The potassium channels open after the sodium channels, and when they do, potassium moves out of the cell, reversing the depolarization. The sodium channels start closing, and the action potential reverses, moving back toward -70 millivolts.
So what does this have to do with evil tendencies and obsessions? It explains what’s happening inside the brain to cause experiences, behaviors, actions, thoughts, and possibly, the psychopathic, schizoid, antisocial, and sadistic acts we call evil. Scientific American reported in 2003 that evidence indicates that, when people think they are seeing aliens, ghosts, and demons, or when they think that they are floating on the ceiling, what’s really happening is a firing of neurons inside their brains, imposing upon them the fiction that they’re seeing things or floating. It’s all induced inside the body, specifically by the neuronal connections in the brain.6
There’s plenty of scientific evidence to support this notion. For example, neuroscientist Olaf Blanke provokes out-of-body experiences in people by stimulating the right angular gyrus in the temporal lobe.7 Neuroscientist Michael Persinger subjects patterns of magnetic fields to patients’ temporal lobes to induce all sorts of supernatural and out-of-body experiences. He forces the neuron firing patterns to become abnormal and unstable, with the result that patients have abnormal psychological states. With six hundred patients studied now, he says that these abnormal and unstable neuronal events could occur naturally during times of great stress, when we fast, when we’re flying at high altitudes, and when our blood sugar changes dramatically.8
Of course, we’re talking about possible underlying reasons for psychotic behavior rather than psychopathic behavior. Remember, psychopaths don’t hear voices or see ghosts. However, it remains possible that men such as David Parker Ray and President Snow are evil because their brains have abnormal and unstable neuronal firing patterns. They are very much connected to the real world, meaning insanity defenses wouldn’t play out very well for them. However, they both have serious personality disorders that could be based on neuronal malfunctions.
It’s likely that, as with most human behavior, psychopathic behavior results from a combination of biological traits and social environment. And then there’s that gray area: How extreme does the behavior have to be for a person to be called psychopathic?
President Snow, for example, exhibits all the behaviors associated with psychopathic criminals.
Psychopathic Traits, President Snow, and His Gamemakers
Personality Traits and Behaviors Associated with Psychopaths
President Snow and Gamemakers
Egomaniac.
Yes
No compassion for others.
Yes
No empathy for others.
Yes
No remorse.
Yes
No feelings of guilt.
Yes
Meticulously plans tortures and killings.
Yes
Manipulative.
Yes
Chronic liar.
Yes
Superficially charming and personable.
Yes
Inflated sense of self-worth.
Yes
Very good at faking intimacy and compassion.
Yes
Callous.
Yes
Accepts no responsibilities for his actions.
Yes
Control freak.
Yes
Sadistic—enjoys humiliating and hurting other people.
Yes
Sexually promiscuous or selling others for sexual purposes
Yes
Preys on others.
Yes
For the moment, set aside the arguments about what defines evil versus good, whether our biological wiring determines evil versus good, and whether social environments are the main factors. It doesn’t matter how we define evil. It doesn’t matter if a man grew up in a tent, a trailer, a penthouse, a country estate, whatever. It doesn’t matter if he was born to a prince or a pauper. Regardless, we are left with one sad fact: People like President Snow are simply bad people. You might say that they’re evil. And when you study all the literature, you realize that scientists really don’t know why.
AD 1186–1524
AD 1186, John of Toledo determined that a planetary alignment would occur on September 23, 1186, causing the world to end. Any second now . . .
AD 1260, Joachim of Fiore declared that the entire world would be destroyed between AD 1200 and 1260. Any second now . . .
AD 1284, Pope Innocent III taught that the world would end 666 years after Islam began, corresponding to AD 1284. Any second now . . .
AD 1346, no doomsday discussion can be complete without mentioning the Flagellants and the Black Death. Believing that the end of the world was imminent . . . yes, any second now . . . the Flagellants whipped and spiked people into bloody pulps to absolve them of their sins.
AD 1367, Militz of Kromeriz proclaimed that the Antichrist was already alive and would make himself known between AD 1363 and 1367, and that the end of the world would occur between AD 1365 and 1367. The precision of these prophecies, as well as many that came before Militz, are all quite remarkable, don’t you think?
AD 1378, Arnold of Villanova declared that the world would end in 1378.
AD 1420, Martinek Hausha declared that the world would end by February 14, 1420. Another precise calculation that didn’t amount to much.
AD 1516, the Fifth Lateran Council banned apocalyptic prophecies and all end-of-world doomsday scenarios. Needless to say, given future events, their proclamation didn’t take hold. Shortly after . . .
AD 1524, London astrologers created widespread apocalyptic terror by proclaiming that the end of the world would start by a flood in London on February 1. Tens of thousands of people fled. However, as these things tend to go, not a single drop of rain fell in London that day.
