Three types of criminal and one non-criminal, part 1
First type: Criminal [aware; don’t care]
This is a personal categorisation system or alignment chart and I don’t necessarily expect anyone else to adopt it, even though it is possessed of a near ontological reality for me, which I suspect might be a function of my having OCD, especially scrupulosity OCD.
In short, rightly or wrongly I divide all my fellow humans (and myself) into these categories:
Criminal [aware; don’t care]
Criminal [aware; care]
Criminal [unaware]
Non-criminal
I shall elaborate on these distinctions in four parts. Firstly:
Criminal [aware; don’t care]
This is category of persons that true crime podcasts, Netflix documentaries, tabloid newspapers and a whole media ecosystem is unhealthily/ uselessly obsessed with. I say this because I genuinely believe only a tiny percentage of humans actually fall into this category. When it comes to the contemporary craze for identifying sociopaths, I’m strongly inclined to agree with Kristin Dombek’s hideously under-appreciated book length essay The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (2016) that the desire to assert that another person is merely a swirling miasma of self-interested callousness and creulty says more about the fears of the accuser than the target (who is, more likely, a common-or-garden prick or wassock, bouyed up by their own self-justifying delusions like the rest of us).
As a teacher (and, formerly, lecturer) I have taught thousands of students and I have only taught two students who I strongly suspected were sociopaths who did not see beings outside of themselves as having independent selfhood or being worthy of any respect or consideration. I taught them like any other students and tried hard to protect others from their crueller impulses. One student messaged graphic images of corpses to another student whose parents had both died in an accident. The other student reliably always bullied the most vulnerable neurodiverse students and would quietly say sexually explicit, threatening things in a completely flat tone of voice. Both students ended up being managed moved or expelled. While my first instinct is always to make safeguarding reports (and wonder whether something terrible has happened or been done to the child to make them act this way) I will note that the later student’s brother was a straightforwardly amicable enough kid who seemed endlessly bemused by his brother’s tendency to spend his time in videogames (and hopefully only in videogames) killing cats and generally scaring other kids and teachers.
Either way, whether these kids have been born with a part of their brain missing or malformed, or whether they have simply responded in an extreme way to certain experiences, I’m not inclined to blame them for their anti-social tendencies, but to take a pragmatic view as to preventing them causing harm to the degree possible. I honestly think such humans are so few and far between this is largely achievable.
In her article ‘You Don’t Have To Mourn Charlie Kirk’, Rachel Donald claims broadly of a number of indigenous cultures in Papua New Guinea that they socially isolate individuals who display psychopathic traits, bringing them out of the forest only when they are needed for battle. She explains:
No matter the strategy for dealing with dangerous people, what all these cultures share is a willingness to confront the truth. These cultures recognise that those with a taste for violence and desire for dominance are different to the majority, and that these people therefore pose a threat to a societal structure which depends on egalitarian cooperation. The lessons of the stories above show that the many are responsible for the actions of the one, and that harmony is not a happy accident but a consequential effort. These cultures do not pray for peace, they wrench it from the maw of chaos.
Donald’s original title for her piece was ‘Charlie Kirk Deserved to Die’. However, I think her use of the concept of ‘deservingness’ here is seriously, even dangerously, wrong – an application of Judeo-Christian morality to cultures operating according to different paradigms. It is not that such cultures see psychopaths (or sociopaths or narcissists – in short, those who do not care about the feelings or rights of others) as “deserving” of obstracisation or punishment, but pragmatically recognise they have a limited positive role to play in a cooperative society.
Ursula Le Guin reflects (through the character of Odo) in The Dispossessed (1974):
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
I suspect the appeal of the unremorseful criminal who transgresses lies in the fact that the impulse Poe referred to as the “imp of the perverse” exists within (almost) all of us and that it is pleasurable for us to occasionally indulge the infantile fantasy of ‘what if we could induge in our most base desires and feel no guilt for doing so’.
