Psychological Serial Killers

As I have often remarked, it is interesting that serial killers have become heroes.  I wonder to what extent modern culture has made all of us wear masks of passive niceness covering deeply seated aggressions we don’t know how to express or even share publicly.  I read once where settlers in the West, perhaps Utah, executed a murderer, skinned him, and made boots out of his skin.  Violence is nothing new, and has often been expressed publicly in the past, by the group.

Leaving that aside, I wanted to focus on an aspect of this.  I think we have all felt the urge for the great to fail; for the “hero” to falter.  That hero represents both an ideal and a challenge.  If the hero fails, then we can rest more comfortably in who we are.

More deeply, though, I think when we are unhappy we want others to share in it.  This is the essence of Schadenfreude.  There is this motion towards tearing down.

Here is the point I want to make, though: that tearing down applies to us, too.  It is possible in this life to very happy, to have frequent, nearly continuous moments of contentedness, of satisfaction.  But only if we attach ourselves to them.  When we cut down others, we sever the connections we otherwise might have had in the direction of our own happiness.  We pull out knives that work in hidden ways on our own psyche and potential.  We are psychological serial killers: every moment of joy is killed in its infancy, by something angry.

This certainly true of me, and I may be projecting on others.  I have reached a point where I can see with reasonably clarity who I REALLY am, ugliness and all–my shadow, if you want to use Jungian terms.

You cannot kill ugliness.  You cannot will it out of existence.  As I see it, it is dissolved with progressively greater doses of light, of which truth telling is the principle or at least first manifestation.