Killers Among Us
Nature has equipped her creatures in the strangest ways to assert their territories, their will to survival. Ever hear of robber flies? No, me either. But they're big insects capable of mimicking other insects; for example, some among the one-thousand categories of robber flies are evolved to look just like innocent bumblebees. They are, by their nature, predatory, killers. They have voracious appetites dedicated to devouring other insects.How's this for unsavoury...they penetrate their victims through the neck or other vulnerable points, using their mouthparts not only to impale their prey to helplessness, but for the additional purpose of injecting a powerful mix of nerve poisons and enzymes to liquefy their victims' internal tissues. Kind of a slurry results, which they can then suck up to their hearts' content. If they have hearts, that is.
And that brings us to their human counterparts. There are among us in any given population people whose emotions and mental capabilities become so distorted that they become psychotic. They're a danger to themselves and to all others around them. They've become somehow demented, violence-prone, horribly abusive, with a deranged anger-management problem. We don't want to mix with them, trust me.
And then there are also among us a large group of people whom we label as sociopaths. They have very human traits and emotions, but somehow their emotional needs at signal times in their upbringing were never met, or interrupted, or simply neglected. That's a failure of nurturing due to social mismanagement or dire social conditions like poverty, or quite simply parenting inability. These people develop as anti-social characters.
Theirs are learned behaviours of shunning what is considered to be socially approved, the norms. They constitute a large segment of any society's criminal class. Which doesn't, by any means, indicate they are bereft of conscience, or humanity or emotions shared by the rest of us. They simply don't know how to fit in, don't want to find out how, discover themselves to be defeated by life, and embark on petty or often spectacular criminal careers. Remember Tony Soprano?
Last, certainly not least for the damage they do to society are that group we call psychopaths. It is from their ranks that individuals emerge who may be highly intelligent, even academically brilliant, but they lack the most elementary of human emotions. They are without conscience, are incapable of feeling compassion or empathy. They are completely and utterly disinterested in others, or in the consequences of their actions.
This is an genetic endowment, this condition, inherited through a set of genes quite unlike those associated with 'normalcy'. This is a condition that has been completely un-amenable to amelioration of any kind. And when someone who is a psychopath is also a sadist, deriving enjoyment from the pain and suffering of others we have a truly dangerous member of society. Add an anger-management problem to that and we have a formula for disaster.
And would you believe it, psychiatrists and anthropological psychiatrists attempting to understand what motivates such people, what sets them aside by nature from the rest of the population have come to the conclusion that these people actually represent a sub-species of human. They are endowed with characteristics apart from what is mentioned above, to ensure they endure. Nature has imbued them with an ultra-urgent need to procreate.
Serially. These human creatures who defy the logic of impressionable emotions in our overall make-up geared to render us reasonably humane have an accelerated hard-wired propensity to spread their seed, in an effort to create and re-create themselves infinitely. Over their lifetimes they prey on vulnerable women, generally in an urban setting, selecting partner after partner with whom to share their genes.
How's that for a horror story?
Labels: Nature, Particularities/Peculiarities, That's Life
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, July 14, 2007
<< Home