Evil
by John Leake
Some say it’s an obsolete idea – a religious notion expressed in the Lord’s Prayer’s supplication to “deliver us from evil.” Nowadays we prefer scientific concepts, but as a descriptive term, evil is hard to replace. Imagine being abducted by a man who takes you into the woods, binds you, sexually assaults, and strangles you. How would you characterize him?
I wrote a book about the serial killer Jack Unterweger and I will confine my reflections to what I learned about him. Jack’s victims – the women he murdered before and after he received his first life sentence – found themselves under the power of a man who took pleasure in their pain, humiliation, and death. Instead of prompting his sympathy, their screams heightened his arousal. Instead of eliciting his mercy, their pleas enraged him. In their last, desperate moments, they must have had the overwhelming impression that they were in the grip of a man whose desires and feelings had been monstrously perverted.
We are fascinated by criminals like Jack because their outrageous behavior goes so far beyond the range of our own vices. We are astounded by the creepiness of a man who experiences a euphoria of power and sexual satisfaction in the act of murder – a “crazy feeling of triumph,” as Jack described it in a radio interview, shortly before his early release from prison. Such depravity has made serial killers, along with sadistic SS officers, the favorite bad guys of Hollywood films. Both characters seem to play a dramatic role similar to that of the devil in the pre-modern world.
In studying Jack’s criminal record, one is stunned by his viciousness and incorrigibility. As the lawyer who represented him at his first murder trial (in 1976) told me: “I have never seen someone so cold and remorseless. He took that girl out into the woods and slaughtered her for no reason, and all he cared about was getting away with it.” The psychiatrist who evaluated him for the same trial concluded that he was an “explosive psychopath” in whom “relapse is to be expected with certainty.” The psychiatrist who evaluated him for his second murder trial (in 1994) found him to be a “malignant narcissist with sadistic tendencies.”
“Malignant narcissist” sounds more scientific than “evil man,” though its literal meaning (“born to be bad, self-lover”) conveys the same idea. The term was coined by Erich Fromm, who described the condition as “the quintessence of evil.” Other scientists see no utility in the idea of evil because it does not fit into a schema of causality. They reason that evil is a normative label that we apply to harmful men because we don’t understand the causes of their behavior. If science can show that a criminal’s actions are determined by events and physical states beyond his control – a traumatic childhood, an irresistible impulse – it will show that he is no more evil than an earthquake.
The argument overlooks the fact that, unless we are mentally ill, we can stop acting out our harmful desires, though we may not be inclined to do so unless we are faced with severe consequences. Even Jack Unterweger stopped killing when he sensed he was being watched by the police. And so, no matter how advanced science becomes at explaining our behavior, it will never eliminate our perception that there are good people who respect the lives of others, and bad people who don’t. When we are confronted with an individual who does tremendous harm to others in the pursuit of his desires, we will inevitably perceive him to be evil.
Author John Leake has lived in Vienna, Austria for nine years, where he is a former editor and translator and currently works as a freelance writer. In "Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer" (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, November 2007), Leake investigates Unterweger – a murderer, writer and cause célèbre of the Viennese intellectual elite in the ‘80s.
Illustration: PADMA BHATT / carolineseidler.com
