The Newtown Connecticut massacre was committed less than
thirty days ago by a heavily armed man who was presumed to be mentally ill,
leading to the unavoidable question of ‘Why?’-why do killers kill?
Mass Murderers, Spree Killers and Serial Killers, all hold
traits in common? What are they?
Monsters Among Us by Josephine Thompson goes into a psychologically
detailed analysis of the motivations of the killers among us.
Monsters
Among Us:
Who
Are They & From Whence Do They Come
***
Some People are motivated from deep
within their psyche to do harm, to hurt, to maim, torture and kill and to do it
in the worst possible way. Whatever taboo there is, they seek to embrace it
with the vigor of a lover having sex. The taboo becomes an obsession, a powerful
internal force within them that eventually consumes them to the point the
malignant drive overtakes them and they become like an addict servicing an
addiction. For humans that have devolved to such a low level, the functional
service of a personal conscience in no longer needed because they choose to
commit unconscionable acts that are both criminal and morally reprehensible,
acts against which a trained conscience would merely pose a hindrance to their self gratification. It is
those people who are the least like us; in fact they are so far removed from
normal mores and values that we, the ‘normal’ people are fascinated by them. We
are puzzled by them and can’t understand how they are made, because they defy
everything that makes us human and are to us like aliens.
One of the most poignant lines in the
movie The Dark Knight (2008) is contained in the scene between Bruce Wayne and
Alfred Pennyworth when he explained to Wayne that all men were not ‘simple’-
that some defied logic, that the motivation of some men to create ruin is not born
from logical desires for money or fame, but stems from something deeper and
darker within them:
“They can't be
bought, bullied, reasoned,
Or negotiated with.
Some men just want to watch the world
burn”
Alfred Pennyworth
From the movie The Dark Knight (2008)