My friend recently watched Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025) and informed me that the show seems to aim to rehabilitate Ed Gein, portraying him sympathetically as a misguided hobbyist driven to evil by a sadistic girlfriend. While this strikes me as wrong-headed to say the least (especially when his victims have surviving relatives) the seemingly weird modern conception of the serial killer as ontologically innocent [see similarly sympathetic recent portrays of Jeffrey Dahmer] captures a lurking suspicion that these men couldn’t have acted otherwise (and if they did not choose to be evil cannot be rightly seen as guilty). Richard Ramirez, Glen Edward Rogers, John Wayne Gacy, Arthur Shawcross, Fred West – all documented as having suffered head injuries prior to committing their crimes. Cases like that of Eadweard Muybridge, who experienced a serious concussion during a stagecoach accident, which purportedly resulted in a profound change of personality from amicable to emotionally unstable – a fact that led to his later acquittal of a murder charge; or of Phineas Gage who became ‘‘unrecognisable’’ to his friends after being pierced through the frontal lobe by a railroad spike, throw into doubt the very concept of God-given free will that is central to Christian morality (or at least make us think ‘there by the grace of God go I’).
That said, whether blameworthy due to committing themselves to evil choices or else blameless due to neurological injury or defect, the ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’ is only personally interesting to me due to the outsized role they seem to play in business and politics in a society that incentivises competition, selfishness and corruption. Being outraged at figures who would now be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (the Wikipedia list is not so very long, all things considered) seems as pointless to me as being angry at the conker that falls from the tree and bonks you on the head, as unpleasant as the experience might be. I’m inclined towards Kurt Vonnegut’s explanation of Dwayne Hoover’s violent spree in Breakfast of Champions (1973) as being due to “bad chemicals”, but even if you think we have perfect free will and such figures just gleefully choose to be evil, I feel like the amount of attention they are given in pop culture is ridiculously over-sized and reflective of the fact that, in the words of Caitlyn Johnstone, “We are ruled by sociopaths because capitalism elevates the worst among us”.
Still, to quote self-reflective and talented sociopath Patric Gagne:
Contrary to popular belief, there’s nothing inherently immoral about having a limited emotional range. The majority of those whose personalities fall on the sociopathic spectrum have the ability to lead perfectly happy, socially acceptable roles in loving family units. But you wouldn’t know that from common discourse.
Television’s talking heads, newspaper articles, and countless magazine headlines continue to disparage and vilify sociopaths, usually by erroneously conflating them with malignant narcissists or stereotyping us based on the worst examples of our personality type – serial killers and monsters. These extremes comprise only a fraction of the sociopathic picture, yet they’ve been misappropriated to define everyone with the disorder.
If a ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’ can be kept away from positions of unsupervised power (or, indeed, national government) I don’t think they necessarily pose a risk to people in the three other groups as long as their needs are met and their skills channeled in the right direction. The student I mentioned who sent images of corpses to the bereaved girl was a genuinely talented artist of black-inked morbid cartoons. I made sure to regularly praise and encourage him in this persuit. Joyce Carol Oates (my favourite living author) is on record as saying that if she hadn’t been a writer she would have been a serial killer. A dark joke but perhaps not without some truth. I believe she enjoys controlling characters – setting up traps for some, having other do her dark bidding – and carefully manipulating the emotions of her readers. I suspect Patricia Highsmith was a sociopath. I’m very thankful both women came into this world.
One ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’ who most people are not thankful came into the world is the late Jimmy Savile. After he died I read Dan Davies’ gruelling biography In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (2014), which I would not recommend reading in a single day like I did because it will put your brain in a very bad place. It is a masterfully researched and written account, however, of a remorseless criminal and predator who committed hundreds and hundreds of abuses against a shattering range of vulnerable people, from the very young to the very old. I really, strongly disagree with calling a human being a monster… but he was about as close to a monster as a human being can be. To the degree to which Savile attempted to atone through lucrative charitable acts, this was because he was a Catholic who wanted to escape the fires of Hell. He was found dead with his fingers crossed.
While alive Jimmy Savile was also beloved by much of the British public. We don’t like to think of that now and most everyone tends to pretend they hated him while he was alive and secretly knew he was a wrong ‘un. Davies’ book makes it undeniable that it was, in fact, clear Savile was a wrong ‘un because he regularly admitted as much, gloating over the fact through jokes and winking innuendo, sometimes going as far as groping/ sexually assaulting teenage girls live on Top of the Pops (episodes of which have, conveniently, been scrubbed from the BBC’s repeat broadcasts – though the John Peel Centre continues to exist). Today the same can be said of Donald Trump who has very openly admitted to assaulting women and who is patently a repeated child rapist. Lots more people openly hate Trump than ever hated Savile while he was alive (though Savile thankfully only ever wielded political influence from the shadows indirectly). However, millions of people love Trump while knowing that he is a living embodiment of the ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’ type… indeed, I would go further and argue that many, many people love Trump precisely because he embodies this type.
