This post is one of a series about the book The Anatomy of Evil by Dr Michael Stone. It is recommended that these posts be read in order. Unless otherwise noted all quotes used are from the book The Anatomy of Evil.
"The aim of this book is to understand evil. To demystify evil altogether would be much too ambitious a task" (page 9)
I think that evil can be a kind of confusing and scary aspect of life but that it like many other parts of human existence is better understood by examining it with evidence and rational arguments and using our best reason. There are many subjects that we all learn about in our lives from childhood experiences, our parents and peers and we end up with folk psychology as our default, modified by religious and cultural factors.
It is probably better than nothing but certainly not perfect. That is to say it is not the result of careful consideration for the best arguments and evidence both for and against ideas related to evil. We usually don't use sound critical and independent thinking to develop our understanding of evil. We end up with whatever we end up with and some is good, some is bad and a lot is useful sometimes but not at other times.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive scientific inquiry, just a glance at the ideas Doctor Stone presented contrasted with a few of my own. My experience with evil is certainly not nonexistent but it is far, far, far less than that of Doctor Stone.
Doctor Stone in his introduction points out the various religious beliefs that included the idea that evil comes from men and not God and that judgement is reserved for God. He also pointed out that as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst he is cautioned against making moral judgements.
Doctor Stone commented on the fact that the attitude towards rape changes whenever women are moved from the category of chattel to that of persons as reflected in the bible. The disturbing treatment of women slaves in earlier times is disturbing, even abominable to many of us now but the sad reality is that people in earlier times accepted these conditions as natural and for many acceptable, especially if they were not slaves or women themselves.
To me every act of having human beings raped or treated as chattel or enslaved is a terrible crime, so I probably would not have for in at all with many earlier societies or I would have hid or adjusted my position. There is no way to really know.
Doctor Stone commented: "There should never be a time, for example, when child rape, serial killing, torture, wife bashing, and the like become acceptable. That is an understandable hope. Given the history of the world, however, I do not think it is a reasonable hope. Still less reasonable is the hope that the large-scale evils that unfold in times of war and conflict-where torture, mutilation, and enslavement suddenly seem "justifiable"-disappear from the earth. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse have yet to be unseated." (Page 17)
Worth noting is also the fact that for much of human history prohibition of torture was not a popular idea. It seems many earlier societies had no moral objections to the torture of enemies, criminals, suspects and often innocent men, women and children. I have heard Jon Atack comment that Voltaire may have been the first person to note that torture is bad. He probably wasn't literally the first, but his idea is not one that was common in much of human history.
Doctor Stone made some caveats before defining evil as he will use it. He is looking at evil at the level of homicide and similar crimes such as torture, rape and pedophilia in peacetime. I use the term more broadly and include other acts but it is fine if we understand this difference. Most of us might feel a co-worker lying about us is evil or something else that would not fit on the scale designed for murderers, serial rapists and pedophiles who rape and torture and murder children.
He has the evil with all caps EVIL while we have a broader scale that can include the inconsiderate and selfish, a totally different scale with his scale at the far, far end of ours. We have evil with all small letters too, while he ignored that for his purposes.
He limits his evil to intentional acts by human beings. No animals, God or nature here. Okay. He also limits it to acts that the perpetrator knows will harm or cause suffering to another to hurt or kill them in an especially excruciatingly painful way. He added the pain can be physical, emotional or mental.
Stone emphasizes that evil involves excess, acts that greatly exceed what would be necessary to express irritation or animosity or to subdue the victim. It makes sense to understand some criticism or restraint is necessary in life at times but evil acts go beyond this. Stone pointed out the derivation of evil comes from "yfel" pronounced as we pronounce evil and meaning "over" or " beyond" and it makes sense. Evil acts go beyond the severity necessary, an assault where a warning would suffice is evil, a murder where a notice would suffice is evil, a rape where a comment would suffice is evil (rape goes beyond the necessary and just in every circumstance) and so we can define evil as more harm than is justified or appropriate.
