Ep. 13 Dark Side Of Psychology: Musings on Profiling A Serial Killer [Part II] (feat. Lee Mellor)

Interactive Transcript

Speaker A This is the Dark side.

Speaker B Welcome to episode 13 of Dark side of Psychology Podcast. This episode serves as part two of my titled musings of Profiling a Serial Killer. This episode features Lee Mellor. He's a criminologist and a best selling Canadian author, soon to be doctorate holder in criminology and applied social psychology. Lee is also the host to the podcast Murder Was the Case, which I really recommend you check out one of my favorite podcasts in terms of how professional the quality is and how great Lee is at finding people who really know what they're talking about and nailing them down to have really in depth, really vivid and morbidly fascinating conversations about murderers. What he really brings to the table is his twisted sense of humor and his his need to explore what people experience when they're staring into the abyss. Best way to really understand his podcast is listen to his promo. Check it out.

Speaker A Let's skip the foreplay. Murder. You want to talk about it? Hear about all kinds of nasty things. Sex, torture, madness, dismemberment. And why? More than anything, you want to know why? Well, dear listener, you ain't never had a friend like me tune in to Murder Was the Case featuring author and investigative criminologist Lee Mellor. Sometimes solo, often with guests. Always horrifically entertaining. Listen to Murder Was the Case on itunes, Google Play or go to murderwasthecase.podbean.com.

Speaker B It'S gonna be sick. Just as a side note, I'd like to say that these following episodes, these are very much musings, they're speculation and just intellectual curiosity from people talking to each other, trying to work things out as we go along. And you'll notice that during the interview we really are batting ideas back and forth. This is not a well polished, streamlined interview where information is just presented as it would be in a textbook. So please bear that in mind when you're listening. Mistakes are made and sometimes we correct each other and sometimes we agree. Okay, thanks very much. Enjoy the episode.

Speaker A This is actually playing into the what the angle I wanted to discuss about mass murder with you to some extent because I listened to docs and you know, I agreed with most of it, but I think it's, it's kind of the way I can. Psychologists would kind of look at the issue, put things in terms of personality disorders and such. Right. And sure, but the thing is too that we have tons of people who are psychopaths and I use that example because it's, let's say, the most severe personality disorder. Would you agree with me I would. Yeah. And you have. Most psychopaths aren't mass murderers. And so there's, there's a lot more to it, you know, especially when we're talking about mass murder more than serial killing. There's a great deal more psychosis involved in it as well.

Speaker B Yeah, you think?

Speaker A Oh yeah. That's the whole nature of being psychotic is that you're not perceiving reality correctly. Right. So it's like being. We can't ignore that. Like I could just go off on psychotics and I can only talk about it in a very colloquial way, but I can. I know for sure that there's psychotics, but I have a whole theory myself about, about how these people come into being. And yeah, there's subtypes. Peter Lang does a good job of this. So he breaks it down into three subtypes. The psychopathic shooters. And I think those, I think those are underrepresented comparatively by a great deal in school shooters. You know, psychopaths and suicide. They're not that. There's, there's something that doesn't fit about that. Your psychopaths and psychotics and traumatized shooters, children from homes where they're, you know, beaten, molested, grow up amid alcoholism and violence. Features of post traumatic stress disorder. And so those are his three.

Speaker B That's interesting. He devised them into the three subtypes. And just thinking about it now and again, I'm saying this as I'm thinking, so this might be a messy pre edit, but it seems like all three might play a part in the one type of school shooter because as you said, like a pure psychopath, it doesn't fit the bill traditionally, like it is massively underrepresented. Something has gone on to make this person consider to revenge, suicide, preoccupation with revenge to the point of being happy to lose their life or just don't care if it lose their life in the actual. So it seems to me that you'd have to have the predisposition to something like psychopathy or one of the personality disorders, but with the same time trauma in your past experiences, but you've been in that much pain consistently. And then with the psychosis thing, I really don't know what to make of that. Like it depends on where you draw the line of psychosis. Could you just say like a delusional world, paranoid worldview is permanent long term psychosis and that's what they're experiencing. I'm gonna ask you about the psychosis component then. Do you feel like these mass shooters are suffering from a form of psychosis.

Speaker A Some of them clearly are. So I'll give you their names. Jared Laughner, I talked about him in the first or second episode of Murder Was the Case. He was the guy in Arizona that shot the congresswoman, didn't kill her, but killed six other people. And just look like, the obvious thing is look at his eyes and the way that he presents like you know what someone in full blown psychosis looks like. I hope if they've trained you properly, you can just by looking at him. But also what set him off was he went to some rally or something that Gabby Giffords was having and he said to her, he put up his hand to ask her a question. He goes, what is government if words have no meaning? Now, she couldn't answer that question because the question itself doesn't make sense. All words have meaning. They're symbols. So you can't that quite. You can't answer that question. So just. She just moves on from it. He doesn't seem to realize how irrational his own question is and then goes a step further in this sort of delusion and thinking that it indicates to him that Gabby, Gabby Giffords is an evil person or a malevolent person. And so the next time he has the opportunity and she's in the public place, he comes out and he shoots her in these six other people. So that's psychosis right there. You know, if that guy had been being treated properly, that wouldn't happen. I don't think that's an evil person. I think that's a person who's living inside a waking dream. Do you want me to tell you one that's, that's really interesting? That.

Speaker B Yeah, definitely.

Speaker A Okay. So I was doing one for my dissertation and I was looking at James Holmes, the guy who shot, shot up the movie theater. And it was the Dark Knight Rises, which was the last of the Christopher Nolan Batman movie. And he went in with his hair dyed bright red and in full body armor and started throwing in like gas pellets and just sprayed the theater with an AR15 and then just kind of left out the back door. He didn't commit suicide or anything. So like Laughner, this is a case where we have sort of a live specimen, one that does not commit suicide after. And if you look at him, his appearance and the size of his eyes and such, he clearly seems psychotic. But then we get into, okay, is he delusional? So I watched 24 Hours, and I mean that literally because it was recorded over separate days and total 24 hours of interviews, him and a forensic psychiatrist. And I transcribed them all and then I, of course, fucked up the transcription so I have to watch it all over again. God. So I watched this interview with him and the psychiatrist and you might want to take a look at it. You tell me what you think of the psychiatrist. I think he did a fairly good job. And he's talking to him and he said, and what happened is Holmes had sent out a journal which he had written Inside the Mind of Madness, something like that. On the front page of the journal. He had sent that to a mental health counselor he was seeing at the university he was attending before he dropped out. Yeah, her name was Lynn Fenton. And this diary is absolutely fascinating and it scared me because it reminded me of something that one of my diaries when I was like, you know, 16 years old, just kind of fragmented thoughts. What of this? All over the place and he's got this theory in there and then the psychiatrist asks him about it. So if you can imagine. Imagine a circle and then imagine the figure 8 infinity sign laid horizontally running from the left side of the circle to the right side of the circle. So it touches, right?

Speaker B Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A So what you should be seeing here is a circle with a figure eight that kind of almost looks like eyes in the middle. Yeah. And then the number one bisecting through the narrowest point of the infinity sign and then stopping and coming across. And it actually, I didn't notice, but he, But Holmes points out in his interview with the psychiatrist that it looks like a face and of course it does, because the line at the bottom of the. Of. Of the number one is the mouth and the infinity sign is the eye. Now here's where it's just, it's just starting. Okay. So the circle is not only the shape of the head, which contains this anthropomorphic. These anthropomorphic symbols when you put them together, but it also represents the number 0 and there's a 1 in there. So it's like binary, you know, non existence of value versus existence of value. Like a computer. Right. I mean, it's pretty, yeah, pretty, pretty cool, you know, if it wasn't attached to this tragedy. Yeah, it gets even wilder. So the doc's talking to him about. He says, okay, well, tell me about this, this theory. And he says, well, it's the theory that death solves all problems, and I won't really go much more beyond that. But this is what he believed, that, you know, if you have a problem, death can, can solve it. And one of his things was that he said, I arbitrarily assign a value of one to each person on the planet. And he said, and so I'm worth one, but if I kill them, then I take their value. So going into this mass murder he was like, if we could think of his value as 1 + x, where x represents however many people he would kill in that incident, which was eventually 12. So now he sees himself as being value 13. And the people he killed are, their value is gone because they're dead. They're all at zero. And so you're going, okay, well this sounds fucking nuts, right? Like what do you, what do you mean? And you know, he's so the doc's trying to ask him the questions with you. And I probably would ask him, well, what is this value? And he says, well it's arbitrary. And then he says, the doctor says to him, so is this some sort of like, you know, objective value? Wherever he says it is objective, but that's my subjective opinion. So tell me, is that man delusional or not?

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A Tricky that I couldn't answer that question. I had to coin a whole other term for it, which was meta delusional. Interesting.

Speaker B Why'd you go for that?

