by Ian Brady
It is rather significant to note that those members of the lower classes who assiduously adhere to law and prevailing morality usually display a smug self-righteousness, which appears to be based on the patent delusion that their virtuous qualities are inborn, rather than evidence of a servile constitution predisposed to the influence of social engineering.
Mostly politicians need to be concerned about programmed ‘public opinion,’ a fickle state of collective consciousness chiefly created and exploited by themselves and the media for financial/political reward. In reality the only individuals who have freedom of the press are those who own one.
Paradoxically, this pious delusion of innate rectitude, in the as yet not caught out population, manages to persist in conjunction with a voracious addiction for every prurient detail about criminals and their crimes, from which the public obtains vicarious enjoyment and sexual stimulation.
In this respect, it could be cynically advanced that criminals provide a necessary cathartic service to society and, when captured, also serve as sacrificial exhibits on which to heap collective guilt and sexual frustration, not to mention primal bloodlust.
The unpleasant truth, I venture to reiterate, is that many envy the esoteric pleasures and excesses enjoyed by the criminal, who translates their darkest fantasies and desires into action.
The common individual craves prohibited sensation minus responsibility and risk. And, perhaps the most psychologically intolerable aspect of all, such people resent inner knowledge that they will spend all their life as timid spectators, never players.
They can’t quite pull off the trick of fooling themselves or others all of the time, no matter how hard they try to rationalise the unedifying reflection of themselves as insatiable voyeurs, luxuriously participating (or anticipating) in forbidden pleasures, and deriving compensatory comfort from the misfortune of others. Reading of the murder of strangers makes them feel good to be alive, particularly if sex is also part of the crime. The resulting guilt spurs them to fresh zeniths of clamorous righteousness and revenge.
In effect, by entering into a form of collective personality of retribution and purpose, they subliminally absolve themselves of evil recompense and intent, assuaging guilt by self-deceit.
Those subject to mob mentality are usually of low intelligence. They fail to recognise that they themselves are victims, of the politicians and their minions in the law and order industry, who have personal careers to advance and fresh powers to seek. Having deliberately provoked public panic, the same politicians egocentrically and geocentrically milk it for votes in the role of saviours, creating harsher penalties and promising the mob more to come. A circus.
The soft-porn tabloids and other sensational media require no remit other than financial gain to daily devote whole front pages to sex crimes — doing so in loving, salacious detail, exploiting man’s lowest instincts and sexual imperatives. Sex crime is reduced to the status of a spectator sport, publicly stimulating for profit the very same feral instincts supposedly possessed by the perpetrator.
Such coverage subliminally incites the spectator to gloat over the physical charms of the victim in every respect, imaginatively projecting into the victim’s eyes whatever changing reflections of horror or pleasure most excites their recondite inclinations.
At breakfast tables all over the country the sexual appetites of millions of ‘decent citizens’ are sharpened by such press reports, their readers luxuriating in vivid visions of debauchery, rape, murder and sadomasochistic perversion, sometimes as perpetrator, sometimes as victim. Death being perhaps the greatest aphrodisiac, feel-good factor and appetizer there is, readers wolf down the bacon and eggs with additional relish; a secular parody of the communion wafer, celebrating life in the midst of random murder.
Whenever prurient reporting acts as a catalyst to some latent killers and rapists, as surely it must, the mass media, with or without the least connecting evidence, conveniently places all the blame on mythical ‘video nasties’ or hardcore pornography, simultaneously utilising the opportunity to print or televise many titillating samples of that which they sanctimoniously condemn.
It is big business. Morality does not enter into the equation except in the shoddy guise of derisively pious editorials, reminiscent, in shallow sympathy and ersatz horror, of the lucrative ramblings of the late Edgar Lustgarten. This self-styled media ‘criminologist,’ a jaundice-jowled, lugubrious little specimen with the eyes of a carp, the ethics of a minnow and the ambience of a ripe red herring, physically personified what every media sensationalist should be obliged to look like as a warning to others.
The sensationalists shrewdly appreciate that when it comes to serial killers or killings, the general public has the infinite attention span of lower primates assiduously searching for fleas. As a rule of thumb, conservative politicians, tabloid reporters, pimps and other strangers to ethics, who regularly and loudly pontificate on law and order or matters of public morality, bear closer investigation. They invariably fulminate in the not so ingenuous hope that hot air will waft attention from their own unprepossessing activities, and that their bluster will be mistaken for personal virtue and probity. They protest too much. The more they profit from crime, or the darker their hue of chosen vice, the louder they rave for ever harsher penalties for the working-class criminal.
The illusion of having a ‘good reputation’ to maintain can be a most corrupting preoccupation, whereas confessing to a bad reputation is often highly virtuous.
