Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Monsters Are Not People

Notes on an Execution gives an important perspective on predatory males, in this case a serial killer who is obviously a psychopath. I would like to give a response which is much less forgiving about her protagonist. For me psychopaths originate in another universe. They look and talk like other people, but they are aliens. They are existentially of a different order. So I ask an impertinent question provoked by the book: Are psychopaths human? Seriously, should we tolerate people who, because of nature or nurture, are inherently dangerous to the rest of us either as a matter of law or even mere civility?

In her quietly provocative novel, Danya Kukafka brings this issue up in a suitably subtle way. She quotes St. Augustine through her character of the policewoman Saffy, who knows the psychopathic Ansel both as a child and through her investigation. According to Saffy, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist at all.” Saffy doesn’t say this aloud but she thinks it with clear irony as the result of her religious education.

The legal “presumption of innocent until proven guilty” is at root religious and stems from this element of Christian doctrine. The prison chaplain expresses this doctrine explicitly to the condemned Ansel: “Of course you can be good, the chaplain says. Everyone can be good.” This is not just an error, it’s a tragedy

This confident presumption of benign potential is a precept that could only be made in a society which has decided that the world is inherently good. This is a society which presumes that evil is a relatively rare aberration, and that where evil does exist it does so not as a force but as an absence of the virtue which had been, as it were, baked into the universe when it was created by God. Evil is, accordingly, a deficiency of the saving grace of God.

At least this is the theory put forward by St. Augustine in his attempt to counter the arguments by his Gnostic opponents. For them the prevalence of evil in the world is obvious and implies that creation is simply an unfortunate mistake. For Augustine, evil was a dearth of God rather than a glut of some malign substance. For him it wasn’t problematic that God appeared to dole out remarkably little grace.

The flaw in Augustine is obvious to all but medieval theologians and their liberal descendants. If evil is the absence of good, then all of creation is at least somewhat evil because it doesn’t possess the perfection of good that is God. Evil then is the baseline of existence. Ansel admits as much, quoting Sartre: “No one thing can be wholly good, can it?” Adam and Eve didn’t invent evil, it was there waiting all the time in the ground they walked on, a moral inadequacy which could never be corrected. Not only that. God in his perfection knew this to be the case, that what he had created would fail because it wasn’t him. Could such a divinity really be called ‘good’?

Clearly there is a spectrum of human evil, even in Augustine’s terms. But at what point does a quantitative absence of good make a qualitative change in biological existence. We implicitly recognise that some such quantitative genetic change in the past has resulted in the qualitative emergence of the genus Homo about two million years ago. Anyone not descended from that biological line is simply not human by definition, and is treated as an animal - with some rights surely, but not human rights. An animal’s legal status is simply but decisively different. The psychopath is not just another bad person.

There is evidence that psychopathy is the consequence of genetics. There is other evidence that such genetic predisposition is ‘activated’ by traumatic up-bringing. It may even be the case that horrible childhood experience is enough to establish psychopathic behaviour in otherwise ‘normal’ individuals. But according to our traditions, psychopathic behaviour, even when it is observed and documented, is tolerated until it becomes illegal, that is until some other person is injured or murdered. It is only then that the barn door is closed on the animal who is actually a non-human life form.

Not only is psychopathic behaviour tolerated, it is also positively encouraged. The sociopathic characteristics of narcissistic self-promotion, manipulative cunning, superficial charm, absence of guilt or remorse, and ruthless pursuit of an objective are stylised as the virtues of popularity, leadership ability, politeness, fortitude, and personal drive. The perfect CEO, President, or Bishop. And there are just so many of them, as Saffy realises:

“Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good… She’d seen it so many times—how they squirmed through the cracks in a system that favored them. How, even after they’d committed the most violent crimes, they felt entitled to their freedom,”

Studies have shown that these are the traits of just the kind of people who disproportionately find their way to positions of authority in business, government and academia. From these positions they are able to be as injurious or even murderous as their fellows without falling foul of legal constraints. They inflict suffering but do not suffer unless their ability to inflict suffering is impeded. The psychopath knows this instinctively, knows he is of a different, superior species, and says so. Shouldn’t we take him at his word?

So, in this sense at least, it is the tolerant society that harbours the mutant psychopath, or at least allows him or her (but mostly him) to exist and flourish in the name of the good. But theologically speaking, the psychopath in himself seems to me decisive evidence that Augustine is wrong. “Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish,” thinks Saffy. This much of Augustine is certainly true. Nevertheless Saffy also knows through her own experience that “Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.”

That is, Saffy realises that evil is a pure immaterial substance distilled and concentrated in the psychopathic personality. This is a non-personality which is inherently and permanently destructive. Ansel is aware of his own disorder when he says to himself, “You only moved on the force of what you knew yourself to be.”

This non-personality is certainly not in any sense good. Any good following in the psychopath’s wake is incidental, and probably accidental as well - like evil sometimes inadvertently results from the actions of normals. Psychopaths like Ansel don’t make bad choices; they have no choices, only compulsions, which they act on aggressively to achieve position, reputation, desires, and a general recognition in the world.

Psychopaths themselves know their condition is not only profoundly aberrant but also incorrigible. As Ansel muses about himself, “You were impossible. Beyond help. You would never be more than your own creature self.” They know, as Ansel also says, that they are already dead and that this gives them inhuman and inhumane power. There is no final double jeopardy. Death cannot come twice. They are effectively released, therefore, from all morality. Psychopaths, therefore, really should have to prove their innocence when suspected of anything. Guilty until proven innocent.

The hope we all share about psychopaths is that they reveal themselves. Saffy is confident that “you could not hide your real self forever, no matter how normal you looked; the truth would come out eventually.” But as Saffy also thinks, correctly, “It was an ambitious concept, justice.” So Saffy isn’t interested in justice. She wants to do good.

The way Saffy puts it is “She wants to be good, whatever that meant.” But really what that means is the attainment and exercise of power. She always has wanted power. It’s why she became a cop. She wants what the psychopath has in excess. Thus do psychopaths create other psychopaths, an unusual but effective method of quasi-sexual reproduction combining the zygotes of revenge and envy to produce monsters.

Thus those attempting to combat evil through force become implicated in evil: “Saffy had not saved anyone.” In fact she precipitated a death. She failed. But not because she might have turned “Ansel into exactly the monster she needed him to be.” Rather, she had become the monster in his image.

It is his victim’s sister who gives the final word on Ansel: “Hazel believes that a person can be evil, and nothing more. There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.” But this condemnation is followed immediately by Ansel’s psychotic rationalisation:

“You do not feel the same love that everyone else does. Yours is muted, damp, not bursting or breaking. But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood. There has to be. Humanity can discard you, but they cannot deny it.”

I deny it insistently.

Postscript 06/02/22. Just one of the many examples of the psychotic phenomenon: https://apple.news/AYznxAZDoSPORM61gn...

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