Speaker A I saw it in a few other things. It seemed to be like, delusion becomes handy when you want to commit murder sometimes. Like people choose to become delusional like that. I heard a couple that actually said that and it's been counter argued that maybe they're just trying to regain some agency and not admit that they were nuts. But I had probably about four or five of them out of a 10 offender sample saying like, no, I knew that I didn't really believe it, but it was kind of useful for me to believe it in order to commit the murder. So another one was Mark David Chapman, who really, it seemed to have been about becoming famous, like usurping John Lennon's fame, which is eerily similar, just more colorful than the James Holmes example. Right? But he framed it in this whole, like he prayed to Satan for the power to do so and then he believed he framed it in this Catcher the Rye sort of framework. Now I think that he was, you know, these guys are psychotic in a way, but. And maybe someone with a clearer understanding about this could do a better job of interpreting it. But it seemed to me that use a Guns n Roses reference, they, they use their delusion, their delusion doesn't use them, or at least that's the way that they put it.

Speaker B I guess if that was if, if you go on that idea, then it's not psychosis anymore. It's just delusion in terms of cognitive distortion. Because I. I suppose what Doc Amity was, was getting at, and I'm still wrestling with this myself, psychosis is it takes you, consumes you. You no longer understand right from wrong. It's not an interpretation. It is how you view the world. And you can't get out of that without medication. So I suppose if they're aware, like you said, if they're aware of it like in a meta kind of way, but they are using this in order to commit these acts, is that psychosis? Is that just, I don't know the.

Speaker A Word we're using right now? If you just care to share it until we figure out something better. Is my meta delusion?

Speaker B Yeah, meta deluded, I suppose. And yeah, I'm really struggling with it because I don't actually know the answer. I don't even know. Maybe someone with a really intimate knowledge of the different variances of psychosis could suggest if it is or not. But to my understanding, psychosis is pretty strict with they completely lose the understanding of reality and therefore, to a certain degree they are not held accountable for the acts done during that psychosis.

Speaker A Well, they lose it involuntarily.

Speaker B What do you mean?

Speaker A Sorry? Because I'm not like. I think that these guys, you know, they do sort of lose their understanding of reality, but it's not entirely that they have no agency in it that they may voluntarily lose their understanding of reality. So another case was that in my dissertation that I looked at was a spree killer called Daniel Gonzalez. And he would have been in England at the same time as you, around the London area. And he put on like a Jason Hockey mask and went around stabbing people. And yeah, now that guy, I would say, is definitely psychotic. But once again, this psychologist or psychiatrist that had been treating him because he'd been institutionalized a number of times was saying, like, you have to understand this. Daniel liked being psychotic. He took drugs. He knew he had these latents like this that he would be psychotic if he did this. But you. He took the drugs because he liked believing in things that were nuts. And you see the same thing in one of the girls who, in that Slender man stabbing with the two little girls that tried to sacrifice their friend to Slender Man. So after she was taken into custody and placed, I think in either a prison with psychiatric facilities or a psychiatric hospital, they're trying to treat her and she's saying, I don't want the medication, because they're gonna make my friends go away. They're like, well, what friends? And she starts listing Slenderman and Harry Potter and all this stuff. Now, I understand that these are at varying degrees. That seems to me much, much more just to me that that's, that's probably eventually psychotic James Holmes thing. But there is still. It's like there's a choice in there. It's like, you know, they're not necessarily unhappy with being psychotic.

Speaker B Yeah, sure. And I guess, I guess also we, you know, if you're looking at schizophrenia, like paranoid schizophrenia as well, where it has just consumed their reality and they think genuinely this is the way it is, that might be different in terms of they might not be aware that their reality isn't right. Whereas what you're suggesting is perhaps that they know that it's a different version of reality, but they're succumbing to it anyway.

Speaker A Mm, yeah, for sure. Yeah, very like, interesting. A form of escapism. So if you go to. If you go back to one of the famous sociologists of deviance, Robert Merton, he had this theory that people adapt when they can't achieve their cultural goals through the institutionalized means. So in the west, the cultural goals are generally financial, but I would say increasingly, fame is replacing that as at least the primary goal. And the institutionalized means are to do it in a way which is civil and legal. And he would write, so like how Al Capone, for instance, he accepted the cultural goals, but he couldn't get it through the institutionalized means because he was an Italian immigrant who was disadvantaged. So he rejected institutionalized means, innovated and got the cultural goals of wealth and such. Right. But then also that same chart. Merton said there's people who reject both the goals and the means as a way of adapting to the society that they're in. And I don't think that this fits the case of the Slender man girl, for instance, because she was far too young, she hadn't really given her life a shot yet. But I think there are. Merton gave the examples of like, so who are people that they, they drop the means and the institutionalized means and the goals, so they just reject both? Well, you could say monks, nuns, mystics, homeless people, you know, people that just go fuck it and go out and live in the middle of the country and live off the land. And another possibility is that one may kind of choose to fall into. Into a semi self induced madness. Maybe one has a bent towards it and rather than resisting it, just fall right into It, Drug, drug addiction is a huge one, or, you know, substance abuse, alcoholism, it's retreating. Right.

Speaker B It's, it's hard to know where to draw the line between when you've got a cognitive distortion and you're not viewing a world quite right anymore, you. It's hard to draw the line between when that becomes psychosis or not. I suppose, like as you said, a way to handle reality with drugs, because you can't handle it normally. That's a cognitive distortion. That's a break from conventional reality, and we understand that, but that wouldn't quite be psychosis. But then I guess to what extreme do you have to get to before someone says that's more than just a cognitive distortion, that is a total break from reality at this point? Maybe it's to do with agency, I just don't know.

Speaker A It brings us back to this issue of delusion and religion. So also within Merton's example, you had people who were sort of strongly religious enough to drop out of society. So we could also expand that to sort of religious fanatics or fundamentalists, sort of the people who are, no matter what you do, no matter what evidence you present to them, they believe, they're always going to believe that there is this, that there is something paranormal, that there is this. You know, it doesn't matter what religion it is or that their minds just aren't susceptible to changing on this issue. To me, that's. That's your jihadis there. That's your people going and blowing themselves up. Like what rational choice, like what rational person would blow themselves up to make their lives better? You know, they believe, like it says in the, in one of the hadiths, that. What? That when you die in jihad, your soul enters that of a green bird and these little green birds fly up into paradise and roost in like these nests in paradise with Allah. Now, I mean, you could make the argument that that's poetic imagery, or it might be literal, but at some point that doesn't really matter. If you really think that anything like that process is truly going to happen enough to blow yourself up, kill a whole bunch of other people with you. I think that that's psychotic. I mean, it's, it's really. At least James Holmes was, was aware that there was some subjectivity to his belief. Right.

Speaker B It's weird. It's. So I reckon for the sake of this conversation, what we'll do is we'll constrain what we're talking about to remove ideological killing. So conventional terrorism as we see it today, we'll put that to aside because the psychology of that is so different to what I think we're dealing with, with the mass shooters that we're discussing today. What do you reckon to that?

Speaker A Mass shooters? I think they're a mixed bag. I think Doc Amitave is right that they're all mentally ill. But you know, how many people are mentally ill? There's a lot of mental illness in society and I think even there's. What was I was learning about lately, this dysthymic disorder or something where dysthymia, where it's like a low level functional depression. And the person I was talking to was saying that we live in a society where so many people, like perhaps 50% of the population may have it, so that it almost becomes like invisible. So everyone's, you know, or half the population's pretty depressed most of the time, but no longer abnormal.

Speaker B Yeah. And that's how we define normality is essentially, generally speaking what people's day to day experiences are. And if you deviate from that, I guess that's difference between clinical and subclinical threshold. Do you? The thing is, if we're, if we're focusing on the psychology or the profile of someone who is a mass shooter, what do you think we already know? What do we know about a mass shooter?

Speaker A Okay, I'm gonna. So that you can generalize it across those who are psychopathic, psychotic, traumatized as a group. This is the way that I look at it. Okay. I tend to look at it through my own theory, which is heavily built upon Etori Higgins's self discrepancy theory. Hate to tell you, it's social. Social psychology. So I guess that means everything I've done is bullshit.

Speaker B Well, I have a master's in social psychology, so you're in good company.

Speaker A Okay, I'll lay out self discrepancy theory for you. Each of us has what we call an actual self. And if it's our actual own self, it's who we personally believe that we really are. And then we have an ideal self. And if it's our ideal own self, it's who we want to become the aspirational self. And we have an ought self. And if it's our own, it's who we believe we ought to be. So there may seem like there's not much distinction between the two, but there is, because the ought one has got like this social kind of moral do, do the right thing or do the polite thing or it's prescriptive or prescriptive. Whereas the who we want to be, I mean, that can be dictated too by social standards. Like we could go, I want to be an actor. But nobody says you ought to be an actor. It's just kind of something that's presented to you as like, wow, that's something to be that I can become, which will make a better me.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A So I focused a lot on the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self. And Higgins theory shows that kind of the larger the discrepancy between the actual self self and the ideal self is, the more depressed a person's going to be. It's associated with depression. And if it's an actual self discrepancy, that tends to be related to anxiety. So then to frame it another way, depression comes from the absence of positive outcomes, whereas anxiety comes from the fear of negative outcomes, which seems fairly intuitive. And I mean, he did quantitative research to establish this. But if you just think of those on the surface, that's pretty much right. Don't you think? Like, yep. You tend to anxious when you fear punishment or ridicule or something like that. And you tend to be depressed, as I currently am a bit in a bit of a phase like that myself, to be honest with you. And it's all related to, to not getting near my ideal self. And, you know, anyone reflect on your life and tell me that that's not right. So this is going to be even. We can talk about people with personality disorders or, or psychotic disorders as perhaps experiencing emotion differently than us at the same time. Even if, like the way that they feel these emotions is sort of different or the way that they consider them. So it's different. I think that this still does apply. So perhaps a psychopath may not have the capacity for a kind of long term depression because they don't have the emotion, emotional sophistication, but they have a more primitive version of it, which is this angry frustration. A kind of more. Yeah, a more primal version of it. Now is that something that you can buy?

