The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [98]
Milgram’s subjects, who thought they had inflicted great pain on other student volunteers, were not under conditions of war. Yet they too were quite capable of inflicting enormous harm on others just because someone who they saw to be in a position of authority told them to do it. As Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote the Nazi Doctors, observed, “ordinary people can commit demonic acts.” It is this feature, the so-called “banality of evil,” that permeates most scholarly analyses of genocide.
Now let us return to Dexter and the other psychopaths in the series. Although Duch may have also focused on his mission of murder, he was unlike Dexter in one significant respect. Duch was infused with an ideological fervor and a desire to please Pol Pot—not only because he “followed orders” but also because he was, unlike in his early years, now filled with ideological zealotry, a burning desire to see the revolution succeed.
In contrast to Duch, Dexter has no one issuing him orders that he feels compelled to obey. He is very clear in his own mind about what he wants to do, and that is to kill people he believes deserve to be killed. It is true that he was well-socialized and trained by Harry, who helped him develop his own moral code. But he is too independent, too narcissistic, too much his own man, too focused on carrying out his mission a mission of only killing other psychopaths and killers to control. Even Harry would have found doing so impossible had he lived to change his mind about how he had trained his son. Sure Dexter is obsessed about killing, but this is a personal quest and not an ideological crusade. It is about him and his needs much more than it is about the people he kills.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine Dexter (or most other psychopaths) “hating” anybody. Hate, after all, is a strong emotion, and psychopaths are generally lacking in emotion. They are cold, calculating, goal-directed, and obsessed with pursuing their own gratifications. They have neither the temperament nor the desire to wallow in the hysteria that engulfs a mob determined to hack to death or stone or shoot those they wish to exterminate. Nor do they want to pursue a systematic policy of executing the ideological enemies of their group, because they do not identify with any group. Psychopaths are, in their own minds, well above the mob or, for that matter, functionaries like Duch or the Nazi commander Rudolph Hoess.
The same cannot be said about those whom we think are “normal” according to what we know about those who commit genocide. Duch was “normal” and followed orders because he blindly, or consciously, elected to believe in the Khmer Rouge and what they believed in. He was normal, too, in the sense that he dutifully followed orders he believed were necessary for the group’s safety. Not only did he follow orders, but he dispensed the carrying out of his murderous plans to his band of deputies and foot soldiers. His behaviors were also normalized in the sense that he was chairman of the board at S-21. His work allowed him to belong. It made him part of society, not separate from it.
As for Dexter—is it conceivable that he would join in a deliberate campaign of massacre with a coterie of like-minded brethren or underlings? Dexter may well have liked seeing the blood drain out of his victims, but unlike those who signed up to the Cambodian strategy he does not want to kill just anyone. He enjoyed being able to share the kill with Miguel Prado, but as soon as Prado asked Dexter to help kill targets who did not fit Dexter’s criteria (with the rationale that, if Dexter was his friend, he would kill them because Prado wanted him to), Dexter instead ended their partnership. Dexter’s targets were special victims, ones who had clearly carried out horrific crimes, carefully selected, targeted, and then eliminated, just as the victims of most psychopaths are. His narcissism prevents him from working