EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (7 page)

Unsurprisingly, Democrats expressed more pleasure from reading about Bush’s bicycle accident, whereas Republicans were more joyful over Kerry’s bizarre space suit. Surprisingly, Democrats also expressed pleasure reading about the economic downturn and more pleasure than the Republicans who were more likely to express negative feelings about this situation. Thus, despite the fact that the economic downturn hurt everyone, the Democrats expressed pleasure over the added damage this inflicted on the Republicans — whom they held responsible — and conversely, the added benefit it brought to the Democrats who could wag their fingers. The Democrats’ focus on the Republicans’ fall utterly trumped the economic crash that impacted all US citizens, irrespective of party affiliation.

In a second study, Smith found that Democrats experienced more schadenfreude than Republicans over the number of casualties reported out of the Iraq war, even though Iraqis were certainly not preferentially targeting Republicans. The pleasure they experienced — seemingly irrational given the atrocities of war — was entirely driven by the fact that this was a war sponsored by a Republican government, and thus, the fatalities could be blamed on the Republicans. From a Democrat’s perspective, even though everyone loses when soldiers die in war, it is a bigger loss for Republicans and thus, a bigger gain for Democrats. With schadenfreude, as with envy, it is all about comparison shopping. It is all about satisfying our desires to gain status relative to others, whether the other is a member of another political party, religious organization, or sports team. This can result in highly irrational responses, as desire for personal satisfaction catapults to the top, dominating all other considerations.

As I mentioned earlier, schadenfreude, like envy, is tied to notions of fairness: we feel good when someone who has more than us suffers a misfortune. To explore the relationship between fairness and schadenfreude more closely, the cognitive neuroscientist Tania Singer set up a study involving healthy men and women. Subjects first played a bargaining game for money against an unfamiliar partner; prior to the game, and unbeknownst to the subject, Singer set things up so that the partner played either fairly or unfairly. After the game, each subject entered a brain scanner, and watched their partner receive a painful shock to the hand.

Predictably, Singer discovered that both men and women liked the fair players better than the unfair players, and showed more empathy when the fair players were shocked. Proof of empathy was read off the images of brain activation, especially the brain circuitry known to be involved in pain empathy, and mentioned earlier in my discussion of Joan Chiao’s work on social hierarchies: the insula and anterior cingulate. More surprisingly, Singer discovered that the level of activity in this area of the brain was reduced when men — but not women — saw unfair players shocked into pain; like Chiao’s subjects, the competitive men showed little compassion for the pain experienced by a competitor. Singer also observed that in men — but not women — there was increased activity in the nucleus accumbens — an area mentioned earlier on that, in rats, monkeys and humans is consistently associated with the experience of reward and liking. The more individual men expressed a desire for revenge, the greater the activity in this reward area. Seeing a competitor go down is rewarding, and at least in these experiments, especially rewarding for men. As noted earlier, this difference fits well with the Darwinian expectation that males are the more competitive, status-oriented sex.

Singer’s findings are joined by many others showing that the nucleus accumbens, together with other reward areas, are activated in a wide variety of situations in which we gain from others’ pain. But because these same areas also respond to non-social, non-comparative experiences such as eating, we come back to a critical point in this chapter (and discussed in detail in
chapter 3
): areas that evolved for one function are readily recruited for others, especially in a highly connected brain like ours that readily combines different thoughts and emotions to create different ways of seeing the world. As long as something makes us feel good, whether it is winning, eating, social comparison, or harming another, the reward areas of the brain turn on.

Schadenfreude is one of the mind’s ambassadors, enabling us to journey from a state of inferiority to superiority. It enables “imaginary revenge”
²¹
in the words of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Like envy, it is highly adaptive, focusing our attention on inequities. Like envy, it also has maladaptive consequences, rewarding us when the inequity is not only addressed, but results in another’s failure and misery. This sets up a potentially dangerous transformation from feeling good when we
witness
others feel bad to feeling good when we
make
others feel bad.

