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.
James Mithcell "Mike" DeBardeleben is a gruesome example of a person shaped by parental cruelty. His father put his head underwater as a punishment and beat him ruthlessly. His alcoholic mother also was violent.
Mike was notably mean, nasty and brutal towards his five wives. He blackmailed them with pornographic pictures. He was unimaginably cruel to twenty or so victims of serial murder. He taped some of them and tortured them until they begged him to either stop or kill them.
True Crime author Stephen Michaud described DeBardeleben as lacking in any trace of decency, and being so evil, so unspeakably bad that he found it difficult to tell his story. He described it as too bloody horrible, sustained horror.
DeBardeleben had a hatred of women. He called them sluts and whores.He viewed them as only being fit for degradation and destruction via rape and murder. FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood classified sexual sadists in categories he developed. Mike for the category that punishes women for being "evil" and "powerful" in his mind.
Stone described DeBardeleben and Gary Ridgway, The Green River Killer, as committing "serial matricide" which is symbolically killing your own mother over and over again when you kill others.
The twisted effort to go from vulnerable to a cruel mother to all powerful over a woman was described by DeBardeleben.
"The central impulse [of sadism] is to have complete mastery over another person - to make her the helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god...and the most radical aim is to make her suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her." ( page 225)
DeBardeleben captures the essence of a person as Daniel Shaw described in his book Traumatic Narcissism ruthlessly projecting repudiated aspects of self onto another. His terms for the denial of vulnerability in oneself and projection of that trait onto another, in this case by using force and literally binding the other person to force vulnerability, then using that position to force the utmost humiliation, dehumanization, degradation and despair possible onto the victim, showing that the killer absolutely cannot stand these traits within himself.
These are men who often absolutely hate themselves, their pasts, their character and their identities with a passion and fury that almost cannot be fathomed. For many, every moment of their existence as adults is a battle to not experience incredibly strong emotions of self-loathing and to find faults in others and to make themselves feel powerful by dominating others and creating "proof" that they are strong and others are weak.
Stone noted that a third of serial killers are neglected by a parent and that the absence of a mother or compensating caregiver is tend to Rob a child of the characteristics we tend to qualify as human while lacking a father may lead to trouble for a child in their teens and preteen years, particularly a boy.
Stone noted that boys and girls who have no parental love have tremendous difficulties and often never from normal emotional bonds with other people. If they also happen to be beaten by foster parents or caretakers they are more likely to treat other people as inanimate objects and to lash out and smash or carve up other human beings at will.
This has a particular relevance for people raised in cults like Scientology. Many people in Scientology, particularly on staff and especially in the Sea Org, virtually completely abandoned their children. Staff often work sixty to a hundred hours a week. Many work a forty hour a week job in addition to forty plus hours on staff as staff often work with no pay.
Sea Org members are subject to very strict control and often work over a hundred hours a week for months and years with no weekends or holidays off. They are often complete strangers to their children, who sometimes see them for a few dozen hours a year. In many orgs in the past children were all assigned to one Sea Org member who was called a nanny. Many Sea Org members admitted that the nanny was often a person the management felt was worthless and incapable of any other position. So, the children were in the care of people who were practically considered totally incompetent.
A serial killer who suffered extreme parental neglect was Leonard Lake. His mother abandoned him as a toddler. When she did have contact with him after that it was unusual. She encouraged him to take nude pictures of girls including his sister and cousin. He ended up having sex with his own sister.
Lake had two marriages before joining Charles Ng. They created a torture bunker in a remote area and tortured, raped and killed people there. They raped, tortured and murdered two dozen people there, also filming snuff films, for their enjoyment afterwards.
Stone described an excerpt from one of the films. It is chilling to hear and I have heard the excerpt as well.
"The bondage and enslavement of Lake's women victims were Lake's antidote to the abandonment and neglect by his mother: Lake's women were immobilized and held captive. And taking a page from DeBardeleben, his torture of a woman showed that he had (godlike) power over them, rather than the woman/mother having power over Lake. But his fury at his mother's abandonment made him go the extra step and kill them. So much for my "psychoanalysis" of Leonard Lake. But what he did to these women takes him to a world where there is no forgiveness. When people speak of evil, this is the world they are talking about. " (page 227)
Stone pointed out that about two out of three serial killers experienced parental humiliation. Young boys being criticized regarding sexuality, lack of manliness, stupidity at school, or odd physical features like being grossly overweight have a particularly hard time.
Stone described how many people who committed serious crimes had families from hell. He commented on the tendency for these families to have what he calls the Cat's Cradle family tree. They have many marriages, divorces, children of casual encounters or with unclear parental ties or siblings, half-siblings, incest children and so on that there is no clear way to draw a conventional family tree.