Speaker B Yes. Yeah, I can get on board with that.

Speaker A Okay. Because we know psychopaths get frustrated.

Speaker B Yeah. Quickly.

Speaker A Quickly. Exactly. And so, yeah, just. So this is a general framework. Let's place all these shooters into this and then realize that this is how it may combine with some of these. Whether it's psychopathy or any number of personality disorders, or autism spectrum disorders or psychotic disorders, how this can all kind of come together. So we're social creatures by nature and we understand ourselves. So that's our actual selves. And you know our ideal selves and ought selves. We understand them through communication with other people. If we're just in isolation, it's very difficult to know who you are because you can't compare yourself to someone else. So if I, if I lay this whole theory out to you and even you're trying to mask that, you don't really buy it. But I pick that up in your voice, it's going to affect the way that I feel about myself and my theory. Right? Yeah, it's all these little cues all the time. Now imagine you're someone with a number, any of a number of mental illnesses that's going to affect the way that you communicate with other people. So we could say of somebody who's psychotic that they're weird. So people react to them in a way that generally gives off a negative vibe. Or even if the person reacts to them in a way that doesn't give off a negative vibe, if they're paranoid, they may believe that it's giving off a negative vibe. We know that psychopaths have problems with empathy. People on the autism spectrum have problems with communication and so on. And you know, then you can even bring it down to, well, people don't like hanging around the really depressed guy because he's a bummer. So what happens is the communication and the social life and the illness feed into each other. And because all of these people have aspirate aspirations to be a better person. And you know, they're. The society is telling them or they're interpreting that society is telling them, you know, that you're really a loser and you got nothing going for you and you're at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. And of course this is why it's all men again, right. Whatever the ideal self is is now the longer they go is getting farther and farther and farther away and they're getting more and more hopeless and more and more in despair. That's why so many of them commit suicide.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A So this sort of my holistic where you can bring the, the mental illness and the social to together to create the kind of like a perfect storm for a mass murderer. Now that's quite a bit that I've given you. So please, I open the floor to criticisms.

Speaker B What I was going to say is I think that's really interesting and it really touches on what me and the doc were discussing. And I guess then the distinction is there's two things I want to ask you based on that. The first one is like you said, most people in that situation, everything you just described are much more likely to hurt themselves and other people. So we're looking at mass shooter who's gonna hurt other people. So what is that extra component, based on what you just said, that makes them decide to hurt others instead of hurt themselves? Now that would come back to. Do you think that you can take a quote unquote normal person, born normal, and create a mass shooter through these cognitive distortions, cognitive dissonance, which is essentially what you're describing there between the self, the actual self and the ought self, as well as societal pressures and norms and expectations thrown to depression, anxiety. Do you think you can create it for societal means if they were okay when they, when they were born? Or do you think there has to be some kind of predisposition which is the reason why they choose to hurt others instead of just commit suicide or seriously self harm?

Speaker A I mean, then we can bring in ideas of like, does someone, can someone have a philosophy, a moral system and an epistemological system, a sense of justice which is divorced from their psychology? It's like it. So is, is there a normal psychology? I guess I'm not trying to avoid the question, but it's what's popping up to me is like, okay, so what's like a normal psychology?

Speaker B What do you mean by what's a normal psychology?

Speaker A Okay, well, we're talking about, about that, you know, these people have something that something in them at birth or you know, in utero before that, or even going back genetic. And so then we were saying like, okay, and then this leads them to develop personality disorders, psychopathy, psychosis. Do we throw depression in there?

Speaker B Not for a personality disorder. And I, I think you can be predisposed to depression.

Speaker A But I mean like, is that, is that enough to be depressed? I think because once, once again, we have plenty of psychopaths who don't commit mass murder.

Speaker B Exactly. Right. Well, and this is the thing. The vast majority of people don't commit mass murder yet alone. The vast majority of people who are mentally ill don't commit mass murder. And the vast majority of people with personality disorder don't commit, commit mass murder. So we're in this really difficult pickle of trying to understand. Okay, let's just say we can't tell if it's some horrible event that happens to them from a very, very young age or if they were born with it because the brain is still developing and it's adapted to its environment. And this is what you're going to get now. So let's just say we can't Tell the difference then. Are we saying that the only way to have someone like this, how you described it, is through some serious trauma in their life? And let me just quickly define what I mean by trauma. So it's not ambiguous trauma being prolonged bullying even, but they've taken it really, really personally or really badly. Now this is, this is getting more and more complex. As I said, I'm, I'm speaking as I'm thinking the only people take it is complex. That's why I'm struggling with it. So, you know, you could even argue that the way that you take bullying depends a lot on your predisposition. In the first place, if you take bullying very personally, which in a way feeds into the bullying, you're the kind of person that is extremely sensitive to it. That's a predisposition in itself. So maybe you need that predisposition to have a knock on effect, like a dominant effect for the whole thing. I just don't know. Or is it enough just to be bullied and hurt for or tortured or serious trauma as a kid, you know?

Speaker A Okay, so let's, let's stop there and let's bring it back to the ideal self and dominance hierarchies. Right. So perhaps what it is is that if you take a kid that yeah, they, there's something innate in them which wants them to have a high position on the dominance hierarchy. Right. It doesn't mean that because it's innate in them that they really are obsessed with it, that they're able to get it. Those are two separate things, the desire and the ability. So maybe it's someone who desires it but is unable to achieve it. And then you bully that person well then their ideal self as being someone of some sort of importance. The more you reinforce through bullying, like what does bullying do is it reduces you right and tangible. It's not just like in your own mind when somebody is bullied, it really does like repeatedly and openly, it really does reduce their social standing. No one looks at the kid who's being bullied and goes, shit, you know, who's cool, him. So it's not irrational for someone who has. What? Yeah, I'll go with you. Sure. An innate desire to really strike drive to be high on the dominance hierarchy and then to just get like knocked down. Knocked down, knocked down, knocked down, knocked down. Well then that goes back to the discrepancy between the high dominance hierarchy self, ideal self and the actual self as a bully picked on little wretch. And so that creates the depression. But it also Creates, creates this strain and you know, which is also in our biology. I mean, I don't know that we have any examples of like chimps or wolves or anything that have, you know, gone back and massacred the social order. But if they had the ability to, do you think you might be able to see that? Because the difference between us is we have the ability to.

Speaker B Yeah, I think the problem there is I don't think they're self aware enough to know their position in the dominance hierarchy in a more meta sense that they haven't achieved their end goals. It is what it is. I think there's too much in a moment. They don't think enough about the past and the future to have those kind of existential crises, shall we say?

Speaker A Exactly. And that was why I brought up philosophy before, because that's an element that we can't take out of this. That the way that people view their life experiences. And this is what you're getting at with how a person takes being bullied. You know, we all have a different take on what is just or what is moral or even like what the nature of life is itself. You know, the purpose of it, the origins of it, the value of it. And that is a component in humans that is not in animals. Yet we still have all these, we still have all these things from our past that, that are in play in our society which put us in this perpetual game of dominance. And the one thing that you will see, like at least from the offenders that I studied, a lot of these guys, they don't have a girlfriend or a very good job, if they have a job at all when they flip now what are those things related to? They're related to the ability to reproduce. You know, it is evolutionary, but it's also social standing, the ability to provide for yourself. But we also judge people that don't have those things.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A So you know, it is, it is that complex. So there's a reason that you can take a psychopath who has, who's bullied and falling short of their, far short of their ideal own and sinking further and further into despair, yet they still don't become a mass murderer. There's always, yes, there is another X factor to it. And you know, maybe they take it out in a different way, but we also have to weave in their philosophy here, their outlook, their view and it's just another variable. So there's a reason that we don't have a ton of mass murderers because it is so such a complex concoction requiring so many of These ingredients, you know. And would something innate, something that you're, that happens in utero or that you're, you're born with, strongly add to that concoction? Of course it would. Is it necessary? I don't know. Because then it's like once again is a desire to really obsess over pushing yourself up the hierarchy. Is that something learned or innate? Can we even know that?

Speaker B I don't know. You know, as you were talking, something occurred to me. What do you think would be a difference between what you study a lot, serial killers and a mass shooter? What's the difference there?

Speaker A Oh, quite a lot. So I would say that generally most mass murderers aren't psychopaths. Now that's not to say that they don't have mental illnesses. I would say pretty much all of them have mental illnesses or I'd go as far to say that all of them have mental illnesses. But there's an overwhelming representation of psychopaths among serial killers. And depending on which type of serial killer is levels of psychopathy will be higher. So I mean this is all very tentative and, and you know, it's, it's far from meticulous research but from, from what I've seen, like sexual sadists are almost all psych psychopaths. But necrophiles is more like a 5050 or they're psychopathic but not hair 30 cutoffs.

