Joe Doakea from Como Park emails:
I generally agree with Joe Soucheray. He has good common sense, much of the time. Based on what we know now, Joe’s opinion in this column is wrong.
The California killer was not evil. He was psycho. There’s an enormous difference between doing bad things because you enjoy them, versus doing bad things because the voices in your head enjoy them.
And fighting tooth-and-nail to make sure psychos can’t be compelled to take their meds, then blaming innocent gun owners when the inevitable occurs . . . that’s just wicked. I’m looking at you, Liberals.
Joe Doakes
True.
Author Joseph Wambaugh once noted that most criminals lack the intelligence to be truly evil. The truly evil will knowingly perpetrate their acts sheerly for the sake of evil. Most criminals are just ignorant, lazy, ill-bred slackers who are just opportunistic and lack a strong moral compass when it comes to meeting their needs. Wambaugh was not endorsing the quality of evil, just noting that the concept is grossly misused and often flatters the person upon whom the trait is applied.
I too am a Soucheray fan. However, I think his claim of evil fits into Wambaugh’s category of misuse of the term. Crazy is just crazy; sometimes it’s dangerous and often times not. Unfortunately it and its degree of danger are rarely identified before its defining characteristics have been manifested …
G. K. Chesterton once wrote that insanity has a moral issue because most crazy people are obsessed with themselves and believe that they are the most important person in the world. That is why the government is trying to control their thoughts, that is why the time the postman walks by their window has a secret significance, etc. Chesterton was writing out of ignorance, or, at least, in reaction to the over-blown claims of psychologists of his day.
But how much more do we know about the broad category of psychosis than we did a century ago?
Pschology Today has an interesting article, What Is a Psychopath?, here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mindmelding/201301/what-is-psychopath-0
Like Asperger’s Syndrome, the symptoms of psychopathy seem to be ordinary human behaviors taken to an extreme degree.
How can you diagnose a kid like Rodgers? He knew that what he was planning to do was wrong, that it would cause the maiming and of death of complete strangers, and their friends and family members would experience intense emotional pain. That’s why he did it. Seems as good a definition of evil as any.
If we are to accept that mental illness can mitigate the culpability of a mentally ill person who does something bad, shouldn’t Donald Sterling, who was allegedly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, or some type of dementia, be forgiven his sins? And shouldn’t his multimillion dollar fine for saying bad things to his mistress be forgiven?