Up to now, I have largely focused on the feelings and thoughts associated with desire. Most of the desires I have discussed are fairly reasonable, even justifiable. If someone has hurt us personally, or hurt someone we care about, it is reasonable for us to want some kind of retribution, some kind of punishment that is fair. We want this because of our sense of fairness and a desire to feel good about the moral universe — that those who violate moral norms will be punished. It is also reasonable and justifiable for us to want more resources than we have, to keep up with the Jones and gain status. Sometimes, as I explained, our desires run out of control. This is especially the case when wanting and liking come unglued, as we saw for the addictions of overeating and overusing of drugs. These are cases where out of control desire leads to out of control action. What I have yet to explain is how a psychology of desire to harm others can spiral out of control and how this psychology connects with and motivates a specific action plan to harm others. Though we may wish to harm another person so that we can feel good, what tips individuals over the threshold from an imagined action to a real action? How does the brain let go of the brakes that typically control our hands and feet, and turn them into weapons that can kill? To begin answering these questions, we look next at people who develop a desire to hurt others — a desire that, for many, is the catalyst that results in excessive harms to innocent victims.

An appetite for violence

Have you ever ruminated on the possibility of hurting someone else? Have you ever harbored a desire to get back at an ex-lover who dissed you or take out a boss who fired you? The following vignettes represent real cases of violent fantasies:

• Prosenjit Poddar told his therapist that he was angry at the woman he was dating because she had expressed interest in other men. He further informed the therapist that he wanted to get a gun and shoot her.
  
• Carl Carson told friends and doctors about his homicidal thoughts, including a recurring fantasy about his desire to kill people; some of his violent thoughts were triggered by the belief that the government was malicious.
  
• Seung-Hui Cho wrote a senior college essay in which he described a revenge fantasy, packed with images of retaliation toward those who had what he lacked. He sent his reflections along with excessively violent photographs and videotapes to the New York headquarters of NBC news.
  

In each vignette, the individual upgraded his violent fantasy to violent reality: Poddar killed the woman he was dating — Tatiana Tarasoff; Carson killed a security guard; and Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 others in what famously became known as the Virginia Tech massacres. If violent fantasies are closely tied to violent actions, then we may have a burden of responsibility to report the fantasizers to the proper authorities. On this view, therapists would be put in the sticky situation of breaking client confidentiality. After all, if violent fantasies lead to violent actions, then early detection should provide us with greater safety. Or, in legal terms, early detection should provide a screening method to determine
future dangerousness
and thus, our risk of being harmed. These are precisely the issues that Poddar’s case triggered. They are issues that led to a controversial California Civil Code decision, often referred to as the Tarasoff duty, that therapists have a responsibility to warn potential victims of danger from a client. This decision, and subsequent interpretations of the law, depend upon the evidence that violent fantasies lead to violent actions.

Studies of individuals who have committed violent acts, including psychopaths, serial murders, and sexual offenders, suggest that violent fantasies are common. For example, records of sexually motivated murders reveal that between 60-80 percent of individuals report having had detailed and recurring fantasies about harming others, some going back to their childhood. Several described running through their fantasies over and over again, deriving pleasure from them, and even going so far as to enact the violence with household objects. Although these results suggest that violent fantasies are common in violent offenders, and may represent precursors to actual violence, they must be treated cautiously given their retroactive quality. In all of these studies, a clinician asked the offender to recall memories of violent fantasies before they committed acts of violence, and sometimes asked about early memories in childhood. We can’t be certain, therefore, whether they in fact had these fantasies, believed they did because of the violence they carried out, or fed the clinician what they wanted. And given the correlational nature of the evidence, we certainly can’t say whether their fantasies necessarily drove these individuals to commit crimes or were just associated with these events. Cases like Poddar’s, Carson’s and Cho’s are more telling in this light because they reported violent fantasies
before
committing acts of violence.