Speaker B Sure.

Speaker A So there's that factor there. I think there's much more psychopathy and serial killers probably a lot more psychosis in the mass murderers. And there's the sexual element, the compulsive element. So the mass murderer, their whole life is a series of problems, frustrations, which culminates in the big event, the single big event. You know, the day of Elliot Rodgers, day of retribution. Right. And read his diary. It builds. It's a lifelong pattern. The idea that someone just snaps and goes off, probably about 1% of them. It's a life striving to be something better than you can be, trying to get to a better place and not being able to. And this is what I've seen in all of them. And that's why I began with this actual self ideal self discrepancy resulting in depression and frustration and anger because their lives are pervaded by this pattern. Whereas a serial killer, it's generally much more about sexuality and wanting to continue to live, to hurt. So taking I think pleasure, living to kill. Not a one time performance, a repeat performance because you enjoy it so much, but the urges being very different. So I Doubt most mass murderers, when they're shooting up their school, are ejaculating. But when, say, Peter Sutcliffe is mutilating a victim's genital region, he's masturbating because he has a paraphilic disorder and he's a psychopath. So, you know, serial killers, and they come in all forms, too. They have their own concoction, and there's some overlap with mass murder. And you actually get serial killers who have committed mass murder, but generally they're quite separate. They're quite discreet things.

Speaker B You know, because I'm thinking, obviously a mass shooter is they don't tend to feel remorse or regret for what they've done, and they certainly have no problems with killing people at that moment. Like, it's all built up. So they.

Speaker A That.

Speaker B So that's, I guess, the trait they share with a psychopath is the lack of remorse or regret over taking someone else's life. You know, a psychopath that would kill someone. So the question is, how do you get to that point without being a psychopath?

Speaker A Because there's more to being a psychopath than just the effective facet. I mean, I go by Hares model. You know, I. I'm not sure that it's absolutely right or that, you know, but it seems to be the most respected model at the moment. So that's what I'm going by. And I know how to administer it. I went and I to a training session with three days with hair. And it's really. It's much more than just no empathy. There's. There's plenty of people that have no empathy that aren't psychopaths. What would you.

Speaker B What would you. How would you categorize someone who's got to that point? I've. I. I guess he's usually through developmental reasons, like the pain. Like an acquired sociopathy type, subclinical level. What. What would you consider that person to be suffering from?

Speaker A I think there really is a point where you can become so depressed and despairing and nihilistic that you. You just lose all sympathy because you feel that no one's ever. Sympathy. Had sympathy for you.

Speaker B Mm. I completely agree.

Speaker A In your worst moments, do you, like. Let's take your worst moment. Okay.

Speaker B Did.

Speaker A Did you feel something like that?

Speaker B A pinch of it or that much despair?

Speaker A Yeah. Well, your personal worst moment, I can tell you that I have.

Speaker B Sometimes I'm trying to think back, and if I've ever been to that point with so much despair that I've not cared about someone else's pain, Probably I have. Nothing comes to mind, but I'm sure it's happened.

Speaker A Have you noticed that your capacity for empathy is actually more dynamic than it's made out to be? So, for instance, when my life is going, well, the past two years, my life has been going a lot better than it has in the past. So I've actually had more empathy in the last two years. I've noticed because I'm more invested in the world and the world consists of other people. The world is the social world. Right. It really is for humans. When we say our world, we can't divorce it from other humans. It's. It's a social world before it is like the planet Earth and the, the universe. And so I, I can tell you that when I've been in a better place emotionally, where I've been less depressed and I've had more hope and I've had more things going for me, that I have more empathy for other people. But I've been down. I think I've been down to the point where I was teetering on suicide and like, genuinely. And I'm only. I have no gain in reporting this to you except to try and get my point across. And at that point I had very little empathy for anyone.

Speaker B Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point. And I think we're actually boiling down to this now, if I think you're right. I think when did a person gets that bad, you do become nihilistic, you become less invested in the world, the reality. And most people who are in that space who get really bad thinking about opting out. And I think you also have helped me see the distinction between that and psychosis. Because with psychosis, the idea presumably, is that with medication and treatment, you would break out of the psychosis. I guess this is below the psychosis in that, yes, you have massive cognitive distortions, maybe like a subclinical psychosis, but it's, it's changing your view of reality. Like you, like you just described, your empathy can change because your version of reality has, for all intent and purpose, changed considerably. So possibly what we're saying here is the depression has got to a point where they've become numbed to those emotions or to the investment of empathy with other people in the world.

Speaker A Yeah. And, you know, sometimes I think the. Our. We always want to say, well, and they're wrong and they're seeing things incorrectly. They must be, because I don't see it that way right now. But, you know, until you've walked in their shoes, and experienced what they've experienced. Experienced like it may not be a distortion. I think this is one of the major flaws of, say, conservative thought. It's the idea that some people just don't get a really bad hand. The amount of bad hand, good hand that people get. Holy shit. Is there a difference? Go read about the life of Henry Lee Lucas and, and tell me that that wasn't going to produce an individual who, you know, was going to rise up like that, that his life was so bad, was so fucking awful. What are you gonna do? Like, you're gonna blame if he ended up on welfare? If that's the worst that happened to Henry Lee Lucas, I can consider. Consider that a success.

Speaker B I think you're right. It's a really good point.

Speaker A There really is. It's not always that it's a distortion. Some people get a bad shake. Some people's interactions with other people are overwhelmingly negative. But to bring it back to what I was saying earlier, sometimes their mental health or personality disorder may also influence that. So if you have autism, people interact with you as they interact with an autistic person, and you. And you perceive you interact with them as an autistic person. So it's not only the way that they actually react to you, it's how you perceive that they react to you. And what you say and the way they take it is, once again, it's all colored by your autism. So I have. I've been. It's been said in the past that I have a bit of a flat affect. Okay. And so I was at a party one time, and there was this guy and I was drinking gin and tonic. He comes up to me and he's. And he's like. He's like, hey, man, what are you drinking there? And I'm like, it's. It's a gin and tonic. He's like, oh, I figured you're for a whiskey drinker. And I'm like, no. Like, you ever had a gin and tonic? It's. It's good. And he's like, not really. He's like, but I'll try it. I said, I'll tell you what, man. And I'm being friendly with him. I said, I'll go have a whiskey with you, and then we'll have a gin and tonic. You try my gin and tonic later. And he's like, deal. We have a. We have a whiskey about an hour or two later in the party, I'm like, where's that, where's that guy? I want, you know, time for the other end of the deal, you try my gin and tonic. And I sought him out. I had a gin and tonic in my hand. And so in my mind, this is what happened. I came up to him and I was like, I was like, hey man, here's that gin and tonic, give it a try. No, it's really good. You'll like it. Now that was genuinely sentiment. But when I spoke to my friend about it the next day, he was like, no, it came across like you were really aggressive within. Like, try the gin and tonic. I'm like, but that was not. I know that that was not in my heart at all. That was my intent. So something to do with my affect colored the interaction. Now imagine, now take that and generalize it so that it pervades all of your interactions. So then all of a sudden you're going like, well, why is it that I'm being a nice person or, you know, being a reasonable person and everyone's reacting to me strange and then you start to think that the world is a fucked up place when really they're reacting to your affect.

Speaker B Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A Right.

Speaker B And so if we, if we are getting to this point where we're saying, okay, someone who, because as you said, you don't think a lot of them are going to be psychopathic. Possibly.

Speaker A No, maybe like a third.

Speaker B Okay, a third of them. So let's just say we grab one who isn't. And they've had some really bad depression colored with some really bad experiences. Some of what you're describing, some not so serious ones, some quite serious ones, and they're starting to view reality in a really kind of, this is not a good place. It's very bleak. They become hopeless, they become depressed. They don't do with that. What separates from someone who commits suicide to someone who decides, I'm going to hurt others instead.

Speaker A So the process goes like this. Those people come to think of themselves as so insignificant that society just expects them to kill themselves and weed themselves out of the social order and that their existence doesn't mean anything. That's the way they see it. It's like, oh yeah, people like me are just supposed to blow our heads off and go away and be forgotten and, and that's, you know, that's the justice of society. But you know what? You know what, what if, what if I make them for a moment have to feel my pain? They can't ignore me anymore. I can't. I'm not just gonna disappear like you want me to, like you expect me to. I'm gonna take you with me. So you can see that my life actually, that if you had given one flying fuck about my life, that it could have been different if someone would have helped, if I wouldn't have been minimalized and just processed through whatever and. And you know what, Eliot? If you want to perfectly understand this, go look at Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter. He basically says it, but because he says it in a way that's allegorical, people go, oh, it's the ramblings of a madman and it's the worst thing you can do. And this was a big part of my dissertation. It was saying like, no, they're almost always saying something comprehensible, you know, but you have to listen with the ear of, of a poet rather than a scientist. Like a poet, a scientist who's willing to decode. Almost like a semiotician in a way. So what Cho says is, he says, you thought it was one miserable life you were exterminating, but thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ to inspire the legions of the weak and oppressed to rise up. Now it sounds like, well, this guy's delusional. Okay, well, let's take some of the color out of it and a little bit of the bombast. You thought it was one miserable life you were exterminating. Translation, none of you hung out with me. I was always on the sidelines. I had no. I'm a virgin. I know that I have no chance of upward mobility in this world and no one seems to care. And I'm stuck in this situation and you expect me just to like, you know, kill myself or go live in my parents basement forever or end up in a mental hospital? And you're going to do this passively through ignoring me? Well, you know, it's. Well, here's a surprise. That's not what's going to happen with my death. I will inspire people in a similar situation like me, who have been oppressed, to rise up and strike out against you oppressive forces. There is a distortion in there, but you can also see that there's a reason within that distortion.

