The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (28 page)

Harking back to the need of ancient tribes to survive, more modern group survival mechanisms include Delbanco’s definition. If all members of a group adhere to the leaders’ values and methods of control, the better the chance that the group itself will survive. People justify evil actions in the group by telling themselves that they are willing to do anything that is necessary to defend and strengthen the community.

The group survival reasoning is a form of evil in which moral virtues and idealism support violent actions. This so-called idealistic evil pushes terrorists to kill both other people and themselves without remorse. Their inner strength spurs terrorists to commit relentless and merciless atrocities.

But before modern terrorism, severe brutality was common among groups that considered themselves idealistically superior to those around them. One obvious example is the Crusades, which divinely sanctioned torture, mutilation, and murder involving millions of people. The Pope called for Christians to gain control of the Holy Land from the heathens, and the Crusaders brutalized people while considering themselves good men with high morals, serving their Church and God.

During the First Crusade, Arabs from the town of Aleppo tried to defend themselves, but they failed miserably against the onslaught of the armored knights. After beating down the resistance, the Crusaders hacked off the heads of the Aleppo men and catapulted the heads into the town of Antioch, hoping the citizens in that walled city would not resist them.

Also, during the First Crusade, the knights took Jerusalem, massacred the Muslim citizens, then burned alive Jews in their synagogue.

While modern people rarely think of the Crusaders as good and just men who treated unarmed citizens decently (and that is quite an understatement), the word
crusade
is still used when talking about organized movements whose purpose is the greater good. We have crusades against terrorists, drugs, crime, and so forth.

Murder fits most definitions of evil. Murder of children is almost universally accepted as evil. The perpetrators of the murders—for example, President Snow and his cronies—clearly plan and intend to torture and kill children in the most excruciating and horrific ways possible. They know and delight in the fact that the children will suffer immensely. They have no shame. It is this excessive use of suffering that makes the leaders evil. They could choose to limit freedoms without torture and death, but they choose instead to commit evil acts that go over and beyond what is required to maintain control of the people. It’s interesting to note that the Anglo–Saxon roots of the word
evil
were “over” or “beyond.”

Scientific laws do not define evil with mathematical precision or experimental proof. As mentioned earlier, there are a thousand gray shades of evil, ranging from murder to theft to bullying to innocent comments that make someone commit suicide. However, if we look at evil as not being supernatural, but the result of a wide range of human behaviors, both intentional and innocent, then we can examine it in a more scientific manner.

Recent explanations for the behavior of serial killers usually revolve around extra Y chromosomes or insanity. It’s been suggested by scientists that a genotype of XYY causes men to fly into fits of anger, into rages, into acts of great violence. Insanity, as we all know, is often used as a defense for violent crime. Yet, not only serial killers murder people. Seemingly normal people commit acts of evil every day.

As for being born evil, it seems unlikely. Some scholars claim that there are scientific roots in the evil mind, that a newborn baby with a perverse twist in his DNA will grow up to commit atrocious crimes; that no matter how much this baby is loved from the moment of birth, it won’t matter.

But then, there’s the theory that evil people are born with what researchers call criminal or risk genes.

In 2002, a group of scientists working for the Institute of Psychiatry in London claimed that they had discovered “the criminal gene.” According to the scientists, the particular gene was strongly linked to criminal and antisocial behavior. Children from poor circumstances were nine times more likely to act unlawfully when compared to other children living in similar circumstances if they had a particular variation of the gene.
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Needless to say, not everyone agreed with the findings of the Institute of Psychiatry. Especially when Nuffield Council on Bioethics located in London declared that a criminal’s genetic makeup should be taken into account during his trial and his sentencing.
⁵
Politicians on the right immediately suspected a plot to pardon criminals for the most unforgivable sins using the argument that such acts were a result of genetics not intent.

Rising like tidal waves from both sides of the political spectrum came dire warnings of early twentieth-century eugenic programs, which championed sterilizing criminals so that their traits would be wiped out of future generations. These stories were quickly followed with talk of Nazi genetic experiments in the 1930s, forced sterilizations of specific groups, and the possible existence of an “alcoholic” gene that turned ordinary Englishmen into drunkards. No one wanted to be categorized by their genetic code. Nor did either political party want criminals set free due to a mix-up in their genetic code. At present, there’s no agreement on whether the criminal gene actually influences behavior or not. The argument has moved out of the scientific community into politics and it’s doubtful any resolution to the question will be soon found. Evil remains a matter of behavior, not genetics.

Several personality disorders—psychopathic, sadistic, antisocial, and schizoid—have been linked to violent crimes. If a person can’t empathize with and have compassion for other people, then he’s most likely to commit violent crimes against them. The brain becomes
wired
for violence. The perpetrator becomes addicted to the high he gets from his atrocious crimes.

Psychopaths empathize with but lack compassion for other people. Schizoids are aloof and lack both compassion and empathy. Many of these people don’t fit into ordinary society and have immense trouble forming emotional bonds. And if someone has psychopathic, sadistic, antisocial, and schizoid traits, then he will probably commit evil acts.

However, these killers are not mentally ill, and in fact, they most definitely know what they’re doing and they enjoy it. To be insane, a person must be unable to distinguish right from wrong, he must be unable to assist in his own defense.

Evolutionary psychologists tell us that our minds evolved long ago to help us survive. We learned how to recognize each other’s faces, how to recognize and cope with cheating, how to choose mates, and how to talk to each other. Various groups of neurons might handle something like language and be located in one area of the brain—in the case of language, it is located in the area known as Broca’s area. Other groups of neurons might not be located in the same area. In this way of looking at the brain, small modules of neurons feed information to larger modules. Even smaller modules feed information to the small modules, and so forth, until at the lowest level, an individual neuron fires during specific events.

A neuron fires electrochemically, meaning that chemicals produce electric signals. When chemicals in our bodies have an electric charge, they are termed ions, and ions in the nervous system include sodium and potassium, each with one positive charge; calcium with two positive charges; and chloride with one negative charge. Neurons are surrounded by a semi-permeable membrane that lets some ions pass through while blocking other ions.

When the neuron is not firing, the inside of the cell is negative compared to everything immediately surrounding the cell. The ions keep trying to pass from the inside of the neuron to the outside, and vice-versa, with the membrane controlling the balance. For example, when the neuron is not firing, potassium ions pass easily through the membrane, and for every two potassium ions the membrane allows to enter the neuron, it allows three sodium ions to leave. Basically, there are more sodium ions outside the neuron and more potassium ions inside it. At rest, when the neuron is not firing, the difference in voltage between the inside and outside of the neuron is approximately -70 millivolts, meaning that the inside of the neuron is 70 millivolts less than the outside.

When a neuron sends information down an axon away from the cell body, neuroscientists say that there is an action potential or that a spike has occurred. The action potential is created by a depolarizing current, which creates electrical activity. An event, or stimulus, occurs that moves the resting potential of -70 millivolts toward 0 millivolts. The stimulus causes the sodium channels to open in the neuron, and because there are more sodium ions outside the neuron than inside, sodium ions flood into the neuron. Because sodium ions have a positive charge, the neuron becomes more positive and depolarized. When depolarization shifts downward to approximately -55 millivolts, the neuron fires an action potential, which is known as the threshold. If the neuron never reaches its threshold, it won’t fire.

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