By C. Rommial Butler
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As I was picking my way slowly through Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, I happened upon a point of view relevant to horror fiction.
Discussing how dogma tends to fail to align with the intrinsic moral compass of the individual, Schop drops this Kantian nonsense in our laps:
“Therefore, however different the religious dogmas of nations may be, yet in the case of all of them, a good action is accompanied by unspeakable satisfaction, and a bad action by endless remorse.”
No.
The first problem with any belief of this type lies in the supposition that all human beings feel the same. This would have been much easier to believe in cultures that shared a relatively unitary mythology, which most cultures did up to Schop’s time.
I say “relatively” because there are always outliers who oppose the unitary mythology, but because of the pervasiveness of that mythology, even those who oppose it tend to do so on the grounds of incorrect interpretation—think Protestant Reformation here—rather than on the grounds that the mythology is wholly false.
So it makes sense that Kant and Schop will have born down on this notion of a relatively uniform sense of feeling, given their saturation in the unitary mythology of their time, which might have conditioned them incapable of perceiving the minutiae of distinction between subjective emotional experiences. This is especially ironic in Schop’s case, reclusive curmudgeon that he was!
I can falsify this belief quite easily by referring to two cases in recent history, which are first, very well documented, and second, should easily call to mind thousands of other well documented cases just like them.
Denis Rader, the BTK Killer
He bound, tortured, and killed people, including children. It gave him a sexual thrill. He meticulously planned many of his gruesome killings. He relished getting away with it for thirty years. He enjoyed recounting each murder in grisly detail once he was caught. Not only was he not remorseful, but it was the bad rather than the good action that gave him unspeakable satisfaction.
Though it is fair to say that Rader is not an example of a normal person, he is a person, and there are others like him, so therefore, it follows that the supposition that bad or good actions are necessarily and respectively followed by bad or good feelings is false.
We must also take into account how well he hid his crimes, and for how long, beneath the guise of a church-going pater familias. Rader’s wife and kids had no idea.
Stephen King wrote a great story in Full Dark, No Stars called A Good Marriage, which was based on this unfortunate reality. Worth a read, along with the others in that collection.
If you doubt that Rader was remorseless or that he got a sick thrill from his crimes, just watch his court testimony.
Beware! It is chilling.
Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, the Slenderman Stabbing
This case bears directly on our love of horror fiction as well as our duty as good citizens of the world to care about and protect the innocent.
In 2014, two preteen girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, lured their friend Payton Leutner off the beaten path to sacrifice her to the fictional character and internet urban legend Slenderman. Leutner was stabbed multiple times and left for dead but survived due to her own diligent efforts to crawl to a main thoroughfare and a lucky encounter with a helping hand.
Here’s the Wikipedia article for more detail.
For my purposes here, I’d like to highlight these points:
The girls were very young and highly impressionable. They did not understand, for totally different reasons, that Slenderman is a fictional character.
Morgan Geyser had hereditary schizophrenia which was at the time untreated. Where Anissa was trusting her closest friend, as many of us seem to do so blindly at that age, Morgan was literally, viscerally experiencing Slenderman and related phenomena as full-blown psychotic hallucinations.
In the court proceedings, much was made about Morgan’s lack of empathy as opposed to Anissa’s expression thereof. Morgan was the one who went through with the stabbing while Anissa turned her back, but both were complicit, and both really believed they were appeasing Slenderman.
This question of empathy comes up again and again in relation to violent crime, but the connection, though not irrelevant, is often tenuous, and this is an excellent case to illustrate the point.
People with a natural lack of empathy can spend their whole lives not committing a violent crime, because they are still logically aware of consequences and reasonable about their own self-interest. It is not only lack of empathy, but also lack of reason, which caused Morgan Geyser to perform the act she performed.
It was, on the other hand, her empathy and emotional connection to her friend Morgan that caused Anissa Weier to go along with it.
There’s a lesson here about the balance between empathy and reason—emotion and intellect, in the broader sense—which those who fall more on one or another side of the spectrum naturally tend to want to ignore.
Both girls were tried as adults but ultimately found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Nevertheless, they were sentenced to mental healthcare institutions for indeterminate amounts of time.
Weier was released in 2019. Morgan is currently up for release as I write this. I sincerely hope her treatment was adequate. The victim has expressed no concern about further attacks, so that is a good sign.
In Conclusion
Going back to Schop’s assertion now, we can see in both the example of Denis Rader and the example of the two preteen girls that there are not necessarily intrinsic motivations to do what anyone thinks of as good or evil in this world.
We also must consider that in the case of Rader, though he secreted away sadomasochistic literature and videos, he grew up in an era where such was not widely available, and there was no indication of an abusive childhood or any other environmental trigger for his sick fantasies, which he began having very young, and which he acted on after thorough premeditation.
In the case of the girls, there were also no indications of abusive households. Quite the opposite, as the HBO docuseries Beware the Slenderman does an excellent job of pointing out. I could not help but feel absolute sorrow for everyone involved in the affair.
Creepypasta (the term for internet horror tropes and stories) are not much different than the old ghost tales around the campfire. Our stories, dear reader, are reflections of a complex world, and we should honor and respect them as such.
People have killed in the name of peace and love on the grandest scale of atrocity as certainly as they have for war and hate. Warring for peace, as George Carlin remarked, is like screwing for virginity, but every day it happens somewhere in the world, and is sincerely done with little dissonance by most participants.
Conversely, countless folks just like us, of all ages—me included—enjoyed the Slenderman mythos without trying to murder our friends on his behalf, and it demonstrates that aforementioned lack of balance between reason and empathy to suppose that the stories are the cause, or that there is ever any one cause from which evil, or good, might spring.
I want to finally highlight something that happened after this unfortunate incident with the Slenderman myth itself. In some retellings of his legend, he becomes not a stealer of children’s souls, but a protector of innocence.
Isn’t this, dear reader, the best that can be made out of a bad situation—namely that terrible struggle we each must endure to wrest from the morass of the unconscious a soul worth striving for? How can we discover an individual moral good by preordaining an absolute moral stance—especially on and through art—in a complex, amoral world?
Nature is both beautiful and savage. It is not for us to change nature, but to change ourselves to preserve that within and without that elevates us to a higher state of consciousness and conscience.
Obviously, it remains an open question, despite the circumlocutions of philosophical minds, and I will not tell you what to think but only thank you for thinking!
On that note, I bid you adieu, dear reader! Thanks for talking Schop with me, and consider checking out some of MAD’s podcasts or drop us a line in the Horror to Culture facebook group!
