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Nov. 18, 2011
Recognizing that evil does exist
Forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Michael Stone places behaviors on a scale.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK
People around the world continue to try to understand and deal with the weight and tragedy of the July 22 murders of 77 people in Norway by ultra-right wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik. Britain’s Daily Telegraph examined a father-son relationship in which neither had seen each other for the last 15 years. Bloggers volunteered that, “perhaps Anders Behring Breivik is a sick man with schizophrenia.” His attorney pronounced him “mentally ill.” A psychiatrist observed in an online forum, “Breivik may be given ‘diagnoses’ of borderline personality disorder or borderline psychosis, but....”
Closer to home, Allan Schoenborn meant to kill his daughter and two sons in Merritt, B.C., in April 2008, but psychotic delusions kept him from knowing that what he was doing was wrong, Kamloops Supreme Court Judge Robert Powers ruled last February. “I find that Mr. Schoenborn did commit the first-degree murder of each of his children as described in the indictment, but is not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder,” Powers wrote in his ruling. “Any reasonable or rational person would know that it was wrong.”
Then there was the horror unleashed by U.S. army major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murderous acts in Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, which left 13 dead and 30 others wounded. The attack left everyone searching for answers. In attempting to understand the incomprehensible, many focused on Islamic extremism, postulating that he had been influenced by Muslim terrorists with whom he had been in contact. Others guessed that Hasan was a disturbed individual, perhaps suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or maybe “secondary PTSD” from listening to U.S. soldiers’ combat stories. He was under a lot of stress. A loner. Conflicted. No one really understood him.
Overlooked in these tragedies is the possibility of another basic theme of the human condition – evil. A preliminary look at evil might see it as the conscious perpetration of subhuman, hurtful acts that diminish not only the individual, but all of humanity. As history has taught us all too often, and what we continually struggle to grasp, is that mental illness and evil – or evil acts – are not now, and never have been, mutually exclusive. That is, at times they may coexist in varying proportions, which adds to the complexity of any analysis of evil.
One of the darkest, most malevolent figures of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, had genocidal dreams of conquering the world. He was poorly grounded in reality, had a severe, grandiose personality disorder, was a probable methamphetamine addict and died a suicide. None of these features of his sick personality diminish the fact – or tragic consequences – of Hitler’s profoundly evil nature.
Another malignant force of the last 100 years was the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. Approximately 20 million people died in his prison camps, and another 20 million died as a result of collectivization, famine and executions. After a long period of mental decline, in which he experienced delusions of persecution by doctors, Jews and Czechs (among others), Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953.
Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia’s vicious, smooth-talking dictator, Pol Pot, oversaw the deaths of 1.5 million Cambodians from malnutrition, illness or overwork, and he had another 200,000 executed as “enemies of the state.” Paranoia underlay his homicidally incompetent judgment. He was both mentally disturbed and his actions profoundly evil.
Forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Michael Stone avoids calling individuals evil, but rather focuses on evil behavior(s) in his book The Anatomy of Evil. Stone gives some credit for his scale of evil to Dante’s Divine Comedy, whose author himself was influenced by references to the Seven Deadly Sins in the Book of Proverbs: “These six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven are an abomination unto him. A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running unto mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies and he that soweth discord among brethren.”
Based on his comprehensive, detailed analysis of more than 600 violent criminals’ biographies, Stone writes in the book’s introduction, “For an act to be evil, 1) it must be breathtakingly horrible; 2) malice aforethought (evil intention) will usually precede the act; 3) the degree of suffering inflicted will be wildly excessive; 4) the nature of the act will appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.”
The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst also reminds us that – and it is vital to keep this in mind – “the rate of violence among the mentally ill is about three to five percent. Of 100 mentally ill people followed for several years after release from a hospitalization in the United States, three to five will have engaged in a violent act, meaning that 95 to 97 will not have done so.” He goes further: “In between the once-in-a-lifetime act of the psychotic person who kills a parent and the psychopathic killer is the mentally ill person who is violence-prone and resistant to treatment.”
From this starting position, Stone draws a scale of a number of gradations of evil behavior, characterized by narcissism and aggression, making distinctions between levels of severity of antisocial behavior that are also of prognostic importance, i.e. they themselves help predict the likelihood of criminal behavior reoccurring. In his initial quantification system of grading evil, he notes, “[I] chose to focus on murder initially, not just because the case I was asked to comment on for the jury happened to involve murder, but because people are quicker to use the word evil when they hear about a murder than if they hear about a civil crime such as fraud.” Therefore, distinctions made between different types of crimes – rape versus murder, juvenile versus adult crime, for example – are avoided in an effort to simplify argument and reason.
The shades of grey in Stone’s evil scale fall into 22 categories, from the least to the most evil behaviors, and these 22 categories, in turn, fall into one of six classifications on the continuum of evil. These are:
A) Justified homicide, not evil at all (category 1);
B) Jealousy-driven and other impulsive murders (categories 2-6);
C) Murder to get someone out of the way, without planning (7-8);
D) Murder to get someone out of the way, malice aforethought (9-14);
E) Serial murder, repetitive vicious acts, but without torture (15-16);
F) Serial murder, with torture the main goal (17-22).
Mental illness is a key factor here in helping judge the evil status of a person’s behavior. The more clear-cut the evidence for a person’s mental illness, the lower the number of an evil category of an event within Stone’s system.
The higher the number, the author notes, “the more likely people will use the word evil in describing the murders and other acts belonging to that category.” For example, Washington state’s notorious Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, serial killer Ted Bundy and Canada’s Paul Bernardo all fall into Group F, or somewhere between categories 17 and 22.
Criminal courts continue to reverberate with the “not guilty by reason of insanity” defence and, to that end, considering the possibility of a defendant’s evil – or the evil of a defendant’s behaviors – rarely is considered. While evil may coexist with mental illness, it remains a separate and, as Stone would argue, quantifiable, malignant entity. Mental illness is treatable, but evil and evil behaviors must be recognized, contained, deterred and – consistent with uneven, variable jurisprudence – punished, as well, because, if not in our courtrooms, then where? This is not an argument for vengeance, but for honesty in acknowledging that evil exists.
David Kirkpatrick MA, MD, is a semi-retired psychotherapist and psychiatrist working part time in West Vancouver and Sechelt.
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