacon, and community activist whose multiple activities conveniently disguised his violent and predatory nature, and which in turn masked an extremely violent serial killer responsible for at least sixty murders. No, it is the ordinary among us, or the potential that we all have to inflict carnage and physical violence on our fellow human beings, that bothers me more than the Dexters of this world.
Many so-called normal people show psychopathic tendencies on at least a few occasions during their lifetimes. Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that most of us have fantasized at least once about violently hurting, even killing, someone we dislike. Of course, unlike Dexter, we don’t act out on these violent fantasies and, though Dexter might well call it hypocritical, we continue to both see ourselves and to be seen by others as normal law-abiding citizens. But this is not what concerns me.
There is a parallel group of killers, those involved in genocide, where the tally of victims usually numbers in the hundreds, thousands, or sometimes millions. Psychopaths, terrible as they are, are nowhere near as frightening as the war criminals and camp or prison commanders who exhibit no psychopathic traits but who conduct their killings as part of normal, everyday business.
There are many reasons for this appraisal but one of them is very personal. I have spent a great deal of time observing and contrasting both psychopaths like Dexter with people who commit major human rights abuses like genocide. Take, for example, a man by the name of Kaing Guek Eav, otherwise known as Duch, who I observed during the Cambodian genocide trials currently underway in Phnom Penh under the auspices of a joint U.N.-Cambodian government tribunal.
Some background to the tribunal is in order. During the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, somewhere between two and three million people died as a result of mass murder, starvation, or disease. Although the numbers vary according to the expert