So, Stone acknowledged that evil is seen as what is beyond what can be considered acceptable in a community. It has the quality that to some degree the definition changes as the community changes, but we can have our own standards and feel that regardless of the time or place they should not be changed. We can have our own values that don't change with the times.
Stone pointed out that evil requires malice aforethought. We have to intend to hurt another person physically or mentally or know we will hurt them to achieve a goal and be willing to cause that harm with no concern for the victim. He also pointed out that we more easily see the act as evil the saner the perpetrator is.
He gave a definition for an evil ACT
"1. it must be breathtakingly horrible;
2. malice aforethought (evil intention) will usually precede the act;
3. the degree of suffering will be wildly excessive;
4. the nature of the act will appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community. " (page 22)
Stone pointed out the important distinction that evil PEOPLE can be counted on to commit such acts habitually and often. That makes sense. He also pointed out that even among evil PEOPLE it will only rarely be true that every moment of the person's waking day is spent doing evil.
I think that people such as cult leader Ronald Hubbard can be seen as doing evil nearly every moment of their waking day as Hubbard carried out programs and plans that caused people to suffer mentally, emotionally and physically by the hundreds or thousands for years of his life. I also put people who have done other acts such as approving sanctions against countries, often very poor countries, in this category. Sanctions can cause hundreds of thousands or millions to suffer and starve. And the people ordering them often know this fact.
Now to move from my comment and Stone's ideas to how he came to decide how to use evil in his context: "The meaning of the word evil in everyday speech can be grasped most readily from the accounts in newspapers and in the biographies of those who have committed murder or other violent crimes. From these sources, we can look for common features in the crimes themselves and even in the people responsible for them." (page 23)
Doctor Stone in my opinion had a brilliant idea - don't tell people what is evil, let them tell you. He read over six hundred books on criminals, specifically biographies of killers and other particularly heinous criminals who the press, authors and public have labeled as evil.
Doctor Stone over twenty years ago began his study of evil with true crime biographies of killers because those books gave him many details about the childhood and life of each killer, enabling him as a psychiatrist to compare and catalogue which types of family life and backgrounds are present or not present for various criminals. He obviously is at the far end and mainly dealing with murder, mass murder, serial killers, rapists and so on. These are not jaywalkers and people who return library books late. He came up with the idea for his scale of evil and developed it over time.
He wanted a tool to help juries when he acts as an expert witness regarding criminals. He found some killers to be more evil than others.
Here is an example: "Ian Brady and his girlfriend-accomplice, Myra Hindley"... "Brady had first strangled his victims and then recorded their screams on a tape recorder, for use later on as a kind of aphrodisiac for him and Myra. That was torture and callousness of a sort that went beyond anything I had heard of in the crime literature up until that time. That was twenty years ago. Worse was to come. But at the time, I placed that example at the far end of my evolving scale: evil at the extreme. " (page 30)
Doctor Stone put justifiable homicide at the other end of the scale. He considered acts that could be called self defense as not evil at all. He has examples of people who kill abusive men. Often men have women and children as terrified victims who they abuse and threaten with death of they attempt to flee or to notify authorities. Doctor Stone considers some acts of killing abusers, even via ambush, as necessary for survival and therefore not evil.
Over time Stone added a middle point and assigned various crimes based off the three starting points of no evil, the most extreme evil and more routine murder. He considers jealousy murders the most understandable for many of us. If we caught a lover of spouse in bed with another person we MIGHT be tempted to kill one of both of them. We MIGHT. Until we are in that situation we don't really know, but we can imagine the urge.
Stone worked his way up to having the early scale taking shape.
He settled for a time on this sequence from least evil to most:
A) Justified homicide, not evil at all
B) Jealousy-driven and other impulsive murders
C) Murder to get someone out of the way, without planning
D) Murder to get someone out of the way:malice aforethought
E) Serial murder, repetitive vicious acts, but without torture
F) Serial murder, with torture the main goal
Doctor Stone pointed out that he focused on murder because people are quicker to use the term evil for a murder than for other crimes such as fraud.