Honest criminals are much preferable, more refreshingly wholesome and cheaper to sustain than conservative politicians. You should never doubt your own experience in favour of other people’s opinions, no matter how loftily they berate you with them. Hypocrisy adores exalted heights to condescend from.
Experience and instinct caution that one should invariably beware of those who talk much of friendship, loyalty, honesty and other admirable qualities; they devalue the coin by usage and abusage. Virtue requires no messenger, particularly not a Mercury of the press.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
— Thomas Jefferson
An editor is a person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
— Elbert Hubbard
Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong?
— Don Marquis
A Sympathizer would seem to imply a certain degree of benevolent feeling. Nothing of the kind. It signifies a readymade accomplice in any species of political villainy.
— Thomas Love Peacock
In close daily association with psychopaths, psychotics and schizoids, I personally find it easy to differentiate between them, to read them accurately. Your life depends upon it.
I have previously listed the salient traits and characteristics of both the criminal and socially acceptable psychopath/sociopath — broadly synthesized as lack of concern and emotional depth in all but self-interest. Devoid of humour, they can nevertheless simulate laughter, bonhomie and all other social niceties as part of their practised public persona. But the experienced observer will usually detect the hollow tone, the unsmiling eye. In general they are not susceptible to psychiatric treatment.
It is sometimes the case that they slowly mellow with age. But, with equal validity, this process could be attributed to declining physical strength in a prison culture where brute force is perhaps the highest value. The deadly monotony and social stagnation of a prison regime naturally debilitates, with its mindless repetition and stale conversations. In addition, there is nothing worth striving for if, as many psychopaths are, imprisoned without the possibility of parole. The withering of ambition, desire and life force in general might generously be regarded by the authorities as ‘mellowing.’ Dying is a more honest word in a caged place where sleep is the best part left of life, dreams defeating the walls.
Contrary to popular belief, not all psychopaths are prone to violence. As previously explained, the general public erroneously connects the term psychopath with murder, when in fact it can be applied to all recurring patterns of criminal behaviour coupled with an inability to learn from past mistakes.
Those classified in the remaining psychopathic categories are dangerous in other ways, obsessed with secular power in all its forms. The socially acceptable psychopath, immune from serious prosecution by virtue of influential power and wealth, differs from the more vulnerable criminal breed to whom money is something to spend freely and enjoy life with, rather than hoard as a power base.
In this particular respect, the orthodox criminals are at least more human, more easily satisfied. Childlike, less sophisticated, if you will. They exhibit identifiable desires far easier to comprehend, no matter how abhorrent and selfish their chosen means to an end. They are also, of course, more likely to be caught and heavily punished.
The socially acceptable psychopath is quite another kettle of fish. This category shares the same basic pathological traits and characteristics possessed by their less exalted brethren, with some added.
Secular power being their aphrodisiac, they can never be satisfied. Obsession drives them relentlessly.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
— Lord Acton (1834–1902)
In prison I met those few politicians and financiers careless enough to be caught. Their whole manner denoted the conviction that they were not only above the law but also the architects and swayers of it. They regarded prison as a brief, unjust, temporary setback, which their power and wealth would eventually overcome — a slight slip-up their influential friends would not hold against them when released to re-enter the high social strata.
As previously indicated, statistics show that this elite category of socially acceptable psychopath collectively deprives society of more wealth than their blue-collar opposites. And with less excuse, the former having had superior education and a privileged upbringing. Their easy air of effete affectation was reminiscent of the French aristocracy before the tumbrels and heads began to roll. However, unlike their decapitated approximates, the confidence of these modern-day tyrants is rather more justified, so securely are they protected by the forces of law and order they themselves create and treat with such contempt.
Mass communication rubs salt in the wounds of the servile almost daily by reporting how the high and mighty invariably escape imprisonment or suffer no stigma when released.
Ousted dictators can flee to the West with billions of dollars stolen from their country’s treasury, confident they will be received like visiting royalty, whereas some little gangster trying to escape justice abroad would be imprisoned immediately.
Steal an apple, you are a thief; steal a country, you are a statesman. Moral relativism therefore indicates the bigger the crime, you do no time.
Those very same pillars of the community who bay for harsher prison sentences and capital punishment for petty criminals, obsequiously wine, dine and lionise exiled financiers and plundering dictators.
Such moral, legal and social distinctions have always clearly illustrated that judgment and penalty are tempered according to wealth and privilege, an irrefutable fact that should reinforce relativism in all discerning individuals.
The Manson family effectively taught the wealthy that they are not beyond the reach and reproach of the activist subculture. As evidenced, ‘Anyone can be killed, even the President.’
Society, if you believe such a thing exists, trains and constrains the individual to counterfeit surface respect for powerful personages and outmoded conventions which, in truth, the large majority abhor and despise.