Speaker B I think that's a really great example. But I'm now really conflicted about something, and that's this. Just give me a second. Because I'm trying to put my thoughts into order to make this as careful as I can.

Speaker A No problem, man. I've had like 10 years on this going, hey, here's the abyss. Look.

Speaker B Yeah, I'm playing a little bit of catch up here. I'm trying to find my parachute and all Right.

Speaker A I hope your hair is white by the time we're done talking.

Speaker B I'm gonna be shaking. I'm gonna get another color in a minute. Because it's taking all my powers of deduction and concentration to keep three or four simultaneous thought patterns going with you so that I don't forget what I wanted to say, but at the same time come back with something which helps us propel this forward. So that's why I'm being unusually slow with my response.

Speaker A And. Sorry, I don't mean to dominate the conversation. It's just I have so much to say about it. No, and I. I feel that's what you want.

Speaker B I do.

Speaker A You don't want.

Speaker B Otherwise I'd be talking to the mic by myself.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B Okay. So if we're talking about someone who's depressed, pretty far gone down the line where, like you said, they. They've just. They've got to a point where, like, well, the world wants me to snuff myself out, get rid of myself, or.

Speaker A Even worse, doesn't even care.

Speaker B Doesn't even care if I do or don't. So, yeah, that real feeling of absolute hopelessness and nihilism. But something instead goes, well, hang on, let me let you know what kind of pain I'm in so then I can send a message or just to have you experience what I've experienced. Now, the first thought I had when you were saying that is, well, the difference between someone who would opt to kill themselves and opt to kill others will maybe at that point, it's a form of psychosis because they've snapped and they've gone, well, actually, I can now put this pain upon other people and show them what I've been going through. And they become obsessed with this thinking, like it becomes the only natural logical pathway to make this all make sense. And presumably with medication, they perhaps wouldn't think, feel this way anymore. They'd still be very depressed, but they wouldn't feel like the only way out is to kill others. But then, as you were talking with the poetry side of things, when you get rid of some of the hyperbole or the dramatization of the narrative is perhaps they're not psychotic or going through psychosis. Perhaps they've just.

Speaker A Sometimes too. But it's almost irrelevant.

Speaker B Yeah, they're so far down the rabbit hole. But then why. Why would they describe it with such a dramatic flair instead of just with that more cold, clinical way of talking about it?

Speaker A Sometimes they do. It's. You know, so Cho was. Was an English major, right?

Speaker B Well, that, that really kind of helps me seal the deal on that one. Okay, so it's not necessarily psychosis, but what is having someone flip the lid so that they go to hurt others instead of themselves? That very small percentage.

Speaker A Yeah. And it's also, if I may bring it back to when I was talking about self discrepancy theory. So let's see that you've tried all these to achieve all these ideal selves, and some of them have more of them than others. But I'll keep it simple and I'll use a hypothetical example. So who did we have for the serial killers? Robert. That was our serial killer. Robert. Okay, so let's say that Robert's had a real shit time in high school and he's tried to fit in and be a popular kid. That which is an ideal self. And he's been unable to, and he's felt depression since that, but he perseveres and he goes on and he manages to, let's say, get into college. And he thinks, when I get into college, then I'm going to be. I'm going to get laid. I'm going to be. Have more friends, I'm going to have a new chance, which, by the way, I don't think is unusual with a lot of people. Right? But then it does, but then that doesn't happen either. And then he ends up dropping out of college and he says, okay, well, I've always been a good visual artist. Maybe what I'll do is I'll start a comic book and it. And I'll work really hard at this and they'll be able to pay the bills. So at least then I can be a comic book artist. And then they, they fail at that too. So they keep trying to be something and failing at it. And so it's a lifelong pattern of both depression and frustration that happens. And you go, and so as the anger is building, as the despair and the nihilism is deepening, you go, you know what I could do? You know what an ideal self I could achieve is mass murderer. You know what I've got to do to that? I get myself a weapon and I go and I kill a bunch of people. And if I want to be noticed for it, I, I don't know, I film it. I live stream at that. I mean, that's about to happen, trust me. Probably happened this year. Gotten very close a few times, or I send a media package out or, you know, I post pictures of it on the Internet, I send my manifesto. And then in many cases, I'll make sure that it all ends there because I'll just blow my head off. And so finally they found an identity that's tolerable. Finally, there's somebody. The gap. Even for that one moment, even for the 30 minutes where they're shooting up their school or their workplace or people on the streets. Take your pick. That actual self, that's pathetic. And this new ideal self, which is like the Avenger, and it will wear various identities. That's why so many of them, like, dress in camouflage or, you know, they'll kind of. If you once again go to Cho, he looks. He takes pieces of the Columbine shooters and he sort of adapts them into his own costume. And so it's not that they necessarily necessarily always say mass murderer, it's that it can take another homicidal form. But for that 30 seconds, the discrepancy is almost completely closed. And then they end on that.

Speaker B Yeah, that's a really interesting concept.

Speaker A Well, let's hope that my dissertation committee thinks so. I've got to defend it pretty soon.

Speaker B Well, I hope you get. I hope you get marks for originality because the idea behind. I really like that, actually, that one, one thing you just said, right the end, it really hit me is for that moment in time, their identity kind of shifts to something important. Like you were saying with the social stuff, they've become someone. And even if it's the adventure, well, it's better than loser.

Speaker A Yeah, it really is.

Speaker B I like that.

Speaker A Name people who weren't already famous that committed suicide that you don't personally know. You can. Now, do you want to start going down the list of mass murderers? Yeah.

Speaker B Yeah. Seems logical in that way, isn't it?

Speaker A There is a logic to it, you know, it's not completely unreasonable. Is it immoral? I don't know. Well, then we get into morality, man, you know, and I think that one of the reasons that I'm good at this is because I have been to the bottom. Like, seriously been there. I've lucked right into the bottom of the fucking pit. I'm pretty sure of it. And I'm also, as we said, open. So I will question things like the moral ideas that we have and, you know, what is just and not. So there's also a unique combo that makes for a good criminologist of this or psychologist of this subject. But how many of them. How many people like that are walking around, Right. That's rare. So when we ask ourselves, well, what's that special. Special potion that is Biological biopsychosocial formula which results in the mass murderer, we may ask it of really any kind of individual who's. Who's rare. Yeah, what, what, what makes an Oscar wild? It goes to this bigger human problem of like what makes us a genius in, in the, in the less formal sense. Anyways, sorry, I'm rambling here thinking on my feet.

Speaker B It makes a lot of sense because you're right, a product of a collection of events that is very hard to predict and screen for. So that's what I was going to ask you. Based on what we just discussed in your mind, is there any way to look at a screening procedure that you would be like that would work?

Speaker A Yeah, I think there is, but I don't want to be build a brave new world type society in service of it. And this is the problem. We come to this fundamental conflict. It's like the guns issue, right? It's which side do you want to err on? Do you want to err on the side where the civilians don't have, don't have any weapons? No civilian has a weapon in, you know, the person, the perfectly controlled. You can't commit a mass shooting experiment. No civilian would have a weapon and then risk the absolute inability to resist what I would say is inevitable tyranny. If you understand the forces of history. The same thing goes for privacy. We all lose our right to privacy. And the more Huxley. And in the brave new world way it's going to become. So are we going to be like scanning in utero and going like, oh, look, this one has a predisposition to perhaps committing murder. Let's not even go to mass murder. So yeah, we could do it, but should we.

Speaker B Even if, even if we're looking like a screener before people would be able to purchase a weapon. Like I was saying to Doc, I'm not sure if you heard that part about how the hell do we get there. We were trying to get our heads together and work it out because we couldn't just due to the complexity of the situation. And the vast majority of people who are mentally unwell won't commit murder. So this is why I'm trying to find the obvious and inevitable trigger that would get you there. And I can't. So I don't know how you would screen for it. What's your view on that?

Speaker A I was just sort of chuckling to myself as you were saying that, because I imagine the stereotypically paranoid militia guy who's going like, yeah man, I am getting guns. You know, why? Because the fucking government's coming for me. And everyone's like, you're a nut. You're paranoid. And then the government comes. I'm telling you, it will read history. And tell me that's not true.

Speaker B Mm.

Speaker A It's just people think to seem. We seem to think that we've entered this period of history where it's like this golden age. And if we could just get rid of all the guns and, you know, if everyone just. If ever your. If ever your solution is. If everyone just. Your solution's shit. Right?