AD 1524, astrologer Johannes Stoeffler foretold that February 20 would mark the end of the world instead of February 1. It must have also been the year of global ocean terror because Stoeffler also claimed that a flood would bring about the apocalypse.
The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all [from killing animals].” So thinks Katniss in The Hunger Games (40).
This statement occurs very early in the three-book series, and in many ways, it is a premonition of what is to come. In times of war, as discussed a bit in the previous chapter, soldiers may start to view the enemy as nothing more than objects. They are the “others,” no more human than a bug. In times of religious combat, such as during the Crusades or anywhere in the world today where terrorism occurs, the killers tend to forget that they are indeed murdering human beings. Children on one side of a border are no different from those on the other side: Both are living, breathing, thinking human beings. But as soldiers, crusaders, and terrorists grow more accustomed to acts of cruelty and killing, they slide into automatic pilot mode, and killing humans becomes no different from killing animals.
Katniss’s evolution into a killing machine takes time. At first, she kills animals so her family won’t starve. Her first solo hunt results in supplying a rabbit to her hungry mother and sister (The Hunger Games, 51). She’s killing for the same reason animals hunt in the wild: to survive. She doesn’t know it at the time, but soon, she’ll be forced to hunt and kill humans for the same reason: to survive.
In her first Hunger Games, she must kill other children in order to save her own life. The first person she kills—ever, in her entire life—is a boy who spears her friend Rue. After shooting an arrow into the boy’s neck, she wonders why she even cares about his death (The Hunger Games, 243). She has already evolved from a girl who had to learn how to hunt animals for food to someone capable of murder. And while, yes, eventually she would have to kill the boy anyway to become the winning tribute, she kills him without thinking in a cold act of retaliation. She’s angry that Rue is dead, and she wants him to pay.
So
mehow, the reader empathizes with her and is pleased when she kills the boy who took poor Rue’s life. Even we, the readers who are not in combat at all, understand why Katniss has killed another person. In fact, we identify so strongly with Katniss that we want her to emerge from the Games as the victor, and we know this means she must kill multiple children. We see Rue’s murderer as “evil” and we see no reason why Katniss shouldn’t do away with him and save her own neck.
Even after her cold act of retribution, she identifies with the dead boy and those who mourn for him. She is not a killer at heart. Not yet.
By the time Katniss is in the thick of battle in the second book, she thinks like a killer: “I make a silent promise to return and finish [Beetee] off if I can,” (Catching Fire, 383). And by the time she leads the revolution in the third book, she blames herself for the hideous deaths of a lot of her companions, and worse, she is directly responsible for killing an “unarmed citizen” (Mockingjay, 323).
How do people like Katniss and Peeta become killer kids? What makes a sweet, innocent child turn to murder?
Clearly, Katniss and Peeta must kill in order to remain alive. But Katniss herself comments more than once that she’s become a killing machine, a killer, someone who actually mows down an unarmed woman. At what point does a child shift from killing for survival to killing out of habit?
We’ve all seen photos of children holding machines guns with caps pulled low over their too-old eyes. The pictures are jarring because we don’t associate the innocence of children with the evil of mass murder. Who puts deadly weapons into the hands of their young and sends them out to slay victims? Well, we know the Capitol and their Gamemakers do it, but in the real world, leaders have been doing the same thing since the dawn of time. The gladiator ring, while prevalent for a century in ancient Rome, is another matter (see chapter 4, “Tributes: Gladiators in the Arena”). But sending kids out to torture and murder is such a global phenomenon that it’s almost chillingly common.
There’s something profoundly disturbing about the idea of killer kids, whether in Hunger Games arenas, in the ancient gladiator battles, or in adult warfare. Humanitarians claim that it should be a war crime for adults to enlist children in warfare. They argue that innocent, vulnerable children are manipulated and lured into service and given light-weight weapons that turn them into killing machines. While this is true to some extent, it’s not entirely true. Take Katniss Everdeen as a fictional example of what is also true in the real world. In Mockingjay, Katniss leads a rebellion because it is the only recourse the people have to find freedom. Though she resists the role for a long time, in the end, she takes on the leadership. A posse of adult generals doesn’t show up in her town, kidnap her, and brainwash her to bear light-weight weapons and slaughter hundreds of innocent people. She rebels and fights against the posse of adults who have enslaved and tortured her people since the Dark Days.
In the nineteenth century in North America, Native American Cheyenne boys went to war for their tribes at approximately the age of fourteen. But when you consider the atrocities against the Cheyennes—for example, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his troops in 1868 killed more than a hundred Cheyenne women and children during the Battle of Washita River—it’s not a stretch to understand why warrior-trained Cheyenne boys would fight back. In 1875, the Cheyennes along with the Sioux and the Lakota killed Custer and many of his soldiers in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
In the Sudan, Dinka boys received military spears between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.1 Fighting has been a constant for the Dinka tribe, and a decade ago, reports estimated that warfare had displaced 4 million people in Sudan and forced another half a million to emigrate to neighboring countries.2
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Amazon, girls were inducted into warfare at the age of nine. In fact, the Amazon Dahomeys were an all-female group of warriors some 4,000–6,000 strong. Known as the Mino, or Our Mothers, the girls received rigorous training and a robust supply of weapons, including guns, rifles, knives, and clubs. A common means of death by a Mino was decapitation. Many girls enrolled in the Mino by choice, though others were forced into service by their husbands or fathers.