Therefore, there exists in every freethinking person a tenacious tension between that which they know to be their genuine beliefs and desires, and the grotesque proprieties and social protocols they reluctantly pay homage to under duress. The resulting psychic conflict creates a neurotic self-contempt, a mordant doubt that they possess the will or spiritual strength needed to throw off such tight bridles and assert unconditional individuality, even at the risk of their disconsolate lives.
Contrary to Ian Fleming, you only live once. Therefore, a person should consciously choose whether to exist as a grey daub on a grey canvas, or as an existential riot of every colour in the spectrum. You know which of these alternatives the serial killer selects, action-painting with his knife on a human canvas, each slash-splash creating a unique masterpiece. Not for sale but nevertheless widely viewed with fascination by most.
One should be fully aware of the respective relative merits of those complementary qualities deemed good or evil before daring to pontificate upon them. Society demands, for reasons of social control, that the criminal, having experienced, enjoyed and practised both good and evil with more or less equal enthusiasm, should recant his unorthodox beliefs and actions simply because an error of judgment led to his capture. Had he not been captured, would the criminal then have been expected to renounce all his good qualities in similar manner?
This essentially artificial, impossible demand for a moral dichotomy, which excludes one of two contrasting qualities that in reality constitute a unity, is the height of human folly.
By all means punish or execute transgressors, but do not bore them to death with concepts based entirely on social engineering flatteringly disguised as divine wisdom.
Returning to forensic matters, paranoid schizoids are, by definition, less predictable than psychopaths, and are therefore, in some instances, more dangerous.
Many are lost in a whirlwind cycle of hallucination and grand delusion, tranquil and normal one moment, raging and violent the next. Beyond accurate prognosis, they can nevertheless be stabilised to an effective degree by drug therapy, but on the whole must be regarded as an almost permanent potential menace to themselves and others.
Sometimes many appear normal for such lengthy periods that one becomes careless and relaxes — then the explosion of violence catches you off-balance. Yet certain other schizoids are comparatively harmless, reacting mainly to their imaginary inner experiences rather than their surroundings.
Many under strictly supervised medication can be kept as normal as the next person. But one still has to remain alert for those who decide they no longer need medication and surreptitiously spit it out.
I personally consider psychotics the most interesting. When not in a state of cyclical manic depression, or lost in a schizophrenic fugue, they are energetic in mind and body, swinging from tears to laughter, constantly bubbling with ideas and startling momentary insights, treating morals and legalities as malleable playthings. They often exhibit a high sense of absurdity combined with acute observation of man’s foibles. This invariably results in a cavalier, bold and arrogant attitude to all matters — including murder.
They ‘view the world as from the edge of a far star.’ Should they respect or learn from the conduct of their sane mentors, who exemplify and justify tribal mayhem? Over fifty million people died in World War II — it reads more like a league table than an Everest of bodies.
How many centuries would you suppose it would take for freelance ‘criminals’ and ‘madmen’ to equal the numerical carnage the ‘law-abiding’ and ‘sane’ can achieve in such a comparatively short space of time? One should cultivate discrimination in accepting or respecting one’s moral ‘superiors.’ So often they are certainly not.
Do you not find it at all intriguing and incongruous, as I do, that political and military killers show none of the guilt or remorse society so eagerly demands from lesser criminals?
&nbs
p; Why is this?
Because society has given the former permission to openly indulge, glory and exult in unlimited slaughter and panoramic devastation.
For an intelligent discussion of this question, we should ignore such absurd rationalisations as ‘But that’s war.’ Convenient psychological sophistry manifests itself in other bewitching ways.
Why are the mass media and the general public so fascinated by serial killers, yet show not the least interest in, and, quite frankly, absolute boredom with, far more prolific legalised killers? Say, an American pilot in Vietnam, whose daily routine task was to fry alive in napalm thousands of men, women and children; or the American Special Forces, who habitually cut off the ears of the enemy as trophies and made necklaces of them.
The American public displayed no shock over such atrocities, but expressed horror and revulsion over a simulated mutilation in the film Reservoir Dogs, where a character cuts off a policeman’s ear.
It becomes transparent that the reason why the media and public are so fascinated by serial killers is that these people kill at will, requiring no legislation, without asking for or needing permission, the very concept never entering their mind.
The same morbid syndrome exists in all other countries, of course. The five murders committed by Jack the Ripper in England over a century ago are found to be far more internationally intriguing than the six million murdered in the German concentration camps of Heinrich Himmler. Everyone knows about the Boston Strangler murders, but how many people can as easily recall who was President or Attorney General at the time?
Fickle fame and infamy.
You may have already deduced that the teams of prominent psychiatric consultants who have attempted to interview and categorize me over the years classify me as psychotic. A rose by any other name . . .
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again.