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A So as far as. Okay. And now. And I was being completely serious when. When I was saying that. But to be more on point with your question, I think that because so much of this comes down to identity, right? As that was the case I was making before with what I call the expressive transformative theory of violence, which is pretty much what I just laid out for you there. And so much comes to it. Down to what is. What is my social identity? How do I feel about myself? We discussed that, and we also talked about how we understand ourselves through communication with others. Now, there's a reason why so many of these shooters leave statements or manifestos or are increasingly taking photographs or whatever, or filming it. It's because it's their final communication of self. But it usually isn't there. First, there's usually a pattern of communications leading up to it. So your listener should go and chronologically watch the vlog, or V log, however you pronounce it, post by Elliot Rodger, and watch how it's pretty much obvious, even kind of by number two, it should be pretty much obvious that this is an unstable individual and he's giving you all the clues to how his mind is going through a series of video diaries online. And so in the digital age, we can really look at people's online content because the sort that are going to do this are going to. Not always, but I would say at least 50% of the time, have a trail of warning messages leaving up. Now, the problem is there's also people that would have things that are similar that. That do not end up committing mass murder. So I would say that that's the first. The first thing that we can do that sounds.

Speaker B I agree with you. It's very tyrannical to. Because then what's happen. Going to happen is people are afraid to write things down in case it's an algorithm is formed to kind of put it together to detect how close you are to becoming an unstable person with a weapon. And like you said, the problem is I don't think we can distinguish between someone who's going to use a weapon to hurt themselves or someone's going to use a weapon to hurt other people.

Speaker A Do you think? Or someone like myself. Like, I've been pretty confessional here who's just, you know, I study violence professionally, and I've been down to the darkest places by my own admission and have considered suicide. So what do you do? Do you lock me up? Do you start taking away rights from me? Because that's my experience of this, of the life I've had.

Speaker B That's what I mean. What's that, what's that final component? What's that final bit that separates them from what you were saying? Just being able to look at the bottom that barrel and not thinking about hurting other people.

Speaker A Well, I mean, is it okay to think about hurting other people and not do it?

Speaker B That's the thing, isn't it? Because when you start to get, you know, sometimes when I'm dealing with people depressed, often someone in their life has made them depress depressed, and they do think about when they're embarrassed to tell me, hurting that person, and I know they're not going to, and they always make a disclaimer, oh, my God, I'd never hurt that person. But, you know, like a boss, for example, they have violent revenge fantasies, which I would actually consider quite a normal reaction to most people who have a stifling boss.

Speaker A Well, here's the thing. It is normal and most people do have violent fantasies, but you work through it in your thoughts and then it goes away. I'll give you an example. So I had a friend of 10 years who I confided a lot of secrets in and I considered to be, you know, I probably would have had him, you know, in my. In my wedding party if I ever got married. That's how close I was to the guy and never did me wrong once. And I had such trust for this person. And then one day found out that he tried to, you know, fuck my girlfriend at the time. And. Which was. Which was bad enough, but also that he had disclosed a number of things to her about me to try and, like, reduce me, to make me look, to enable his chances. Now, do you think that I. I just went, oh, okay, that guy's a dick. Like, of course I had the. Had it all planned out in my head. Had it all planned my head. And at some point I just came down to, yeah, and I'm talking about. I thought about this for a couple days and then I Just went, okay, now you've done it in your head. You've rehearsed it. That helped work. Helped me work through it.

Speaker B Yeah, yeah. Which is the standard way of, I suppose, working through frustrations and problems.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B You know, Lee, you're. You're inevitably leading to one. One route, which I don't think you're gonna like. If it's tyrannical to screen people, then the other option is to take away all their guns because you. You can't prevent people from having guns because it's tyrannical to start excluding people based on potentially normal thinking patterns. T The alternative they're going to see, if other mental health professionals come to the same conclusion you and I just have is, well, you just got to take away the guns.

Speaker A Well, there's a third option, and it's probably the least popular option, and that's that we all live in a society where we. Well, particularly Americans, where we accept the risk of being a victim of gun violence or mass murder, and we say, okay, these terrible things happen, but we've made a rational decision that the alternatives are worse.

Speaker B Do you think then. Because the debate always goes the same way. Right. It usually ends up keeping the status quo as it is. Like you said, that third option. But the debate always goes two ways. On the NRA side and more sort of Republican side of things. It's, well, this person should have been screened. There were obvious warning signs. They should have never had a gun in the first place. This is where what happened. This is why it happened. There was a failure in the system, a breakdown, and if we fix that, we stop these from ever happening again. And of course, on the other side, they're saying it's not a mental health issue. Only 4% of these people have mental health issues. It's a gun issue.

Speaker A Now, whoever said is a fucking idiot.

Speaker B But do you know what I don't understand? I don't understand that statistic. I've got a couple of journal articles I printed out and some guidelines around it to try and make sense of it, because that really, really blew my mind when I read that. But that's the conventional wisdom. That is actually the standard statistic as we live and breathe. 4%.

Speaker A Sorry, is this a. Because I think I know the tweet that you're referring to, and that was specifically about mass shootings, right?

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A Okay, so whoever these psychologists or psychiatrists are that hold that opinion, they should just quit their jobs right now.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A No, honestly, they don't know. They don't know anything. They don't deserve to hold the license. If they believe that 4% of mass shooters are mentally ill, what do you.

Speaker B Think is their reasoning for that?

Speaker A You have to be delusional to believe that yourself. Jesus Christ. List them. I'll tell you. I'll tell you what's wrong with them. Bunch of them. I'll tell you right now what it is. You know, there's so many things that can be wrong with them. What are you talking about?

Speaker B And I'm going to read these later today for the essay. But my only. My only thing I can think of is. But they haven't met a dsm, pure dsm, diagnosis from ad hoc, as in after death. Because they can't obviously interview them. And they're basing it on either what they've said or done beforehand or what they've left in notation form. I just don't know. I'm gonna read it and let you know about that, but it's really confused me too.

Speaker A They're also misreading the communications. Yeah, this is ridiculous. All my research was based on. It's not like I got to interview Cho, but I immersed myself in his world. He left a number of stories that he had written, semi biographical ones, videos that he'd put out. There were. There were numerous reports on him. I mean, a guy who's a great resource. This is Peter Langman. He's got a good book called why Kids Kill. But he also has a website where he just archives like all these manifestos or documents related to these people. I think it's particularly school shooters, but sometimes just mass murderers in general find their way on there. And if you read those documents and you tell me that those people aren't mentally ill, like I said, I think your license should be revoked.

Speaker B So they. I think they're trying to avoid the stigma associated because obviously the vast majority of mentally ill people don't hurt other people. I think it's. I really hate to say it, but it sounds a lot like it might be ideological based at that point. The idea protect mental health people.

Speaker A Well, do you remember we were talking before about how delusion. You read it and it relieves like a. Sorry, it reads like a religious fundamentalist. And then at the bottom it says, yeah, but we're not including religious people. If you think that these manuals are like hard science and that they're free from ideology, like, just place yourself on that committee. Okay? Of course. Anything with a committee where there's a bunch of people trying to. They always make the wrong decision. They always. You Know, if it's an association, it's, it's almost like there's always going to be something political that creeps in there that stops it from actually being good. I mean, there's got to be, there's got to be other issues that you have with the, the DSM 5, right? Just pull some out of the air.

Speaker B Oh, yeah. Well, the problem with DSM 5, of course, like pretty much every DSM with the medical model is it's extremely reactive after the event and it often doesn't take into account nuance differences in the way that mental health issues present themselves. And like you said, there's always trying to cover its back so that it's not taken out of context. But unfortunately, although, and it always says the clinician's discretion is paramount, but by the same token, they don't mean that at all. Your, your discretion is not paramount. It has to fit these very rigid guidelines, otherwise it no longer counts as a diagnosis.

Speaker A Yeah, and I mean that's, I remember talking to you and Doc Amitay online about this and it's like as interesting as I find psychology, like the ethics that you guys have to abide by and all these professional standards I just find so stifling, you know, how is it that you're, that you're able to do it? Because it's, there is a kind of shut your mouth element to it.

Speaker B Yeah, I see what you're saying and I think, I think like with everything it's always a trade off and you just got to be careful not to go one way or the other. Like obviously the ethics comes from when there was a frame free for all time in psychology which has produced some of the most awesome research ever, but which kind of fucked people up pretty bad. And so there was a horrible knee jerk reaction to that in which we really clamped down hard. And I do think perhaps we've gone a little bit the wrong way. So I see your point completely. But because I guess like any medical professional where you have to watch out for people's health, you have to err on the side of caution because there are some horror stories of psychologists who really get off on the power trip and really screw people big time.

Speaker A Is there screening for psychologists?

Speaker B No, we, we invent the screening. We're not going to let ourselves get screened.

Speaker A Isn't there an interesting power in there that may play into this conversation upon reflection?

Speaker B Yeah, definitely, I completely agree with you there. But you know, I think it is worth stating that there are cases of psychologists who really, I think probably are drawn to the career for the power trip. And then when you hear about stuff they've done to people who are totally in the care of their hands and completely dependent and trusting, like they, I mean, it's really hard to give yourself over to a therapist. Like fully give yourself over, like say I trust you with my most closest held thoughts and frigidity and I'm gonna be able to break down in a session because I need it. And then that power and control you have over that person, you could do some terrible, terrible things. And people have.

