Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand “the killers,” quit asking what drovethem.Eric Harris andDylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, butdepressive andsuicidal. He blamed himself for his problems. Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as “nice.” But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. “Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people,” Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled kid, thepsychiatrists say, he was a psychopath. In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a “psychopath.” But in psychiatry, it’s a very specific mental condition that rarely involveskilling, or evenpsychosis. “Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch withreality, nor do they experience thedelusions,hallucinations, or intense subjectivedistress that characterize most othermental disorders,” writes Dr.Robert Hare, inWithout Conscience, the seminal book on the condition. (Hare is also one of thepsychologists consulted by theFBI aboutColumbine and by Slate for this story.) “Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths arerational and aware of what they are doing and why. Theirbehavior is the result ofchoice, freely exercised.” Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that drove him to mass murder.
The psychopath is arebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, arevolutionary without a program: in other words, hisrebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; he is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires.
Robert M. Lindner,Rebel Without A Cause—The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944)
Thehipster ... knows that if our collective condition is to live with instantdeath byatomic war, relatively quick death by theState asl’universconcentrationnaire, or with a slow death byconformity with every creative and rebelliousinstinct stifled (at what damage to themind and theheart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation forcancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate oftwentieth century man is to live with death fromadolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, todivorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience wheresecurity isboredom and thereforesickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is withoutpast orfuture, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he mustgamble with his energies through all those small or large crises ofcourage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing. The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds ofperception; anddefeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each newgeneration coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in theWild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in thetotalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.
[PsychopathologistEssi Viding] was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.
Jon Ronson,The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (2011)
