The prevalence of true crime podcasts, and of stories focused purely on killers and the insane in film and television, points to our culture’s increasing obsession with the twisted and evil. Point of fact – there are no role models in these works. The role model of a true crime podcast is the State, the faceless machinery that, at the right point in the production, auto-generates a police officer NPC to deal adequately with a problem according to procedure. The detective inspector interrogating the killer, the doctors to follow, are not heroes but mere civil servants.
The same attitude – the intense interest in evil for its own sake – results in the facile idea that people would enjoy Hell because it’s ‘where all the interesting people go’. I have two problems with this.
First, it’s a received idea. Of course you wouldn’t want to go to Hell and don’t try to pretend you would. To say otherwise is pretentious and contrarian and you should rethink your life if you argue against this. “Oh but Frank Sinatra would be down there”. Hell is by definition not a place where you connect with people. Do you really think he’d want to talk to you? What would you have to talk about? Would you have a grand old time making fun of all the normies in heaven who aren’t getting tortured for the rest of time like you? Hell’s population hates itself. Hell being where the ‘cool’ people are, or whatever adjective you choose, is a received idea I particularly detest because it’s so obviously fundamentally wrong to anyone with even the slightest capacity for reflection.
Second, frankly, what’s so interesting about evil? Murderers, et al, could have been interesting people if they weren’t murderers. They could have been complete human beings with their own constructive goals that involved actual engagement with the substance of the world around them. Instead, due to a mental aberration, they wish only to destroy some aspect of the world regardless of what it contains. This is not an interesting attitude. Why would it be?
“Some things destroy for the good, that’s why Shiva exists. Destruction can be an act of love.” Yes. But a critical article in a newspaper offers a diagnosis and a solution to a social problem. It (usually) doesn’t advocate for the destruction of some aspect of a society, except where it argues that aspect is a net negative. Its goal is ultimately positive (reconstitution).
But crime of the kind discussed in true crime podcasts is not reactive. It doesn’t reveal anything profound. Oh, yes, things can be destroyed. People are fragile. Well, we knew that. We didn’t need to see it. Sin is a boring, selfish imposition of the self onto reality. People who ignore the structure, ethics, and laws of civilisation when directing their attentions tend to devolve into using the most direct methods to get things, i.e. killing, rape, etc. If you want something and (internal) rules aren’t restraining you, there’s no reason to engage with anything constructively.
Humanity is at its most interesting when it suppresses its animalistic desires and its id, when it engages with things as they are. (To a point, where we let things wash over us, react to them.) Virtue, glory etc are achieved at this point – even secular glory: asceticism isn’t the only method. Alexander the Great forgets his tiredness and pushes on toward India.
We’ve all had intrusive thoughts. We’ve all contemplated sins and selfish desires. Again, we don’t need to see them in action. Because humans are consistent, all evils come out to the same set of things.
But all good things engage with the specifics of reality, build on the specific structures (rules, resources available, ethics) that confront a life. This is why Chesterton says there is nothing more extraordinary than an ordinary man with an ordinary wife and ordinary children. There’s nothing more interesting to hear about, because they always by nature choose to/are forced to engage with the superstructures around them in a unique way. Psychopaths etc…oh, what’s your super-fascinating, super-deep psychological story? You had a twisted formative sexual experience and now you’re a psychotic rapist? Yeah, we’ve never seen that before. Door number five, thanks.
And once you realise psychopaths aren’t interesting a number of related illusions shatter also.
“But you enjoy murder mysteries. Don’t they share this focus on evil?”
The kind I like are essentially heroic stories, of justice and the law triumphing by ingenuity over evil. Detective Nero Wolfe, the great fat symbol of order, sends his assistant/fellow detective/lapdog/living conscience Archie Goodwin (and just look at the surname for proof of hope) out into the world like an emissary, or an angel, to discover the chaos of existence, to bring it back to Wolfe’s office, and there, to have the case solved and order restored to the universe. Holmes, Kosuke Kindaichi, Cadfael etc are the same (They’re all unique, but they share this basis).
“What about Dostoevsky? Crime and Punishment is the textbook investigation of a killer’s psyche. You like that book.”
I do, because it’s genius – and ultimately refutative. Dostoevsky, as usual, dares to make a moral judgement. Raskolnikov suffers. It’s a redemption story, and it’s an actual investigation (into the psyche in all its aspects), not a fetishisation of criminal behaviour and attitudes. Raskolnikov’s crime is simple and the psychology is ultimately sane. And there’s no glorification of it. How much marketing have we been bombarded with promising to tell us the juicy gossip of the criminal’s sick and twisted psyche – using a frayed mental state as an attraction?
The crime podcast fan approaches life with a voyeuristic, fetishistic, destructive attitude, while the mystery novel/Dostoevsky enjoyer adopts a constructive approach. These attitudes inform everything else we are.
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