WHY IS A STONE KILLER SO INTERESTING? by Art Smukler, author & psychiatrist

I’m talking about the one with dead eyes who blows someone’s head off, then opens the fridge, finishes off the last piece of apple pie, and carefully brushes away the crumbs with a clean hanky.

How can someone do that? Wouldn’t he be shaking or vomiting, filled with guilt and anguish at the fact he’s taken another’s life? That would be nice, but then that would make him human. A stone killer has no conscience. If you have no conscience you can strangle puppies to death, steal from elderly women, or torture innocent people. Having a reasonable discussion with this type of pseudo-human sociopath is a waste of time. Spending thousands to rehab him is also a waste of resources.

So why do we find him so interesting? Because he does exactly what he wants. We struggle with right or wrong, whether we’ll hurt someone’s feelings, or whether what we’re doing is honorable. Our code of ethics runs deep. His only code is to not get caught.

On the good side, stone killers can be fun. It’s fun to get revenge without guilt or remorse, to read a murder mystery and give our overactive consciences a rest. Crawl into bed, relax into a comfortable state of anxiety, because in the end, the good guy will get the bad guy and we’ll all be saved.

Any thoughts on good versus evil?

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5 thoughts on “WHY IS A STONE KILLER SO INTERESTING? by Art Smukler, author & psychiatrist

  1. I think the fascination lies in the fact that most of us just cannot fathom that behavior and so when it does occur, we want to see it and to try to understand it, but of course, we can never understand it unless we learn to think as they do and hopefully that won’t occur

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  2. Not just interesting, but also sexually atractive. I do believe sociopaths are a step up in evolution. They get all the benefits of society but don’t have to make any contribution. They are parasitic to social humans just like carnivores are parasitic to hervivors. We can see how lions are superior to antelopes, so are sociopaths compared with us empathic beings. If everyone was like them society would collapse, just like the savanna echosystem if all animals were lions, but given that there is a society, sociopaths are kings.
    The only advantage I see is that just like evolving alogsitde lions makes anthelopes faster, I hope a few sociopaths have the effect of making society took at itself and evolve into a better society.
    So, let’s hope we deal with the bankers at least as well as we deal with the serial killers, they are here to make us better.

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  3. I think there’s a tiny part of all of us who ency the Stone Killer in that we have met or heard of – somewhere along the way – a terrible cruelty or injustice to a person or an animal and wished to extract a terrible revenge on the victim’s behalf. Also to make sure that the perpetrator will never be able to do it again.
    I know I have heard of some dreadful cruelties which were allowed go with a slap on the wrist by a magistrate or judge.

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