Speaker A Yeah. And you know, that's a fair statement. It's. I'm, I'm just beginning to see the world as basically there's, there's no good answers. And I think that separates people like you, myself and you know, Doc Amity from these left wing ideologues who, it's like they have almost like a view of the world where at some point things like there is a right answer and at some point things are going to be okay if we just follow these series of right answers. And I find life is often about choosing between the lesser of two evils. And even that's hard to gauge. I mean that's largely what we've been discussing towards the end of this conversation is constantly what's the lesser of two evils? Is it too much ethics or too less ethics? Is it too much government or too little government?

Speaker B Do you think there's a point there where what the NRA and the conservatives were saying, that there were obvious signs that could have been used to stop this person, the most recent killing?

Speaker A Yeah, I see. I'm in this problem where I'm always so busy studying the people of the past that I, I'm always playing catch up with the latest guy.

Speaker B Sure.

Speaker A Because I'm already, I'm already leeching so much out because most people, it just passes them by and it becomes a political issue. So they go like, okay, well how can I use this to riff on my politics and you know, to make my moral statements about the world or whatever. And for me it's like, hold on, like we have an interesting specimen here. It's going to take a few bottom of this guy. Right. So while I'm doing that, everyone else is making these really uninformed just like it's like they're using the incident to try and push some other agenda and haven't really thought through the complexity of any of the issues that are involved.

Speaker B Yeah, it's pretty sick.

Speaker A Yeah, I think so. But I mean people acting on things they don't understand. I think it's always been that way.

Speaker B Maybe another example of one, you know.

Speaker A NRA said and what this young man, what his history was then. I can give you my opinion. I just don't know it.

Speaker B How about we go one you're more familiar with, where perhaps the NRA or the conservatives have said, look, this was perfectly preventable. Is there a case perhaps, that you know of where that was? The general rhetoric that they were saying, yep, this is preventable. These were the obvious signs. And it wasn't. The law did not do its job.

Speaker A Okay, so one that stands out to me, that is probably the most recent is Omar Mateen, who shot up the Pulse Club in Orlando. This was a guy that the FBI had been looking into for suspected terrorist sympathies. Now, I don't think he wasn't linked to any groups, and that's very important, but he did something to get on their radar. And he had a history of antisocial behavior going back to his childhood. I mean, the guy was just red flags all of his life. So if that dude ended up with, you know, with a gun, which I'm trying to think, if he got that one legally, I think he did. You recall that?

Speaker B Yeah, I think it was legal.

Speaker A Yeah. So if the. If you're on the FBI's suspected terrorist list, I mean, I don't know, should that not kind of, maybe, like, before you get the gun, like, contact the FBI? I'm not sure really how it works, but it seems to me like that's one that could have been preventable.

Speaker B I think with this one, it was. He was known to have done some violent things. Things like threaten people and have some antisocial behavior problems. So the police did know of him.

Speaker A Have you ever threatened someone?

Speaker B No. Honestly, not publicly. What, you mean with physical violence?

Speaker A You don't have to threaten someone with physical violence to threaten someone with physical violence.

Speaker B Let's just say perhaps I have, but I'm not aware of any particular example.

Speaker A Okay. So, yeah, point made. Yeah, I don't know. Is that enough that I'd have to know the specifics of the threat and, you know, if the threat is, you know, someone pinches my girlfriend's ass in the bar, you're gonna bet I'm gonna threaten that person with physical violence. Does that put me at risk of being a mass shooter? I don't think so.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A It's the nature of the threat. Now, if it's me threatening my girl to kill my girlfriend if she leaves me, that's a very different type of threat. Would you agree?

Speaker B I completely agree.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B I think that's much more of a red flag, especially if you threaten them with a knife or a weapon of any kind. I think that's quite a good red flag. But then can you not allow someone to buy a gun if they cross that threshold?

Speaker A How. And, and, you know, then there's the whole proof element, too. Right?

Speaker B Exactly right. There's. You've only got. I suppose if you're lucky to have a witness, then there's some evidence towards it. Can you imagine how many reports like that they get every day in America?

Speaker A Oh, for sure. And then they'd have to look into them and investigate them and see if that they can actually, you know, I think it's probably more of a history of, like, generally these people. Okay, so how would I look at this? There would be behaviors and a personality element to it, to me. So you're not looking at, you know, just like, how do they. What did they do? You know, and we're not talking about, like, one time. We're. We're talking about, like, how many times did they do something that's a red flag. How severe are those? And also, what sort of personality and, you know, mental illnesses does this person have? If that's. If that's possible. But then, you know, perhaps, you know, we get into ethics again. We get into. Into how much. So if there's a rumor that, you know, you threatened to kill your girlfriend if she, she leaves you or, you know, she reports that, does that give them license to send you in for psychological testing and to look into your past? Sorry, I didn't mean license. I mean, does it allow them to.

Speaker B Yeah. Do you think there have been times in the past and when they've missed obvious signs and that person should have been. Had their guns or the ability to buy by a gun confiscated and therefore conserved to have a legitimate point?

Speaker A Yeah. Oh, most certainly. But some of the most egregious cases, it's like, remember that Adam Lanza guy who was like, he's like some kind of. I think he was an extremely autistic kid that lived with his mother, and his mother thought that, like, it would be good for Adam to learn how to, how to fire guns?

Speaker B Oh, yeah, yeah, I do remember that. Yeah.

Speaker A That's probably the worst thing for Adam. Like you. You don't want to take someone that's. That's struggling socially and go, well, you know, it'll cure him. Give him some gums. I think another case that was Christopher Harper Mercer. Now, that one didn't get a lot of attention because I think he wrote a manifesto and they kind of suppressed it. But that was in Oregon or Washington, one of the two. And that was another one of like, I believe it was like mother and son bonding over guns. Like, that's just a terrible parenting. If you have some weirdo misfit kid is to go, well, you know what will help? This is firearms training. Right. Go with something a little bit more pro social, like. Yeah, but, yeah, there are cases, but I just tend to not look at this from a gun issue because I'm just not really, believe it or not, a very political person. I just. The law and politics bores me. I'm more interested in people. So. Yeah, but like, have I seen those cases? Yeah. Can I recall them? No, but I could look into it and send you a list if I had the time, which I don't.

Speaker B No, no worries. No, it's just if something, you know, because I was thinking about this most recent case and it's starting to emerge some behaviors that he had beforehand. But they've been very careful with releasing this information. Now they're trying very hard not to release too much to the general audience. So it's hard to kind of get put together what's really going on.

Speaker A Yeah. And also, does this. Does this concept then shift? Does it become like, okay, well, in 1995, this person used a racial slur, therefore they are a racist and a danger to minorities, therefore they can't have a firearm. Like, does it go there? You know, that's the problem with creating legislation. It moves these moves. And to be honest with you, I'm really reluctant to weigh in on the legal side. The sort of ontology of why they murder, I would consider myself a bit of an expert on. But how we should respond to it. Can we just say that. I'm just playing. I'm always kind of playing devil's advocate because I think it needs to be done.

Speaker B Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B And I was just one of those predictive factors that they should have taken into account and didn't and that could reduce them substantially even. And perhaps the conservatives are right there. I don't know because I don't know enough about these because it's always easy to look back and say, oh, it's so obvious now. But generally speaking, it seems to be a very much after the event type blaming game. So it's very difficult to know what the truth is there.

Speaker A Yeah. I do believe, though, that if they had sort Of a. And you know, maybe they do have more of this now, but people looking online more, not for things like hate speech, like stop wasting, stop wasting your time looking for hate speech online and do something that requires a little bit more nuance and go in and.

Speaker B Look.

Speaker A At the videos people are posting or, you know, I mean, what, what circles are they? Are they moving in? Like, people tend to be drawn towards certain ideologies or ideas. So with like the Elliot Roger case wants to get, and you have all these videos of him getting progressively angrier at women for not sleeping with him or not desiring him. And you know, he says you girls. And he wags his finger at the camera with a very strange affect. And then if you were to look further into it, you can see that he's in like this. Was it like red pill Reddit group where he's showing major signs of insecurity with his masculinity and a lot of woman hate going on in there. Like there are digital trails. I would say that that's a productive path to do it.

Speaker B I think you're probably right. There. There was one thing that we said we were going to talk about, and we just haven't done it. I'm not sure if you have the time. It was about releasing their identity or not, and their loved ones as well.

Speaker A It's going, it's going to be irrelevant soon. And this is why. So I can see the point. And yes, I think a lot of them do do it for fame, but not all of them. And fame is just part of the equation, by the way. You know, it's going to be irrelevant because if you say, okay, we're no longer releasing their names. Okay, Elio, you're about to commit a mass murder. Figure out a way around that. Oh, seriously, do it. It's fun. Figure out a way around that.

Speaker B Figure out a way around me committing mass murder.

Speaker A No, I want. Let's just take it. You are going to commit a mass murder. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Now just using your, your intelligence, figure out a way that your name's gonna get out and everyone's gonna know it. And regardless of the mainstream media or.

Speaker B Not, how would I get my name out there as the killer even if the media tried to suppress it? Release a video online before I do it. Yeah, yeah, I see your point.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah. New media is just, is going to render that impossible. This is an idea that may have worked in the, the 20th century. It won't work now. You know, and, and, and you watch in the coming years, you're gonna see live streamed mass murder, you know. Yeah. I mean that may take it down at some point, but how many people copy it by the time they take it down? This was the issue. The. So the Luca Magnotto video, are you aware of that case?