Elvis and Michael Jackson are appealing because of – not in spite of – their infantile entitlement. As the Residents (who are always clear sighted about these things) correctly identified, Elvis was the Baby King. Sometime I think a civilisation needs or insists up figures who operate as the opposite of scapegoats… figures who embody the ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’ and yet remain somehow, illogically, immorally, impossibly heroic to some eyes. Mythically untouched by petty human morality. The bloody Kray twins are another good example of this.
Personally I don’t think a healthy society elevates or reveres such figures, but maybe it’s a deep-rooted human impulse that we’re better off not trying to purge, I honestly don’t know.
—
Nia DaCosta’s and Danny Boyle’s upcoming post-apocalyptic movie 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) will purportedly be about the allure of the ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’, focusing upon a marauding gang who style themselves on Jimmy Savile. Expect a lot of fancy dress costumes here in the UK the following Halloween, includings children dressed up as the Jimmys. Look forward to the subsequent Daily Mail outrage.
The 28 Years Later films exist in a world in which Jimmy Savile was never exposed as Britain’s most prolific sex offender because mainstream news reporting and investigative journalism were both fatally interrupted (along with every other aspect of business as usual) by the outbreak of the contagious ‘Rage virus’ in the early 2000s. It makes sense therefore that a group of young men living in post-apocalyptic Britain might think back to a celebrity figure from their youth before the viral outbreak with nostalgia and affection.
However, perhaps in the film like recognises like – a group of anti-social criminals are able to sense that Jimmy Savile was one of them.
Within the world of fiction, I’m not one for enjoying male anti-hero assholes. Nonetheless, even while the likes of Walter White, Don Draper and Tony Soprano leave me personally cold, I have to recognise that they are beloved characters with many, many defenders. Within the realm of comedy, however, I can enjoy – even relish – the ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’ type. British comedy icon Julia Davis almost always plays these kinds of characters, such as in Nighty Night (2004–2005) and Hunderby (2012–2015) and dammit I always want her characters to succeed in spite of myself. I think this is because, rightly or wrongly, there are many more things than a person or character’s morality that makes them interesting, appealing, or even socially useful. Jill Tyrell in Nighty Night is determined, resourceful, confident, quick-witted and attractive. She is also a narcissistic sociopath. You would not want her to be involved in your life under any circumstances.
However, if it is in the interests of such an individual not to harm others, the might live a happy and socially beneficial life without causing too much in the way of misery or destruction (or, at least, no more than individuals within the other two criminal groups, which constitute the vast, vast majority of humanity). It feels like an obscene impossibility to consider (though, to quote Momus, “unthinkable thoughts are thoughts we have to try”) but could there have been a version of our reality in which Jimmy Savile didn’t abuse others – in which he desire for power was sated by fame and fortune? Would anyone really be surprised if Jake and Dinos Chapman were revealed to have tortured small animals as children? However, apart from some really nasty invective against female journalists, they mostly seem to sublimate their destructive and sadistic desires into their art a la Oates (who I don’t actually think is an example of ‘Criminal [aware; don’t care]’ but is certainly fascinated by figures who are). Both brothers are members of Arts Emergency, which seems like a worthwhile charity and, speaking for myself, I like a lot of their art.
In short, there’s always going to be part of a given society that belongs to the ‘Criminal [aware; don’t care]’ type and unless we’re willing to live in a dystopia like the ones depicted in Brave New World (1932) or A Clockwork Orange (1962) then we need to find ways of dealing with that fact and living with them. Personally I’m inclined to the imperfect solution depicted in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed of children’s education including a lot of focus on cooperation and community, with “propertarian” and selfish impulses strongly socially proscribed. Those who, as adults, keep engaging in such behaviour are not formally or legalistically punished, but they do end up effectively frozen out of their society, often having to take to the roads or the woods as self-sufficient hunters or nomadic traders. In extreme cases, individuals are committed to comfortable and theraputic facilities/ asylums. As said, imperfect, but in my view preferably to our own hypocritical and ineffective combination of turning a blind eye when a ‘criminal [aware; don’t care]’ abuses or offends against individuals without sufficient social or cultural cache, but becoming aggressively punitive and fist-shaking when convenient, especially when such a figure interferes with property rights or violates the wrong taboo without being sufficiently famous enough or is not acting in the service of empire and white supremacy.