The Normalcy of Serial Killing – What If My Hero Is a Psychopath?

Hannibal Lecter, the monster at the center of the film, “The Silence of the Lambs,” is the epitome of evil. If anyone were to ask, “Is there evil in the world?” Hey, just look at Hannibal Lecter.

With that little circular argument, the subject is pretty well covered.

Except if you look for the science behind this view, you discover there is none. The whole notion is based on a lie.

Why is it so important to know what is wrong with Hannibal Lecter?  

As we have outlined in “Confused about the State of the World?… The Invisible Blindness,”  there are many other serial killers out there who are not only regarded as psychologically “normal” but often hailed as great leaders.

A classic example: Ratko Mladić, the “Butcher of Bosnia.”

“Described by the former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein as ‘the epitome of evil’ after his conviction, Mladić was one of the most notorious figures of the war that killed more than 100,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless.”

And:

“Mladić and the other wartime leaders are not portrayed in Bosnian Serb history textbooks as war criminals. Rather, they are described as heroes who established Republika Srpska, the separate, Serbian-majority part of Bosnia and Herzegovina that emerged from the war.”

In fact, the number of deaths attributed to these “normal” serial killers is orders of magnitude greater than the numbers killed by the “abnormal” ones. To put it bluntly, we are locking up people like Hannibal Lecter because they are clearly “psychopaths.” At the same time, we make heroes out of our leaders – who are the main culprits behind the 110 wars and mini-wars happening all over the planet today.

By comparison with these pros, Hannibal Lecter is just a rookie.

So, is there any real difference between these mere amateur “psychopaths” we lock up in jail for life, and the real professional serial killers we so often regard as heroes?

 

Surviving Childhood – A Shared History of Abuse and Violence

If we ever hope to reduce the literally millions of “serial” deaths caused by these “normal’ killers, we better find out how this happens, especially when it turns out that the whole notion of “psychopathy” is based on a lie.

For example, Lillie E. Franks reviews the subject in “There Is No Such Thing As a Psychopath.” She is an American transgender author, educator, and humorist based in Chicago, Illinois.

Or, “There Are No Psychopaths,” by Rasmus Rosenberg Larsenis, assistant professor of forensic epistemology and philosophy of science at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada and an affiliated scientist at the National Center for Ontological Research in the US. He is the author of “Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis.”

If the whole idea of psychopathy is a deception, what is going on with people like Hannibal Lecter?

Dr. James Gilligan, Former Director Center for the Study of Violence, Harvard Medical School, put it this way in the movie, “Zeitgeist – Moving Forward”:

“I have spent roughly the last 40 years of my life working with the most violent people our society produces – murderers, rapists, and so on – in an attempt to understand what causes this violence. I discovered that the most violent of the criminals in our prisons had themselves been victims of a degree of child abuse that was beyond the scale of what I ever thought of applying the term child abuse to. I had no idea of the depth of the depravity with which children in our society are all too often treated.

“The most violent people I saw were themselves the survivors of their own attempted murder.

“Often at the hands of their parents or other people in their social environment. Or were the survivors of family members who had been killed… their closest family members… by other people.”

Dr Gwen Adshead, a forensic psychiatrist and 2024 Reith Lecturer, describes a similar experience in, I spent 30 years as a therapist to killers – and no-one is born evil.

So, rather than suffering from some innate evil, this view explores the source of these people’s violence by exposing their violent childhoods.

This has far-reaching implications for how human beings treat and respect each other’s differences.

Firstly, it puts into question the whole “science” of psychiatry.

If Hannibal Lecter is the result of his upbringing, what about the sadness that is called depression? Or any of the other labels we plant on anyone who is suffering from something that has no detectable physical basis?

If our childhoods create killers like Hannibal Lecter, how are killers like Ratko Mladić created?

Or the famous butchers of history? Or the Putins, the Trumps, and the Netanyahus of our own time?

In fact, doesn’t this shocking piece from the New York Times answer this question?

“Remarkably, all throughout decades of research on mood disorders, scientists doing animal studies had to create animal models of anxiety and depression — that is, animals who showed behaviors that looked like human anxiety and depression — by subjecting them to weeks or months of chronic stress. Zap animals with unpredictable and painful shocks they can’t escape, force them to survive barely survivable conditions for long enough, put them in social situations where they are chronically brutalized by those higher up in the social hierarchy — and just like that, the animals will consistently start behaving in a way that looks like human psychopathology.”

Sounds familiar to anyone?

You may be one of those people who look back with incredulity at the time of witches – when we burned women alive for the crime of having sex with the devil or some such fabrication.

How was that possible, we might ask ourselves?

Easy. Just like we do today: first we torture little children with the “depth of the depravity” to the point they, like those animals in the experiments described above, “start behaving in a way that looks like human psychopathology.”