Speaker B No.

Speaker A Oh my God. Well, dare you to watch it. Luca Magnotta killed a young man and filmed himself. About 10 minutes, I believe it was. Or just short of mutilating the body. Having sex with the mutilated body or at least similar. Simulating sex, in my opinion. I don't, I think it was a fake. But. And he, I think he brought a puppy into it and the puppy was laughing at the bloody stump of the ball. And there's a scene where he's got like the dismembered arm and he's, he's masturbating it with it. And it's, it's a really atrocious video. The one thing I'll say that makes, makes it bearable is that the person isn't alive. So you can rationalize. Well, they're not feeling it, you know, so it's just, it's grotesque. And since you know that he's trying to shock you, I was like, nah, I'm not letting it happen. I was kind of rolling my eyes. I'm like, okay, do that. Go ahead, do that. But this was another offender I looked at for my dissertation. So he did that and then he posted it it on a number of sites and then it went viral. Of course it's going to go viral. Even if 0.5% of the global population want to watch it and want it to be online, it will be online. If a handful or a dozen people want to make sure that it proliferates as much as possible, it will. Especially the killer. Right. So. Or anyone knew the crime had been committed. It was already on the Internet. Now I don't think that anyone who has a strong desire to be famous through committing homicide is going to be prevented because you didn't see their name on. Sorry, you didn't hear their name on CNN or see their image. There's. I don't know, it's. Yeah, it might clamp down on some of them, but people will just adapt. Criminals are always adapting. Go ahead.

Speaker B I was gonna ask, does YouTube screen videos before uploads them?

Speaker A I don't think so.

Speaker B Okay. I was gonna say, because otherwise that would be an obvious way around. Since YouTube is the biggest one, they would prevent massive viral attention to it. You'd have to find a way around YouTube if, if they were pretty hard on censoring things like that.

Speaker A Yeah, right. And, and plus, then you have to have all media outlets agree to it. So let's say that it just appears on some fringe site and then I'll. So once again, if everyone just write, okay, well, let's say that my media company goes, nah, we're going to give the name. And there's enough media companies now where that's possible. Nah, we're going to give the name. This is a good scoop. And even if, like, there's some legislation and we get fined for it, you know, the amount of clicks we're going to get in our site because people are, believe it or not, intrinsically interested in murder, as much as people want to deny that, then that's enough. And then like, once it's out, it's out. And so it'll, it'll make it on murderpedia.com and there's all kinds of people that just also don't agree with the idea that censoring these sort of subjects is a good idea. I'll give you an example, kind of a counter argument, and this is not a very good counterexample, but there was a lot of like, let's not talk about child molestation going on in kind of the era before the 1980s. So I heard of several cases where there's the famous. Every country seems to have a babes in the woods murder. But there was the famous in the Wood murder in England. And it was these two children found in, in like a little grove near Enfield, North London. And there was clear signs that their, the way that their clothing had been disturbed, that they had been sexually assaulted. But believe it or not, there were homicide investigators who were actually unfamiliar with the concept of the child molestation in 1970 when, yeah, when John Walsh, head of America's Most Wanted, when his son went missing in the 1980s from a mall in Florida, he didn't understand the motive. He's like, what do they want money from us? Like, what is it? And then when a detective suggested to him, you know, your son actually, you know, they might be raping him, you know, according to his own book. And if we're to trust him at his own word, he didn't know people did that. So I would, I would argue the world's a better place now that we know more about child molestation. So once again, it's, it's the balance, right? Like when you censor something, like, do you want to not hear about the map? Because when, yeah, that's it. If it goes completely underground, like, yeah, they, they may, there may be less of them, but it can create a whole slew of other problems. It's like, well, we don't talk about that part of our society.

Speaker B That's a good point. That doesn't lead to good places.

Speaker A Yeah. So I think what we're getting at here is it's always, you know, where is the right middle ground to do it? And I think the way to look at it. Look at it is you just go, okay, well, who was the person who did this? And then you go, and you look at their life and inevitably you see that they're an utter loser and you excavate that and you go, yeah, look at this guy. Like, absolutely pathetic. And nothing sexy about it at all.

Speaker B Yeah, that's a good idea. That's a very good idea.

Speaker A And yeah, I think that. And we can also look at, like, the other issues in society which are leading to this. So, yeah, having discussions about guns and who has access to them and how we screen. That's productive. Instead of turning it into my side's right. No, my side's right. It's like, well, do you want us, do we both want to solve the issue or not? Because we're going to have to have a meaningful dialogue rather than getting into these camps. We're going to have to have that same conversation about mental health. Definitely. We're going to have to look at how the society is structured. Like, have you ever noticed how. How hierarchical American culture is in a formal sense? Like, funny, because Americans are like, they're all, you know about the individual and being individualistic. But then if you look at like, the progress of their society, like so much is placed on athleticism. Like, I know this is prevalent in most countries, but it's way skewed in the United States. Like, you, you have entire schools, societies, going from elementary school all the way into post secondary education. That just puts athletes on a pedestal. And anyone, any man who's not an athlete is, is confined to this lesser social space. Right? Not. But not just that. Like this intense structure too. Like, you have the prom king and the prom queen and even have like. And then you go to college and you, you join a fraternity or a sorority and just this, this constant structure and like, entering in groups and, and, and where you, what group are you part of? And you know, and then they have, they have like the homecoming queen. And I had to figure out what that is. I go, what's, what's the fucking homecoming queen it's like, well, come back from college, it's the person they went to high school with becomes a queen. And it's like, you mean the person who I just left behind forever? That person I don't give a flying fuck about at all. Now I'm going to go and watch them be celebrated publicly because they're the homecoming queen. So I think there's other elements to American culture too, beyond the gun culture and that are more important, which is this kind of obsession with groups and hierarchy within these groups, which I don't understand why that exists in an individualistic culture.

Speaker B Yeah, that's a good point. And you know, that kind of leads me to a question I really want to ask you. Probably last question, but it's something that I really think would be. Be really great to try and work out is why has there been an increase?

Speaker A Has there actually? Because I know there was for years. There was a statistician, it would have been Jamie Foxx, not the Ray Chuck, sorry, but James Foxx out of Boston. And he was saying, no, there's just more press coverage on it. So I haven't, you know, and I didn't know what to believe then. I'm always just focused on my narrow little niche. But okay, why has there been an increase in it? Well, one of the reasons you could say, well, because the media attention to it, the increasing media attention makes it something to aspire to, so it legitimizes it as a homicidal ideal, to use the terminology that I was employing before. Another possibility is kind of sociological one, where we have this concept of anomie. When society undergoes rapid changes, people don't know what to do with themselves anymore. They don't know what is, what is expected of them. They get confused as to, as to how they should act. And this was Emile Durkheim's explanation for deviance. Now if we follow another idea that culture is always chasing technology, technology comes and culture is always trying to catch up to it, which I think is pretty much indisputable at this point point. And you can simply see that we're trying to figure out how to deal with social media, for instance, right? And so it's, it's creating, and we're living in a time of such mass advances in tech, technology that it's creating all these purposeless, alienated people just being spat out of this, you know, this machine. And also, you've got to think too, like just the inundation of information that's going on as well that can really make you Hate certain groups of people. Like, I've. I was just thinking the other day how much I hate social justice warriors. And I was like. I was like, should I tweet this that I actually hate them? You know, I'm. I did not, because I didn't see what good would come out of it. But I was standing there going, I. I hate these people. I really do. And. But I'm stable enough so far. But imagine I wasn't.

Speaker B Yeah, that's a good point, because you're being immersed into it all the time, and you're so much more familiar with them because you get to see what they say every single single day.

Speaker A Right. And you're alienated and can't get laid. Your job sucks. You don't know how you're supposed to act in this world. Everything's moving so quickly. You really don't have anything to lose. And that's something, too. It's like, what stake do you have in conformity? You know, someone has to have stake in continuing to play by the rules, and the more that they just see that things are stacked against them. And there'll be people that will literally say to people like, you're a hopeless case, like, you're never getting ahead, and they'll flaunt their own success in front of those people. You know that we live in a mean world, and that's amplified by social media and the kind of dialogues that we have in that. And so, I mean, a part of it could be that there's more media coverage, but I would say that it's not mainstream media coverage of killings as much as the sort of society that this exponentially changing technology with culture always trailing behind. It's the kind of society that's been produced as a result of that. And then also, I'm almost positive that we are not taking care of people's mental health properly because we're not taking care of physical health properly, even in countries that run their healthcare systems decently.

Speaker B Yeah, I think that's. I think that's a really. That gave me something to think about, but unfortunately, you've probably doubled the length of my article already from this podcast, so that's. That's something more.

Speaker A Well, it's like, I get. Let's to say I've given you a big mound of clay to sculpt with, and that's better than me not giving you enough clay.

Ep. 13 Dark Side Of Psychology: Musings on Profiling A Serial Killer [Part II] (feat. Lee Mellor)

Interactive Transcript

Topics Covered

Related Episodes

True Crime Vault: The Wicked

Trailer: McGillicuddy and Murder's Pawn Shop

The Wolfe Murder Case - Richard Diamond | 09/20/1953 (Ep157)

The Pale Horse

Share Episode