"The term evil is often applied to cruel parents, vicious bullies, and bosses who humiliate their employees to the point of mental breakdown and even suicide." (page 34)
This is particularly applicable in my mind when we think of, for example, how the Office of Special Affairs, formerly the Guardian's Office in Scientology has the mission of utterly ruining people, by now hundreds or thousands, who are targeted by Scientology management and leadership by among many other things, driving people to suicide or madness. In other words at the direction of Ronald Hubbard earlier, and now David Miscavige, hundreds, probably thousands, of people have been targeted by campaigns specifically designed and intended to utterly ruin them by driving them to suicide or madness. If that isn't evil then I don't know what is.
Doctor Stone pointed out that at that time he had read a couple hundred true crime biographies and he added more categories over the years. Eventually he read over six hundred of these bios.
Importantly Stone described some killers as not neatly fitting his scale such as some mentally deranged people who don't understand what is going on.
He also pointed out that he found some men who made careers of subjecting others to excruciating tortures, as he described them. These men have committed acts that exceed even the furthest level, twenty two, of his scale.
For simplicity he didn't extend the scale further and recalibrate the position of everyone who he had already assigned a designation. His scale stops at twenty two.
Torture-murderers are people he described as serial killers who are sexually stirred up by inflicting torture and are men (almost always men) who he described as almost always never mentally ill. They are not delusional, don't hear voices and show no other signs of a departure from reality. They know what they are doing, they understand the harm that they cause and they are perfectly happy to do it.
I have read the descriptions of several men we can put beyond the end of the scale or say they are at the furthest reaches, beyond most people at level twenty two. I can assure you they are worse and their acts are worse than garden variety serial rapists and killers.
Doctor Stone described the reasoning behind his scale as his desire to separate the serial killers from men who stay up late scheming to kill their wives and that when we look beyond the outer differences between a guy who might act as a killer once to one who may seem to kill habitually or even routinely we can find inner differences.
The literature years ago merely called many people who had any break with reality as schizophrenic and labeled the cause as stemming from an issue with the mother. Not very scientific. A few patients were labeled manic.
Doctor Stone described in some detail the early days and, well, they didn't have much regarding diagnosis and treatment for a long time and it took many decades for effective medication for any serious mental health issues to be developed. Then diagnosis had to improve because lithium may treat some patients with one issue but not help others with a different problem.
One thing that is of interest to me in looking at evil is the fact that some men and women have such a small chance of reform and such a high chance of re-offending that it would be criminal in my opinion to release them EVER. UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. PERIOD.
Doctor Stone commented that forensic psychiatry has a duty to be on the lookout for people likely to commit more crimes.
I want to make it clear, this is not about punishment or revenge or even getting a fair exchange for victims: it is about protecting society and the men, women and children in society from people who the best arguments and evidence show have far too great a chance to commit the most serious crimes if ever released based in part on the crimes they have already committed.
It is not a guessing game, these people ALREADY have committed acts such as serial rape, serial murder, serial child rape and serial torture, rape, murder. They are not randomly selected. They have made choices that put them in this category, probably the most important category for any psychiatrist to put a patient on, because of what the people who don't get put in this category but should have been DO.
Doctor Stone sadly documented many people who committed numerous crimes and could have been identified as serious threats but were not, subsequently they were released and caused tremendous suffering, suffering that could have been avoided.
Doctor Stone takes on the issue of predictable recidivism. It is a very loaded issue as often sexual offenses that don't results in death are treated as far less serious than murder and often first time or young offenders get particularly lenient sentences. These factors combined give us many rapists and pedophiles who get very short sentences, even shorter if they plea bargain and reportedly over ninety percent of federal criminal cases result in a plea agreement. So, a rapist or child rapist may be a young man or first time offender who has committed many rapes but not had sufficient evidence brought forth for conviction before and now gets a relative slap on the wrist, only to be released to commit more rapes of women and children while still young. Doctor Stone gave the example of a first time offender convicted of rape at nineteen who gets a ten year sentence, then three years off for good behavior and is released to have between a third and half of such offenders rape again.
