Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  Serial killers don’t develop out of nowhere a desire to kill, rape, mutilate, cannibalize or have sex with the dead; they find it in themselves as an array of deeply embedded primitive instincts which humans are all endowed with at birth but are supposed to be taught in childhood by healthy familial upbringing and positive societal norms to suppress. Serial killers are not actually made; those of us who aren’t serial killers were unmade as such when we were children, through good parenting, stable family environments and the sheer luck of not being exposed to some random source of trauma. (Which explains why it comes as no surprise that serial killers often report familial breakdown and trauma in their childhood histories.)

  Some Big Historians argue that our unique necrophobia explains why all previous species of hominids became extinct while our Homo sapiens species did not. Necrophobia was the result of an evolutionary transformation of a subset of survival instincts, necrophilia, into a neurosis, necrophobia, that transformed quasi-animal-like Homo sapiens into that civilized “thinking herds of crazies” we are today, as one Big Historian has described humanity.34 Not to have a capacity to kill, eat and rape would have been “abnormal, sick and crazy” in the Stone Age. The basic survival and evolution of early hominids depended on the dominance and procreation of the most naturally physically fit and virile. There was no place for the weak, the impotent, the ill, the disabled or the aged, for those unable to defend themselves, hunt or breed. Hominids at best abandoned the weak of their own species, and at worst raped, killed and ate them, without the slightest stirrings of empathy or remorse. Essentially, we hominids were a psychopathic serial-killer-rapist-cannibal species because that is precisely how we needed to be to survive in the cruel world of natural selection. Mother Nature is a cruel psychopath herself, with no empathy for her progeny.

  THE TECHNO-HUMANITARIAN BALANCE HYPOTHESIS

  Our development of necrophobia some forty thousand years ago as we finished murdering Neanderthal people was how Mother Nature corrected herself after endowing hominids with the deadly gift of toolmaking.

  Hominids began fashioning stone tools perhaps as early as two or three million years ago.35 Our earliest tools, called Oldowan tools, were made from pieces of flint, the edges of which were shaped by flaking to a remarkable razor sharpness.* They became highly lethal handheld weapons that enhanced hominids’ killing capacity beyond their natural strength.

  As the Nobel Prize–winning zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz described in his magisterial book On Aggression, the more powerful a species’ natural killing ability, the more pronounced is its instinctual inhibition against aggression within that species.36 Naturally equipped predatory killing machines such as lions, tigers, sharks and eagles relatively rarely kill members of their own species, but rats and doves are highly aggressive toward their own; “peaceful” doves peck one another’s eyes out and rats cannibalize one another. As hominids were not fitted with powerful jaws, thick pelts or deadly claws and fangs, their natural inhibition against intraspecies violence was correspondingly very low. Prehistoric hominids wantonly killed one another like rats, with little consequence to their species.

  But when hominids created stone weapons, evolution went off the tracks; it was the beginning of an arms race. Homo sapiens were not the only species of hominids that made stone weapons; our rival Neanderthals did too, and even more archaic species prior to them, perhaps as long as three million years ago according to recent discoveries.37

  It can be argued that one of the reasons these various prehistoric species of hominids became extinct was that, with naturally low inhibitions on intraspecies violence, they led an unbridled life of not only killing rival species, but serially murdering one another with their “unnatural” stone weapons until there were only two species left standing: Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Neanderthals were not only equally capable of toolmaking, but were also physically stronger than Homo sapiens and had larger brains. So why didn’t they wipe us out rather than the other way around? Because somewhere in the mid- to late Paleolithic Age, about forty thousand to one hundred thousand years ago, the newest of the breed, we, the Homo sapiens species, began developing that irrational fear that our dead could rise and take vengeance on the living—necrophobia. We became afraid to kill one another.

  This kind of “demobilization” and gradual suppression of our unbridled killing instincts through necrophobia fits into the techno-humanitarian balance hypothesis, which argues that as humans develop more powerful and destructive weapons they simultaneously develop more sophisticated means of inhibiting their use. Just as the development of machine guns and chemical and nuclear weapons was accompanied by international conventions on WMD nonproliferation, the concept of war crimes, and the founding of the United Nations, necrophobia was a primitive natural arms-limitation program as a response to the increased use of stone weapons.38

  This gave Homo sapiens the winning advantage over Neanderthals in our genocidal war with them, as Neanderthals not only fought us but continued to slaughter one another at the same time. It also prevented us from slaughtering ourselves into extinction once we were victorious over all the other hominid species.39

  With the rise of deviant burials, we also find increasing archeological traces of human remains of those who died at a later age, in ill health, suggesting that along with necrophobia came compassion, empathy, deeper familial and tribal ties and organized care for the aged and the sick despite their inability to contribute to the species as hunters or breeders. People began to survive into later age because they were taken care of by those stronger than themselves. Both the fear of the dead and compassion (empathy) for the weak and aged required a degree of societal organization and intellect. The fit went to hunt while the unfit stayed home and began ritually painting their collective fantasies and desires on cave walls: the birth of the intelligentsia and leisure. The oldest known traces of cave drawings, located in Spain, go back to about forty thousand years ago, about the time we had successfully killed off the Neanderthal people and begun manifesting fear of the dead.40

  Necrophobia and cave art were two signs of the emergence of civilization and the shift of the hominid species from mere “psychopathic”-animal-survival state to empathetic evolutionary progress: the triumph of the human and its superior intellect. It’s these things that define us as human. We are the only animals with funerary and mourning rituals and the only animals to export our memories from our brains to shared media, beginning with cave drawings and progressing to the Internet.

