Philosophers struggled evil nature for thousands of years, but today, immorality seems like a solved problem. Take the case of Bryan Kohberger, the prime suspect in the four murders near the University of Idaho, whose arrest has sparked widespread media speculation about the killer’s psyche, as if the diagnosis Correctly diagnosing his personality disorder can minimize the damage already done. His “psychological look” made headlines in the British tabloids, while The New York Times dissect Kohberger’s self-described feelings of remorse as a teenager. Dr. Drew invites a former FBI agent to discuss Kohberger in the context of the “dark triad”: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
Understandably, Americans want help to better understand the senseless deaths that appear on the front pages of local newspapers and form Netflix’s extensive real-crime catalog. Criminologist Jarkko Jalava and psychologist Stephanie Griffiths, co-authors of The Legend of the Born Criminal. When it comes to crime, psychologists are often “really sloppy,” says Jalava, adding, “we’re working at this folk level.”
The perpetrators of the University of Idaho murder should be condemned, but getting to the heart of the killer is easier said than done. Prediction and prevention – the supposed ultimate goal of criminal profiling – is even harder. And the proliferation of quasi-scientific terms for assholes, assholes, and even murderers has had far-reaching consequences.
Medical chemistry evil—that is, the diagnosis and management of physician-directed illnesses such as “moral insanity” and “criminal psychosis”—has been around since the early 19th century. Once drawing the line between good and evil, psychiatrists began to care for people whose behavior was impulsive, self-destructive, or otherwise un-Christian.
From the very beginning, these doctors and criminal profilers explained bad apples through theories like sadism. Advocates believe that, over time, poor interbreeding has led to the degradation of genetic resources and the concentration of poverty, crime, and other undesirable traits in certain ethnic groups or social class. While the theory of degeneration was gradually replaced by a strikingly similar concept of “mental illness” (literally, “sickness of the soul”), many concerns remained unchanged: those who deviant shows no remorse or guilt, exhibits promiscuous sex, and develops long raps, perhaps from an early age.
New variations on this theme are always appearing. “The Dark Trio,” fabricate in 2002 by Canadian psychologists Delroy Paulhaus and Kevin Williams, to describe “annoying but not sick personalities,” including CEOs, politicians, and bad boyfriends. There are also labels such as antisocial personality disorder, a diagnosis for individuals with severe impulsivity, aggression, and criminal behavior—in other words, a DSM approved twisted the old “psychological” standard.
At first glance, these classification efforts appear to be trending positively. For one thing, researchers are slowly separate obvious mistake from the more unintentional effects of mental illness. Likewise, it’s a relief to be able to use the dark trilogy to acknowledge just how pervasive selfishness really is.
But the shadow of degeneration is still very large. In addition to continuing to medicalize everyday discourse (“idiots,” Jalava and Griffiths point out, have become “psychopaths,” with all their baggage), these models support supports the vague belief that every human being has a fixed personality—and that those personalities can easily be classified as good or bad. In fact, recent research Shows that many people change—and, in some cases, dramatically—in their lifetime. At the same time, many researchers still criticize history characteristics of personality disorderpartly because it is discriminatory and can trauma reliefand even then it doesn’t lead to clarity treatment direction.
