On the Pleasure of Dismembering a Human Being
Ala Jeffrey Dahmer Style
Civilization is a relatively new thing. An exotic and strange thing seen from the perspective of life on this planet. When considered from the vantage point of the species, it only accounts for roughly 3% of our time on Earth. From which it follows that the fundamental character of mankind must have been formed during immemorial times, of which we scarcely know anything. During savage and harsh times when fear and a desire for raw power reigned supreme (as opposed to now when one frequently has to look deep into their sublimated children in order to sniff them out). A time in which being inventive and insatiable in cruelty was considered a core tenet of the prevailing morality of customs, a time when collecting and lavishly displaying caches of skulls only served to increase one’s power manifold.
As with the probable origins of very powerful masochistic tendencies, the root cause behind this most flabbergasting (relative to our modern senses) display of will to power, in the form of these monstrous extremities as we see with Bundy or Dahmer, is probably to be found in a retarded configuration of the synaptic connections in the brain.
By studying the life of Dahmer and Bundy we are in a way looking back tens of thousands of years into our ancestral past akin to looking back millions or even billions of years into our universe’s past simply by observing those ancient photons as they reach our planet.
Their condition essentially betrays the longest period of mankind when being insatiable with cruelty increased one’s feeling of power many orders of magnitude and hence, in addition to offering one solace from immense suffering — suffering that would make Schopenhauer’s philosophy sound like a lullaby for children —, pumped one with immense feelings of pleasure.
It betrays a bygone age of mankind when such a lowly display of will to power was the rule, rather than the exception. So we are here essentially dealing with an atavism of the greatest degree, whereby traits that have disappeared (but are still represented in the DNA) and are essentially inactive are suddenly expressed again (for example by a fault in the genetic control). Given what we already know about the science of epigenetics, it should not appear altogether strange that cultural traits too are indeed inherited, and they too are subject to these laws of biological atavism.
Gombe Chimpanzee War
The pleasure of cruelty: just as it is reckoned a virtue in a soul under such conditions to be inventive and insatiable in cruelty. In the act of cruelty the community refreshes itself and for once throws off the gloom of constant fear and caution.
Cruelty is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind.
For to practice cruelty is to enjoy the highest gratification of the feeling of power. — Nietzsche, The Dawn.
Our idyllic conception of our closes cousins was finally shattered when Goodall experienced a most brutal and unforgiving war.
For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind — Satan cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes.
This was a tribal war fought between two communities of chimps that used to be a single unified community not so long ago. Then they separated into two groups and this separation soon gave way to the above-described bloodshed.
It is important to emphasize that Satan did not just kill Sniff and continued about, no, after having him slain, he celebrated his victory by drinking his blood. As Nietzsche points out, the act of cruelty is one that brings great refreshment to the constantly imperiled community, and originally, one of the highest expressions of the will to power.
It should be emphasized, and cannot be emphasized enough, that all of this is done in an extremely joyous, nay ecstatic mode. Every time the chimps had slain one member of the ‘other’ group (this separation is crucial in enabling the behavior) they celebrated exuberantly, throwing and dragging branches with hoots and screams.
This type of behavior, as is to be expected, is not very far from the constant state of war that the primordial hunter-gatherer communities of our species were in. To throw in some numbers from one primitive tribe as it was coming into contact with western peoples:
- 56% of deaths of infants from 0 to 3 came from violence.
- 74% of deaths of children from 4 to 14 came from violence.
- 46% of deaths till the age of 45 came from violence.
- 50% of deaths from 45 to 60 came from violence.
It should, again, be noted that “violent death” here is almost certainly tantamount to a terribly vile and full-of-anguish death. It is much closer to Chikatilo-style death rather than death from the average criminal type as seen today.
And for those of you who think that our higher culture today has elevated us enough to abstain from such retarded behaviors, I am afraid you are in for a disappointment. Our higher culture serves as nothing more than an insulator and damper for all our more tropical monsters and growths, which have always been lurking in the shadows and always will be. For a more modern example, we can briefly mention the infamous group of Oskar Dirlewanger, who once razed to the ground three hospitals packed with patients as they were gang-raping the nurses outside — before hanging them naked— while enjoying the festive tunes of the popular song “In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus”.
The Metaphysics of Crime
Below is an extract from Dugin’s essay “The metaphysics of crime” (the bolds are my own).
When the average man is horrified by descriptions of heinous crimes with mutilations, dismemberment, and nightmarish details, it is understandable.
Less understandable is, why he loves, passionately loves to be horrified by this, implicitly, but insists on more and more horror, more and more dismembering operations, to shudder for the thousandth time reading gory details. Severed heads, shaked out insides, extracted wombs, extruded eyes, separated bones, ears, which were slashed with a razor, genitals, lying a few steps away from their former owners, etc.
It is clear that Chikatilo is an internal concept, that he intimately expresses some obligatory, intimately close figure, inextricably linked with the depths of the unconscious. It is not a person, it’s a fetish, it is a sign, it is the voice of the human psyche.