Stone drew the family trees (wreaths?) of several serial killers and they often have incest siblings, so the addition of diagonal lines to an otherwise vertical and horizontal layout is added, they have the father having multiple invest children with multiple daughters in one case and murdering the husband of one of his daughters out of jealousy. The family of Ed Sexton, He had children by two of his daughters and attempted to with two others and had nine children overall. He also had numerous half-siblings and a miscellaneous relative named Otis who was casually labeled "sex offender."
Other murderers with complex and interweaving family trees include Manson, Scott Peterson, David Ray and Leonard Lake.
Stone described how some children experience violence and in turn exhibit negative behavior. For boys it more commonly results in anger and hatred resulting in becoming violent towards others. For girls it more commonly results in becoming depressed and taking these strong emotions out o on themselves, sometimes even becoming suicidal. On occasion these patterns are reversed regarding gender.
Some considered violence delivered to boys as a pretty reliable recipe for violence done later on by those boys.
For those interested, Stone described a beautiful book by criminology professor Lonnie Athens, The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals.
Athens described stages a battered child may go through.
At first the child is brutalized, severely beaten and humiliated or made to witness other family members enduring such treatment or simply encouraged to injure or kill anyone who dares to mess with you.
After brutalization comes belligerency. At this stage the idea of hurting others becomes absorbed into one's personality. It becomes the seemingly appropriate response to dealing with life's stresses.
The next stage is violent performances. At this stage, reached in adolescence or early adulthood, one progresses from violent thoughts to repeated violent acts against anyone who presses even lightly on one's sensitive buttons.
The final stage is reached by some but not most people. It is virulence. This is a way of life in which violence is so entrenched, so much a part of their nature, that according to Stone their is no turning back and no corrective treatment is available. Stone pointed out that we don't know who the violence will target, whether it is the offending parent or more usually another person.
Rarely a girl or woman may also display this progression but usually not to virulence
Now, I don't have the expertise of Stone, nor frankly enough education to form an educated opinion on these stages, or if they are genuine. I find the progression plausible, but would need to know far more to fully evaluate it.
It is plausible that a person can go through these, or some of these, but I honestly don't know, certainly not at the high level of certainty I would want to make a definite statement one way or the other.
In the spirit of equality I should mention that though they are extremely rare, Stone did find an example of a female serial sexual killer. Jane Toppan was born in 1857 and is a serial poisoner who killed at least thirty-one people and possibly as many as a hundred. She poisoned her landlord, her foster sister and many others as a nurse but when an entire family she had moved in with all died it raised suspicion and the bodies were exhumed. At forty-four she was tried and sent to a mental institution for the criminally insane.
What makes her a serial sexual killer is the fact that she experienced orgasm when her victims died from her poison. Stone described Countess Erzsebet Bathory, who tortured and murdered numerous young women, as the only other female serial sexual killer he knew of.
So, in some matters women have not achieved full equality with men, and regarding this subject it is a good thing. The world doesn't need any more monsters, it has more than enough already.
"Some factors span both heredity and environment: personality is said to be half related to genetic influences, half to "non-shared" environment. Being male or female makes a big difference: males are far more likely to commit violent, including "evil," acts. Gender is something we inherit, but once we start out in life as a male or female, expectations and experiences begin to differ - to a significant degrees because of the sex we were born into. " (page 286)
"In dealing with violent crime and evil, self-centeredness - narcissism - is common to almost all persons of either sex who commit serious crimes, the point being that they care only about themselves and care little or not at all about their victims. " (page 314)
Three personality disorders have a close relationship to crime, particularly to violent crime. The evil actions described throughout this book are often the by-products of these disorders, whether singly or in combination. The three disorders are antisocial, psychopathic, and sadistic. A fourth - schizoid - deserves consideration as well because schizoid personality is seen in about half of the men committing serial sexual homicide. In the general population, schizoid personality is present only in about 1 percent. " (page 315)
"If we set apart what we regard as evil from what we do not, the trait that really makes the difference is empathy." (page 315)
Stone pointed out that he used empathy as most of us do in everyday talk. We describe both understanding and predicting the emotions of others and the ability to feel sympathy or compassion, feeling the pain of another or others or being concerned about their suffering emotionally.
Technically knowing the emotions of others and predicting them is empathy and caring emotionally, feeling hurt when they hurt and wanting to avoid or minimize the pain, physical and emotional, of others because it hurts us too is a separate capacity we can call compassion.
Several experts have noted that human predators lack traditional empathy with both empathy and compassion together but that they have "cold empathy," an ability to accurately know the feelings of others and predict them, but no compassion.