Western societies have also sent their children to war for centuries. In the middle ages, the British military included a lot of boys, and by the late nineteenth century, British institutions systematically recruited them. In 1803, the Duke of York founded the Royal Military Asylum to train boys as soldiers who might be able to lead others in battle. In 1765, Britain created the Royal Hibernium Military School from an orphanage to train twelve-year-old boys to serve as rank-and-file soldiers. In fact, these young Hibernium boys fought for the British during the American Revolution.
In the United States during the Civil War, boys routinely fought and died. Conservative estimates place the number of young boys battling for both the Union and Confederacy at approximately 250,000–420,000.3 Parents inducted them into service, as did schools. Many of them volunteered. Avery Brown enrolled in the military at the age of eight, lying on the recruitment paper that he was twelve, old enough to serve! Joseph John Clem enrolled at the age of ten, and his weapons of choice were a musket and a gun. Often called the “boys’ war,” the boy soldiers in the Civil War accounted for as much as 20 percent of all recruits.4
Rather than consider it a crime that the boys served in war, the public at large considered their deaths noble; they were admired and respected.
Only in modern times do we see the rising abhorrence by the public of sending children to war. This is, in large part, a reason why The Hunger Games trilogy strikes such a chord with readers. The modern reader thinks, How can they send these boy and girls into battle? This is inhumane and against everything that’s right! But in reality, we’ve been doing it forever.
During the industrial revolution, it became more common to think of children as innocent youth who must be educated and protected, isolated from adults, and allowed to enjoy their childhoods for as long as possible. Formal schooling took hold and started replacing apprenticeship as the primary tool of education. Of course, many kids never made it through the formal education process. Many were orphans, many were poor. They were needed in coal mines, on farms, in factories, so they became warriors of another fashion: fighting the industrial revolution rather than a bloodbath war.
And along with the formal education came military disciplinary structure. To this day, military training is considered virtuous, and parents send their sons into the military to teach them discipline and morals and to provide structure to their lives. During the industrial revolution, uniforms and regimentation seeped into the schools, and off the children went to become officers and soldiers.
During World War I, the practice of enlisting boys continued. There were age restrictions, but still, it wasn’t all that uncommon to find young boys fighting alongside men on the front lines.
In modern times, throughout the world, some people still view warrior children as honorable and moral, to be admired and respected.
Killer kids are on the rise because the techniques of global warfare are changing. In 1996, Graça Machel wrote a landmark publication, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children,5 for the United Nations about this problem. The widow of Samora Machel, leader of the Mozambique guerrilla war against Portugal and first president of Mozambique, Graça Machel served as a guerrilla fighter in Tanzania and also fought against Portugal. She also served as minister of education for Mozambique and is famous worldwide as the wife of Nelson Mandela. In her report, she states that modern warfare has abandoned all standards of conduct due to the fact that globalization and revolution have decimated traditional societies. The breakdown in what was once normal societal structures has been exacerbated by governmental collapses, internal feuding, financial inequities, and the dissolution of services that are essential to life; among other factors. As everything normal collapses around people, civilians become warriors, and violence escalates. According t
o Machel, the horrors of modern combat that are now taken as givens include ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the use of children in military combat.
As mentioned above, many children are forced into battle, such as in The Hunger Games trilogy. If they don’t fight, they and/or their families are tortured and sometimes killed. To alienate new recruits, adults force the children to kill family members, neighbors, and friends. According to Amnesty International:
Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 have been affected by armed conflict. They are recruited into government armed forces, paramilitaries, civil militia and a variety of other armed groups. Often they are abducted at school, on the streets or at home. Others enlist “voluntarily,” usually because they see few alternatives. Yet international law prohibits the participation in armed conflict of children aged under 18.6
The figures are staggering. According to Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, before the war in Iraq:
Although there is global consensus against the morality of sending children into battle, this terrible practice is now a regular facet of contemporary warfare. There are some 300,000 children under the age of 18 (both boys and girls) presently serving as combatants around the globe, fighting in approximately 75% of the world’s conflicts.7
The United Nations wrote in 2000 that more than fifty countries were actively recruiting children into military service that year, and further, that the youngest known soldiers were only seven years old. Possibly even more grim, in the 1990s according to the United Nations, 2 million children were killed in armed combat; 4 to 5 million were disabled; 12 million were left homeless; and a staggering 10 million were “psychologically traumatized.”8
The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Page 14