  And indeed, despite occasional historical peaks of warfare, statistically, Homo sapiens has become progressively less violent with time. While it seems like our wars have become more deadly, in statistical reality, per capita deaths in warfare have declined. Studies of Pacific-region Stone Age aboriginal tribal warfare reveal that it was far more deadly per capita to its communities than the megakilling of World War II ever was (with the exception of the race war waged in Eastern Europe from 1939 to 1945 by Nazi Germans against Jews and Slavic peoples).41

  No matter what we read in newspapers or see in the media, statistically speaking, in advanced societies, civilian murder rates have declined over the centuries, albeit with ebbs and flows. For example, the homicide rate in idyllic colonial America in the 1700s was 30 murders per 100 thousand people, but in the worst decade of the modern era, the 1990s, the homicide rate in the US was 10 to 11 murders per 100 thousand people on average.42 In the current dramatic rise of murder in Chicago, one of the worst in the United States, the murder rate between 2005 and 2015 ranged between 17.3 and 18.8 per 100 thousand, still only roughly half of what it was in colonial America.43 Only at its craziest recent worst, in 2016, has Chicago approached a murder rate comparable to that of colonial America.44

  THE SERIAL KILLER CIVILIZED

  It was only around fifteen thousand years ago that our species finally began settling down by developing agriculture and domesticating animals, abandon
ing our animal-like life of hunting and gathering. We began assembling together in organized societies around our farms and in villages and, later, cities—civilizations. Fifteen thousand years is not a lot of time in which to undo the cerebral wiring of at least two hundred thousand years of dog-eat-dog, four-Fs serial-killer behavior. As a species, we were serial killers for a lot longer than it has been socially unacceptable to kill and eat whomever we want to whenever we feel like it.

  Those old, deeply embedded reptilian survival instincts continue to rage, spark and fire but now are supposed to be held in check by our higher limbic system and neocortex. When we get angry enough to kill, most of us don’t. Our civilized neocortex has been conditioned to put the brakes on those limbic impulses through societal proscriptions and parental rearing.

  But while our emerging civilization demanded that we “behave ourselves,” our reptilian brains were not that quick to respond and transform. Humans today are basically a refurbished model, not a newly manufactured species suited to the modern world our advanced intellects have engineered.

  Serial killing, rape, cannibalism and necrophilia as modern psychiatric disorders in civilized humans represent an evolutionary turning inside out—a lycanthropic versipellis, or reversion to what we once were. Primitive vital evolutionary instinctual imperatives with the dawn of civilization become paradoxically entropic, destructive and ultimately criminal.

  If we distill aggression, serial killing, rape, sadism, cannibalism and necrophilia to their historical evolutionary and anthropological imperatives, then today a serial-killing cannibalistic impulse is like the appendix, now obsolete and vestigial. Its destructive character can be compared to, for example, our evolutionary fat-storage metabolism—necessary for survival in the wild when food was scarce, but causing obesity in modern advanced societies (especially in North America) where there is unrestricted access to copious amounts of cheap, processed, sugar- and salt-saturated junk food produced to sell rather than nourish. Our advanced cerebral neocortex knows and understands this, but our reptilian and limbic systems compel us to eat shit just the same, because we can, whether we are really hungry or not.

  We snack as compulsively as serial killers kill.

  We can describe serial killing with scientific terms like “psychopathy” and “erotophonophilia,” which reveal how humans come to kill, but they do not explain why.

  I suspect we are too frightened of the answer to look into the face of why: because nature, in the past, for very good reasons, equipped us with a capacity for serial killing. That’s why.

  In conclusion, we might all perhaps be born as serial killers, but most of us are raised and socialized out of it. Serial killers are not made; they are unmade. We are, after all, born uncivilized—wetting ourselves, putting everything into our mouths, screaming when we want attention, wantonly hitting other children and snatching their toys—but most of us are very quickly taught to be otherwise. In fact, it has been argued that serial killers are precisely infantile in their temperaments and sexual compulsions, “emotionally immature” and childishly narcissistic to an extreme level.45 Those children who remain undersocialized for the various clinical reasons psychologists put forth, from trauma and abuse to psychopathy and biochemical factors, essentially remain in the “natural” evolutionary crisis-survival state in which they were born, and mature into serial-killing humans, as nature without civilization intends them to be.

  Simply put, serial killers today are what we all were forty thousand years ago. To quote the inimitable Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” It’s a quote I could sadly repeat at the end of each chapter in this book like a death rattle of a mantra. Just as there is a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in some of us, there is primitive serial-killer DNA too.