Several studies of healthy adults without criminal records reveal that between 40-90 percent have had at least one homicidal fantasy. The evolutionary psychologist David Buss reported that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women had movie quality fantasies about killing someone, including details of the person’s identity, the reasons for their desire, and the steps they would take to kill them
²²
. Many not only had these fantasies, but started the process of realization in motion. This research indicates that violent fantasies are not the sole province of those with mental health issues or criminal records. Given the numbers, most people that you know have fantasized about killing someone else. Most people you know, however, have not taken the next step and pulled the trigger. These facts minimize the usefulness of using fantasies in a court of law. Nonetheless, we can ask what strengthens the connection between the desire to harm and harm itself? Identifying these connective threads might prove useful in law enforcement, providing protection for victims and help for potential perpetrators.

Normally raised children as young as seven years old are more likely to act aggressively toward their peers if they are self-absorbed in a world of aggressive fantasy. This correlation between aggression and fantasy is heightened in children who witnessed violence or were subjected to it. Adult men and women are more likely to crave violence after reading an essay about the cathartic power of violent fantasies to flush their aggressive urges than after reading a manifesto against catharsis. Men who engage in aggressive sexual fantasies are more likely to engage in aggression, but only if they are narcissists. Men who engage in deviant sexual fantasies are more likely to enact these fantasies, but only if they exhibit signs of psychopathy. Psychopathy and narcissism are like Siamese twins, inseparable. And yes, the connection between the desire to harm and acts of violence is much stronger in men than women, as it is for the clinical case of psychopathy.

What these studies show is that those who are self-absorbed and play with violent fantasies, are most likely to take these imaginary worlds onto the real world stage, with real harm. They suggest, contrary to the dominant catharsis view among psychoanalysts, that ruminating on violence leads to violence. Like Carlsmith’s work on revenge that I described earlier, these results suggest that ruminating on harmful experiences, whether personally experienced or desired in the future, revs up the probability of actually harming someone in the future. Thinking, over and over again, about unsatisfied desires to harm others, is more likely to result in attempts to satisfy these desires. When therapists, especially those influenced by the catharsis view of the mind, encourage their patients to engage in aggressive fantasies to release their pent up energy, we should bring forward malpractice suits as they are accomplices to crime.

We can readily see the connection between the world of fantasy and reality by looking at extreme cases of pathology — cases of desire run wild. This is the world of the lust murderer — individuals with a craving for bizarre and degenerate forms of harming others. This is a world that reveals how an addiction to harming others might arise, tying us back to the discussion of how wanting and liking come apart in the case of food and drugs
²³
.

Lust murderers are typically repeat offenders or serial killers. The serial nature of their crimes comes from the fact that they are motivated by recurrent fantasies that create recurrent cravings. They are, effectively, addicted to violence. Their fantasies often entail some kind of paraphilia — an extreme and abnormal sexual arousal to objects, people or situations — played out through some form of sadism — a persistent pattern of sexual or non-sexual pleasure from humiliating, punishing and harming others. Here again we see our uniquely connected and combinatorial mind at work, seamlessly blending pleasure and violence, animate and inanimate attractions, sometimes with benign origins, but often with malignant outcomes;
chapter 3
provides the details of how this works and how it evolved.

The paraphilias, like many of the other disorders that appear within the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health,
fall along a continuum from rather benign forms of voyeurism to erotophonophilia, the vicious and sadistic killing of an innocent victim in order to achieve ultimate sexual satisfaction. Regardless of the particular object or situation driving the paraphilia, individuals develop addictions. Like other addictions, including those associated with food, drugs, and alcohol, paraphilic addicts experience withdrawal. Dangerously for the world around them, the erotophonophilic or lust killer harbors sadistic paraphilias, including flagellation – the need to club, whip or beat someone — anthropophagy — the desire to eat human body parts — picquerism — a craving to stab someone or cut off their flesh, focusing especially on genitals and breasts — and necrosadism — a yearning to have sexual contact with the dead. Although these desires may seem unimaginable, they reveal one facet of the human mind’s potential — a potential that was fully realized in the mind and actions of Jeffrey Dahmer who flagellated, cannibalized, dismembered, and engaged in necrophilia with his 17 victims.