I’m particularly fond of the relatively new CBS drama “Criminal Minds,” which follows FBI criminal profilers as they try to understand the most vicious killers in order to apprehend them. In the midst of one of several mini-marathons of the program in which I indulged over break, however, the show took, in my view, a rare but serious misstep. In a moment of carelessness, the show’s writers had the team’s senior profiler state that the criminals they hunt cannot help their actions and that they are essentially just sick. Though this was the case in the current episode, in which the killer had a psychotic breakdown, this can certainly not be said of many of the criminals hunted in the program, and even of those most heinous offenders in this world.
Indeed, to claim that violent criminals are simply ill gives us — the television viewers, or the public at large — a degree of separation from these evil people that we do not deserve. That is to say, by labeling them as sick, we shunt them off into a different category of humanity; most importantly, they are “not us,” nor could we ever be like them barring involuntary contraction of this nebulous criminal illness. The fascinating aspect of a show like “Criminal Minds,” however, unlike a typical horror film in which we identify with the victim, is the realization that we can identify with the killer. Some serial offenders are, for sure, categorically insane, but many (most, I would argue) are merely seeking fulfillment of desires, usually associated with power and sex, and often both, outside the bounds of social norms and basic human ethics.
Modern society tends to define pleasure-seeking behavior somewhere between natural and laudable, but when that pleasure is derived from illicit behaviors or when it is sought in a particularly unacceptable manner we react with incredulous horror. It is unacceptable to us that pleasure-seeking behavior could result in such heinous acts (such as a deviant who achieves sexual release through violent crime), and so rather than questioning the assumption that the satisfaction of desires is one of the great ends of human action, we lump even the evil but rational criminal in with the insane. Rather than accepting that desire is not an unmitigated good, we say that some people’s desires just don’t count — that they are different in kind — due to their “illness.”
In so doing, we insulate ourselves from their evil. We deny the unsettling reality that we are one deviant desire or tempting transgression away from pursuing pleasure out of bounds, from becoming the criminal ourselves. The Ted Bundys and Jack the Rippers of the world are not of a different species than us; they are human beings acting on human desires. And those fundamental desires — for sex, for power, for pleasure — that are satisfied in unspeakable ways in those we call heinous criminals are the same that are present in our own motivations and decisions.
What are we to take away from this disquieting and somewhat strange thesis is that criminal desires are not distinct from our own but are merely pursued in illicit manners or are disordered in some way? That is, what can we learn about ourselves from studying the worst examples of human behavior?
To me, the obvious lesson is that to define desires and pleasure-seeking behavior as unmitigated goods is disastrously naive. Some natural desires, whether for too much unhealthy food, or for unethical sexual activity, or for the power that issues from violence against others, are fundamentally disordered and ought to be and indeed must be resisted if we are to flourish as individual human beings and if society is to function. The experience of disordered desires is not itself inherently immoral, but engaging those desires most certainly is.
Thus, in examining heinous criminal behavior, we uncover an intellectual and ethical obligation to draw a line in the sand, to say, at the very least, that there are some desires that ought not to be pursued and that are inherently, incorrigibly disordered. Where this line is drawn is up for debate; what cannot be seriously considered is that this line does not exist.
Watching television programs about vicious crimes both real and fictitious reminds us of the evil of which human beings are capable. What we must remember, no matter how unsettling, is that we are all capable of such horrors.
Brandon McGinley is a politics major from Pittsburgh. He can be reached at bmcginle@princeton.edu.
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