  THREE

  Psychopathia Sexualis: The Psychology of the Lust Serial Killer in Civilized Society

  Enough of this kind of horror.

  —DR. SIGMUND FREUD, THE SEXUAL LIFE OF HUMAN BEINGS, 19051

  Love exists above the belt, lust below.

  —DR. JOHN WILLIAM MONEY, LOVEMAPS, 1986

  Once we became civilized and developed language, we began using it to describe ourselves, including the serial-killing parts of us. The earliest surviving written records, Sumerian clay tablets and Chinese oracle bone inscriptions, date to about 3500 BC. For most of the last 5,500 years, humans viewed serial killers as supernatural monsters, for example werewolves or vampires. As for “ordinary” human murderers who killed for greed, anger, vengeance or jealousy, these tended to be looked upon from a religious perspective as evil or even possessed by the devil. The notion that a human would kill repeatedly, pathologically, was rarely touched upon.

  With the dawn of the age of reason, we began to recast the nature of human behavior in secular form. Serial lust killing, cannibalism and necrophilia became linked to primitive core evolutionary instincts, misplaced aggression, reproductive impulses and hunger, expressed in the human animal as twisted fantasies, or what we came to call perversions.

  A version of this primitive-atavistic behavioral model, which I introduced in the previous chapter, was in fact one of the first theories of modern criminology, advanced by the famed forensic psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), known as the father of criminology.

  Lombroso’s criminal-behavior theory was rooted in the anthropological, evolutionary and biological spectrum rather than the psychological. Influenced by Darwinism, Lombroso argued that all crime was a kind of evolutionary failure. Serial killers (and other violent criminals), he argued, were atavists, throwbacks to a prehistoric primitive state. Criminals were primitive or subhuman types, characterized by physical features reminiscent of those of apes, lower primates, and early man, preserved, Lombroso said, in “modern savages.”

  Lombroso’s failure and eventual downfall (and where his argument differs from mine) were because of his insistence that these atavistic features were hereditary and were reflected in a criminal’s physical appearance. When it turned out that many murderers and rapists did not have primitive, apelike features, Lombroso’s Italian school of criminology yielded to the French school led by Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne (1843–1924), a pioneer in forensic sociology and criminal psychology, who argued that criminals are not naturally born but made through social and psychological circumstances. (More on Lacassagne in chapter eleven.)

  So, are we all born potential killers, and raised and socialized to inhibit our natural killing capacity, or are we born pacific creatures among whom a few are desocialized or driven by trauma and mental disorders into becoming serial murderers?

  PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS: THE PARAPHILIC CATALOG

  A milestone in our modern understanding of the psychopathology behind sexual serial murder came in 1886, two years before the Jack the Ripper murders, when Austrian psychiatrist Richard Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) published Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study). In this book he cataloged and categorized a wide range of sexual crimes and disorders reported by psychiatrists (or alienists, as they were called in the nineteenth century).

  Krafft-Ebing labeled the fusion of reproductive sexual impulses (lust) and homicidal aggression paraesthesia* (from the Greek para, meaning “unusual,” and aesthesia, meaning “sensation”), which he defined as a “perverse emotional coloring of sexual ideas.”2 In addition to paraesthesia (the fusion of contradictory impulses), other sexual disorders were rooted in hyperaesthesia (exaggerated sexual impulses) or anaesthesia (an absence of sexual instincts).

  Serial killing can be driven by a variety of different disorders resulting from paraesthesia or hyperaesthesia. Today we call these disorders paraphilias (literally, “unusual loves”), or more commonly sexual deviations or perversions. One of the most well-known is sexual pleasure in causing pain, for which Krafft-Ebing coined the term “sadism,” inspired by the French libertine Marquis de Sade
(1740–1814), author of the sexually violent novel The One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom.

  Found almost exclusively in males, a paraphilia is an obsession for a very particular and statistically unusual type of sex, without which the person cannot otherwise be aroused. Paraphilias include specific fantasy scenarios, an erotic fixation on a particular nongenital part of the anatomy (partialism), the sexualization of inanimate objects such as shoes (fetishes) and a substitution of another act for the sexual one.

  We are not talking about a guy buying his girlfriend sexy lingerie or dressing in leather or latex on the weekend, but of a constant, daily, obsessive addiction for a period of six months or more, to the exclusion of being sexually aroused in any other way.3 A person may have several different paraphilias at the same time, and paraphilias can change and mutate, but one paraphilia usually dominates until a different one takes hold.

  There are dozens of different paraphilias, some of which are benign if engaged in with a consensual partner, such as:

  abasiophilia (a preference for a disabled partner);

  acrotomophilia (a preference for amputees);

  agalmatophilia (pygmalianism, a desire for sex with dolls, mannequins or statues);

  agonophilia (a preference for a partner pretending to struggle);

  altocalciphilia (a fetish for high-heeled shoes);

  coprophilia (arousal from feces or from being defecated upon by or defecating on a willing partner);