That is in the opinion of both doctor Stone and myself far too short a sentence. He called it too generous. I must agree. I am no law and order throw the book at everyone hard case. I would probably encourage the release of a third or more of prisoners in the United States, the non-violent drug offenders, many of whom only dealt with marijuana or are drug addicts needing treatment and to me regarding prostitution, prostitutes are the victims of crime, not perpetrators. So, I am not a "pack the prisons full" guy. But I definitely want the rapists, pedophiles and killers locked up - very often for life.
I think that Stone has a noble goal in mind when he seeks to guide judges, juries and parole boards to keep dangerous predators locked up for longer periods of time including in many cases life imprisonment without any possibility of parole. It isn't about resenting people who commit heinous acts, though being human we may, it is about responsibility: the responsibility to protect the public and keep the people who have shown they have already committed these acts and are extremely likely to commit them and similar ones again incapacitated.
I remember years ago reading about the intent behind the prison system in New York state and reading about three purposes. We have deterrent, rehabilitation and incapacitation. Deterrence of course involves others who will not commit crimes because they don't want to end up in prison, the example serves a purpose.
Rehabilitation in many prisons plays no role or little role. A lot of people simply
don't care about or like prisoners, they feel they are bad people who deserve
whatever they get. And incapacitation involves taking away the ability of a prisoner to commit crimes by locking them up. It has limited success as many people commit more crimes in prison then they did before because the environment encourages that behavior even sometimes requiring it to survive. But society accepts prisoners assaulting, robbing and raping each other far better than it does them running wild on the outside. Part of the problem with this shortsighted approach is that many boys and young men get raped in youth homes and prison and develop a deep hatred for society, a hatred they express through horrific crimes when they are released into society. Sometimes a boy or man goes to prison as someone who made one poor or even evil choice and comes out after being brutalized and sees a world that considers the rapes he endured a joke. That gives us a monster.
Call me sentimental or a softy, but I have this crazy idea that no one in prison should be raped, no men, women or children who are incarcerated should get raped. Zero. No matter what they have done. Just removing the all too common rapes from prison would tremendously reduce the serious recidivism, the serial rapists and killers made in part by their experiences in prison or reform schools.
Even if you have no compassion for convicts this approach can leave us with several problems. Most people who go to prison eventually get released. It doesn't serve society to make them into brutal monsters. Additionally, no matter how carefully we try, we convict innocent people. Probably many thousands of innocent people are in prison. If we throw them to be raped and brutalized, knowing we are doing this to innocent people, what does that make us? Who are we?
I want to give a few quotes from Doctor Stone regarding the dangerous and unchanging, unrepentant criminals.
"As I will show you in a later chapter, this picture of incarceration for a violent crime, followed by imprudent release and then the commission of still more - and more shocking - crimes is actually common in the literature on men ultimately convicted of serial sexual homicide." (page 42)
Doctor Stone described cult leader and multiple murderer Jeff Lundgren. Lundgren followed the cult leader playbook and claimed to be a prophet of God and to hear God then went on to claim to be God. The usual stuff.
Lundgren went a bit further than many cult leaders and demanded that several "disobedient" followers be executed. Lundgren then shot and murdered three followers. He was eventually caught and executed.
"Lundgren, in fact, was one of those rare individuals who behaved atrociously on a day-in day-out basis throughout most of his adult life"
"... Jeff Lundgren and others like him, for whom redemption is unthinkable, whom age does not mellow, and whose propensity to evil actions remains at full tilt throughout their life span. " (page 44)
Redemption has a spiritual dimension to it which I cannot judge, perhaps a God or Gods can forgive, reform or redeem someone. I don't know. I do know that for those who pursue justice in this life releasing some people and expecting them to behave acceptably in this life is a fool's errand. You might get lucky once in a while but if you press your luck and release these kinds of offenders, based on the offenses, over and over you will release the most heinous offenders over and over and they will reoffend in the most monstrous ways possible. They have proven it again and again.
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