Then, after they have killed a few people, we lock them up in a cage for the rest of their life. Just like Willie Bosket, whose story is told in “All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence.”

A sick, evil kid? Or a brilliant little boy brought up in a sick society?

A sick society? I beg your pardon! Everyone knows that my culture, my country, my nation is the greatest.

The Myth of Mental Illness and the Scapegoating of Insanity

Instead of accepting the fact that these killers are created by their upbringing, we rationalize this “evil” by pretending the perpetrators are suffering from some innate, “genetically based” abnormality. Although we don’t burn them alive, you wouldn’t mistake the way this may be discussed in today’s world as an indication of civilization: “Supreme Court justices ask: Is being burned alive constitutional?”

While considering the “sickness” of this society, which seems so certain of its ability to distinguish between “evil” killers and heroic killers, it is worth remembering Christa Pike. At this moment, she is receiving emergency, life-saving treatment in an intensive care unit to treat her for the effects of failing to kill her in a state execution! Another gross example of a sordid list of such atrocities.

Not only does this put the basic premise of psychiatry into question….

Come back, Thomas Sasz; all is forgiven! 65 years ago, he wrote: The Myth of Mental Illness, Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct.

Perhaps the most outrageous story of this massive deceit called psychiatry is the “Rosenhan experiment”:

“‘The Rosenhan experiment’ or ‘Thud experiment’ was a study regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted but acted normally from then onward.

Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication. The study was arranged by psychologist David Rosenhan, a Stanford University professor, and published by the journal Science in 1973 with the title, “On Being Sane In Insane Places.”‘

Rosenhan had sent his own colleagues to a variety of mental hospitals with the instructions to just say they were suffering from “auditory hallucinations” with the sounds of “hollow” or “thud” or “empty” – words specifically selected as there was no existing literature connecting this language with psychosis.

These normal people were duly admitted and diagnosed as psychotic.

Only after 51 days did the last one manage to get discharged. They were released on condition they admitted they were psychotic and agreed to take the meds!

Of course this study really exposed the charade on which the validity of the psychiatric establishment is based. Especially upsetting for them was the discovery that the idea for this study was inspired by a lecture by R.D. Laing, who was already the bête noire of conventional psychiatry.

A prominent teaching hospital, whose name remains hidden, claimed that such diagnostic errors could never happen at its institution. So, Rosenhan agreed to test that assertion by sending fake patients to their facility over a three-month period. After which they proudly announced that they had identified 41 such imposters and suspected another 42.

Only to be told by Rosenhan that he had sent none!

So, if there is no scientific basis for distinguishing between Hannibal Lecter and these other, often “heroic,” serial killers, how do people like Ratko Mladić, the “Butcher of Bosnia,” happen?

It is clear they are not born as killers. So, baby Ratko, just like baby Hannibal, was trained by the world around him to become the killer who eventually emerged.

Would allowing little Adolf to indulge his passion for art have saved 6 million lives? Who knows! But one thing is for sure: until we accept that today’s world was largely created by the way we brought up yesterday’s children, and tomorrow’s world will be largely created by the way we are bringing up today’s children, nothing will change. We will keep churning out Hannibal Lectors, Ratko Mladićs – and all the other tyrants – petty and not so petty – that the world has been plagued with for so long.

How do we prevent these dangerous people from becoming the leaders of our societies?

A certain Polish psychologist of the last century, Andrew Lobaczewski, spent his whole life devoted to this same question: As Psychology Today explains it, he “wanted to understand why ‘evil’ people seem to prosper, while so many good and moral people struggle to succeed. He wanted to understand why people with psychological disorders so easily rise to positions of power and take over the governments of countries.”

Lobaczewski developed the concept of “pathocracy,” “when individuals with personality disorders (particularly psychopathy) occupy positions of power.” “Pathocracy is arguably one of the biggest problems in the history of the human race. History has been a saga of constant conflict and brutality, with groups of people fighting against one another over territory and power and possessions, and conquering and killing one another….”

So, the problem has been staring us in the face for ages.

Why isn’t this front-page news around the world? Because of the same issue:

Lobaczewski’s ideas were hidden away, because “the psychology publishers thought it was too political, and the political publishers thought it was too psychological,” according to editor and blogger Harrison Koehli. “It’s unfashionable to the point of being taboo in psychiatry and psychology now to ascribe personality disorders to public figures,” writes, Zoe Williams, in a review of the subject in the Guardian.

So, it is clear that some people end up as serial killers, of whom a few end up in prisons, but most end up with medals on their chests surrounded by adoring crowds.

It is also obvious that whatever perverted the nature of these people that triggered their potential for tyranny happened in childhood.

Which means that it takes a tyrant, or a society that endorses tyrants, to create a tyrant.