"We see the division between these ordinarily coexisting concepts of empathy and compassion in the psychopath. Many psychopaths are rather good at reading people's expressions accurately, but they lack compassion." (page 316)
"In essence the closer you are to having zero empathy and (especially) zero compassion, the easier it is to carve up a person as though you were whittling wood. We see this with David Ray Parker and his Toy Box; John Ray Weber mutilating his sister-in-law while she was alive; and Theresa Knorr torturing her daughters. " (page 316)
"I have occasionally encountered people who, while not devoid of compassion, exhibit this quality in an extremely constricted sphere of interpersonal contact. David Parker Ray, for example, was assisted in his torture of the women immobilized in his Toy Box by his much younger girlfriend, Cindy Hendy. In my blood-chilling interview with Hendy, she referred to their victims (all of whom were female), in her utterly expressionless manner, as "packages" that is, objects to be whipped, tortured, mutilated, and then tossed aside as packages (as one tosses out the garbage after a meal). When I asked her how she was able, as a woman herself, to treat victims of her own sex with such indifference and contempt - as not even human, she reiterated: they were just packages. " (page 316 -317)
I included this because it struck me as someone who spent decades in Scientology that much of the language in Scientology organizations and the insistence upon calling staff members and Sea Org members by their post or job title and not their name has a dehumanizing effect. Numerous terms and actions in Scientology serve to bolster this.
Here is an excerpt from a blog post by Terra Cognita at Mike Rinder's blog
Words that Hurt: Scientology Nomenclature
"WOG WORLD
Scientology labels people before they ever set foot inside one of their organizations. Outside the front door, he’s considered RAW MEAT. The second he crosses the threshold, he’s a BODY IN THE SHOP.
Everybody living in the outside world—without the benefit of L. Ron Hubbard’s technology—is a WOG—a Worthy Oriental Gentleman. Not only is this term degrading, it’s racist. To this day, the term is widely used inside the church.
Ethics
Perhaps no section of Scientology uses degrading terms more than Department 3, Ethics. Pretty much everyone is considered ETHICS BAIT, until they’ve visited the Ethics Officer and completed their first course on the subject. For many, it won’t be long before they return.
A few of the more endearing terms used to describe “OUT-ETHICS” people are:
DB-DEGRADED BEING
SP-SUPRESSIVE PERSON
ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY
CHAOS MERCHANT
PTS—POTENTIAL TROUBLE SOURCE (all types)
DOWNSTAT
1.1—COVERTLY HOSTILE (especially if you’re gay)
JOKER AND DEGRADER
CRITICAL
MOTIVATOR STARVED
JUSTIFIER HUNGRY
OPEN MINDED
OTHER DETERMINED
OUT OF VALENCE
ROCKSLAMMER
SQUIRREL
THEETIE-WEETIE
GLIB
NATTERY
ENTHETA
OUT-INTEGRITY
SERFACY
And for those with one or more feet out the door:
DISSAFECTED
BLOWN
FAIR GAME
DILLETANTE
SP
DECLARED
DB
PREGNANT
Make More Money!
You are mistaken if you thought Registration/Treasury (the money makers) are immune to name calling:
DOWNSTAT
FREELOADER
OUT-EXCHANGE
WHALE
DB
Pick Up the Cans Please
The Technical Division is not immune from labeling and evaluating its students and PCs:
CLEARED CANNIBAL
SLOW STUDENT
BOGGED STUDENT
STUDY CASE
DOG PC
HEAVY DRUG CASE
PROBLEM CASE
NO-CASE-GAIN PC
OUT OF PT—PRESENT TIME
OUT OF VALENCE
DB
ABERRATIVE PERSONALITY
OCCLUDED
INTERIORIZED
SOLID
MASSY
SAD EFFECT
ROLLERCOASTER CASE
COMM LAGGY
RESISTIVE CASE
DISPERSED
REASONABLE
Tone Level
Scientologists love assigning emotional tone levels to people, especially to those lower than 2.0 on the Tone Scale (who are on a “succumb postulate”). To name a few favorites:
ANTAGO
1.1 COVERTLY HOSTILE
UNEXPRESSED RESENTMENT
NO SYMPATHY CASE
HATE
FEARFULL
HOPELESS
APATHETIC
HOPELESS
CONTROLLING BODIES
Being LOW TONED is akin to having an inoperable brain tumor. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re screwed.
Conditions
Scientologist or not, everyone is in a Condition. If you’re a WOG, pretty much the best you can hope for is being in NON EXISTENCE. Because unless you’re playing the game of Scientology, you don’t have the tech to pull your sorry ass out of your degraded state.
Everyone one who’s ever been in Scientology more than a month has been assigned a lower condition:
DOUBT
LIABILITY
ENEMY
TREASON
CONFUSION"
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