Crime — particularly a terrible crime — resonates with human nature, with its fundamental layers. Therefore, crime and psychiatry are inextricably linked.
Separation of criminals on the sane and the insane — is a pure social convention.
Extremely vile crime is sensational and draws people into the flocks because it for once betrays the longest period of the human condition. There is a certain low-level program running in each and every one of us that jubilantly celebrates whenever it gets an opportunity for such gratification (one can discharge a drive simply by witnessing an exemplification of it).
Dahmer Case
It is not possible to know with certainty what motivated Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer who murdered 17 men and boys in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area between 1978 and 1991, to commit his crimes in the manner that he did. Dahmer’s actions were heinous and caused immense harm and suffering to his victims and their loved ones.
There are a number of factors that may have played a role in Dahmer’s behavior, including his mental illness, substance abuse, and experiences of trauma. Dahmer was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia, and he had a history of alcohol and drug abuse. He also experienced significant trauma as a child, including a difficult relationship with his father and the death of his younger brother when Dahmer was a teenager.
ChatGpt when asked about the motivations of Jeffrey Dahmer.
An ardent student of psychology cannot but have his jaw drop in awe at the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. Unlike Bundy who, once captured, was very discrete and manipulative about his motivations, or Chikatilo who started quivering like a baby once he understood where his trial was going, Dahmer had perhaps enough nobility might I say (also recall that he did not utter a sound as he was being bludgeoned to death), to be completely candid about his actions and motivations as can be seen when he was once interviewed about them.
As always, it would lead one astray to think of Dahmer’s motivations in the realm of intellect: reason is always merely an instrument, and the throne is always reserved for the drives. It matters not whether we talk about genius or a serial killer. What elevates a human being, what separates them from the masses is always the intensity of their drives. Not their existence — indeed they are to be found in almost everyone — but the degree to which they are exemplified.
But the unique thing about Dahmer is that, in addition to being honest, he also did understand himself to a certain degree. As he correctly grasped, what compelled him to do what he did was a desire for complete and total domination of another human being.
In the final analysis, this means a desire for complete and total power. Every human being fundamentally strives to expand, whether they are a group of elites striving for world domination, an Einstein going after the secrets of the universe, a Plato influencing the entire subsequent course of Western civilization — it goes without saying that Plato thought of himself as the most superior human being in the World at the time, the pinnacle of human civilization so to speak—, a Moses distributing the laws of God, or a Naram-Sin going as far as to declare himself a God — unprecedented at the time — and the king of the whole known world… What we all seek in the end is power. To be sure, the type of power that we seek says much about us but expansion is nonetheless what all life strives for.
Indeed one can compile an entire history of civilization solely based on the type of striving for expansion that each age thought of as being good.
Diese Welt ist der Wille zur Macht — und nichts außerdem! Und auch ihr selber seid dieser Wille zur Macht — und nichts außerdem!
His experiments with producing a sexual slave, of eating parts of his victim can be thought of in this way. Eating parts of the victim as he said to “keep them with me”, can be thought of as a high tide of this drive to possess another human being. But when even this was not enough, the drive, always wanting more, always needing more, went one step further and he began planning the construction of an altar composed of ten different sets of skeletons and skulls. Dahmer himself said that this was to be a place where he could chill and recollect his thoughts. But of course, what would enable this tranquillity could only be the satiety of the king-drive (which was driving its host mad) by yet another stunt meant to fulfill its bizarre capriciousness (to say it again: “bizarre” only relative to our modern sensibilities) in its demands for power.
Interviewer: Were you upset when you killed these men?
Dahmer: No, at the time it was almost addictive, almost like a surge of energy. I wouldn’t have to worry about any of their needs but rather had complete control over the situation.
The type of striving for power that Dahmer needed to fulfill belongs to Uralt, bygone ages. By means of an atavism of the greatest degree — indeed all personality disorders can be thought of as such instances — Dahmer’s particular brain configuration made again possible the cultivation — there is a long series of ladders to be slowly passed that finally ends up de-personalizing a living, breathing human being to an object of pleasure — of such retarded drives.
The other fascinating thing is that Dahmer seems to have genuinely tried to fight the vehemence of this drive. And with relative success as after his first murder, he remained somber for almost a decade. But in the end, he had no choice but to give in. He woke up a morning with no recollection of beating his second victim to death. Avoiding opportunities for gratification, that intellectual artifice of associating the gratification of the drive with a very painful thought, dislocating one’s energies by imposing on oneself a particularly difficult and strenuous labor, psychically weakening and exhausting the entire body so as to weaken the drive too, all of these methods, whether they succeed or not depends as little on the intellect itself as the course of world history depends on certain groups of people striving to shape it. It is a problem of optimizing power, and the intellect does not have much.
To our strongest drive, the tyranny in us, not only our reason bows but also our conscience. — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Interviewer: Do you still feel the same urges and obsessions?
Dahmer: Yes.
Thanks for reading.
As always, constructive criticism and discussion of any kind are highly appreciated.
Remember what physics teaches us: One’s goal is to be less wrong about everything.