All that remains is the solution to this age-old problem, which none of these authors offer.

Osho’s Practical Guide to a Sane World

The first proposal Osho makes to deal with this danger is to immediately ensure that whoever is in the white house – or is in a similar position of power – has a resident psychiatrist.

“I have been saying for years that it is time that the politicians should be watched, and they should be looked after by psychiatrists, psychoanalysts.
“Since nuclear weapons have come into existence, the politicians have become immensely powerful.”¹

And:

“At present there is an official physician for the president, but no psychiatrist….”¹

In the past, this need has been repeated by psychiatrists, but nothing has changed.

“I have been waiting for psychoanalysts and psychiatrists themselves to declare this situation, and the declaration has come today….
“They said, ‘In this nuclear age, when the president of the US can start a nuclear war, one has to make sure that he is mentally stable, and not subject to euphoria, manic depression, or suicidal tendencies.”¹

Osho describes how these psychiatrists used Nixon’s behavior as an example:

“Before he resigned, had been miserable for months – avoiding people, taking long walks alone. He refused to talk about how he felt, and had drawn away from his family. He was not sleeping enough, and once could not sleep for four nights in a row. He was drinking too much, sometimes before lunch. He had become unpredictable: one minute close to tears, the next furious over some bit of nonsense, and an hour later on top of the world. Sometimes he seemed out of focus. He rambled or gave orders that were ridiculous. One night he walked the halls of the White House talking to the portraits on the walls. He hinted of suicide.”¹

Even today, the same effort continues: “Nobel-Winning Psychiatrist Issues Chilling New Warning About Donald Trump: ‘It’s Worse’” warns the Huffington Post. “I think we’re in even more danger of Donald Trump using a nuclear weapon in a fit of pique or rage or confusion or poor impulse control than ever before. So yes, he’s more dangerous.”

But nothing changes. This man is the sole decider of a life-ending nuclear Armageddon.

Could you skip lunch today, Hannibal? We can talk about your diet later.

Beyond these temporary fixes, Osho provides the complete solution to this Pathocracy – correctly identified by Lobaczewski as the cause of human history being of “constant conflict and brutality, with groups of people fighting against one another over territory and power and possessions, and conquering and killing one another….”

So, before we get wiped out by a nuclear war, or by the climate catastrophe that Trump dismisses as “a hoax,” or an AI catastrophe, a concern that Trump also considers just a “hoax”… or the killer bug it may already be cultivating….

What do you think? Are you up for an incredible experiment? Instead of continually giving power to Uncle Hannibal, would you consider an intelligent alternative? Would you just suspend your prejudice long enough to realize there might be a good reason Uncle Hannibal and his ilk want you to realize that Osho is… what was that expression? Ah yes, “the epitome of evil.”

Well, now you can decide for yourself.

So, the first step in ending the political elements of the pathocracy is to abolish all political parties and take steps to make sure that no one with any lust for power is allowed anywhere near power! You can read the full account of how this can work here: “Democracy — The Primary Fatal Flaw.”Osho’s more longer-term proposal for a fundamental way to address this major challenge to the human race is to transform the way we bring up children:

Here Osho explores the role of conditioning, what we call brainwashing – when it is not our Uncle Hannibal doing the brainwashing! In, “Childhood Conditioning – The Fundamental Lie,”

Osho makes the key point:

“One of the basic truths of life – that which you have learnt can be unlearnt.”²

In, “Today’s Children Are Tomorrow’s World – So, Keep Your Hands Off!” Osho explains the parents’ role in this brainwashing process.

In “The Child Is the Mother of Humanity – So Listen Carefully,” and in “It’s the Conditioning That Kills, Stupid!” you can read how Osho describes the precise mechanism by which we destroy each generation and, in turn, the society these disturbed people create. The psychologist and neuroscientist, Nicholas Humphrey, calls out this indoctrination of children as a form of child abuse.

Finally, the revolution in childcare that has to be implemented if we are going to have any chance of reversing this insane cycle of brainwashing children to grow up to brainwash their children who grow up to brainwash their children…. And then wonder why nothing changes!

Then we can prevent, at source, the flow of grossly traumatized children that James Gilligan and Andrew Lobaczewski identify above, who grow to terrorize those around them whether from the White House, the boardroom, the Curia or death row.

END

In the next article, we look at the powerful reactionary propaganda mechanism that tries to block these obvious steps towards a world fit for humans. They do this by persuading everyone that all this “evil” is just “human nature.” So, what to do? It is pointless to waste your energies on trying to change anything because all this barbarity is simply inevitable.

 

1 – Osho, I Celebrate Myself: God Is No Where, Life Is Now Here, Talk #3 – The Paradise of Yourself
2 – Osho, A Sudden Clash of Thunder, Talk #7 – From Happiness, Meditation Flows