Book review: On Killing
On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
This is a book I’d found recommended in a few places. I stuck it on my Amazon wish list and got it for Christmas. I’d expected to get around to reading it eventually, but I got sucked into it. It’s pretty engaging, even if I never got quite the information I was looking for. I’d bought it with the intention of coming to understand the psychological processes for people who kill others, figuring that was useful in my writing, for Sylar if not for other, future characters. It…sort of was. But it opened up some other cans of worms I didn’t even know were there.
First, about the contents of the book - it is almost exclusively concerned with intentional killing during armed warfare, with weapons that require direct human control to operate (so not much about the release of diseases, poison gas, or use of starvation to kill the enemy). Mostly, it talks about people with guns shooting other people with guns. It goes over how hard it is to get people to kill each other, even in war, along with the ‘normal’ human response to having killed someone. This normal response applies for some 98% of the armed forces. 2% have a non-standard response. They enjoy it. They’re the sociopaths. The army likes to say they have ‘aggressive psychopathic tendencies’ and uses them on strike teams, where their killing is up close and personal, because these people don’t mind.
The other 98% of the population go through some standard stages related to killing:
Concern about one’s ability to kill
Actually killing someone
Exhilaration from killing and succeeding
Remorse, regret, and nausea
Rationalization and acceptance (if rationalization fails, PTSD results)
Things that make it harder for the average person to kill someone else are when:
Victim is physically closer and clearly visible, facing you and aware of you
Victim is morally/socially close (looks similar, same religion, hasn’t been dehumanized somehow as a ‘Gook’, ‘raghead’, etc.)
Boss/commander/authority figure isn’t standing there ordering you
You’re alone or poorly emotionally bonded to the soldiers/people with you
Your group doesn’t agree with the legitimacy of killing
You’ve never done anything similar to killing a person (no desensitization or conditioning exercises)
Victim does not represent strategic advantage or an immediate danger
Historically, putting a gun in someone’s hands, running them through some drills on using and cleaning it, and then throwing them out on the combat field with orders to shoot, saw only a 20% firing rate, with a lot less than that actively aiming at other human beings and trying to kill them. Firing/kill rates can be dramatically increased by having people exactly duplicate killing attacks with human-looking targets, and receiving immediate, consistent rewards for doing so, paired with immediate, consistent punishments for failure. The standard example is having a soldier in full combat gear crouch in a foxhole consistent with those on the military front, and shoot at human-shaped metal targets that pop up in the field of fire. Once seen, they are shot on command. If hit, the target drops. If missed, it remains up and everyone sees the success or failure. In this way, a soldier is conditioned to fire automatically, without moral consideration, at human-shaped targets when told to do so. Put through this sort of conditioning, the firing rate climbs to an extraordinary 95%, with many soldiers talking about how they shot and killed people without thinking about it, as though they were on autopilot.
The book takes this information and in my opinion, erroneously applies it to civilian life. The author has a political axe to grind as he encourages widespread censorship of violent imagery. Pretty much any movie that shows blood or death should be banned, unless the death (and blood) is very limited and fully, carefully, justified. There should be no anti-heroes, no mavericks, no one working for justice outside the law; no films about corrupt cops (unless they’re the villains) and never any ambiguity about hero and villain. Movies should be intentionally constructed as educational, instructional, morality tales. He’s very forward about this. I disagree with him. My evidence is all anecdotal, but I need not list it. All I need to point out is that his own predictions have not come to pass. He published this book in the mid-90s, predicting a steady increase in murder and assault as children and teenagers came of age, who had grown up on first person shooters, dark music that glorified death, and gory movies littered with violated corpses. Instead, violent crime across the board has fallen, even as the technological means to share these gruesome experiences has become ubiquitous.
I wonder if social media has helped? It decreases the moral distance between people and allows dehumanizing behavior to be called out and punished (or at least criticized)?
Speaking of social media, the other day, my boyfriend got into an argument with someone on Facebook. Someone else had made a post about a man named Chris Carter, who was a sniper for the US. (Apparently Chris Carter died recently in a tragic accident and the article was in honor of his memory.) The arguer posted that Chris Carter was a coward because he was a sniper and killed people at a distance. My boyfriend took issue with this. It came out that the arguer felt there was no special reason to respect veterans or current soldiers. My boyfriend (who has served in the military) was very upset about this and thought all soldiers should be accorded automatic respect (for the uniform, their role, etc.) for putting themselves in danger and advancing the goals of the nation.
My boyfriend’s view is very mainstream. It’s also one that Dave Grossman supports, for he spends a lot of pages talking about the psychological importance of a support structure for soldiers, their need for parades, speeches, monuments, and other public, society-wide shows of respect and approval for them. This gives the soldier or veteran the social sanction that allows them to live with what they’ve done, to feel it was right, and to be mentally stable. They don’t feel like an outcast. They aren’t driven to drink, drugs, isolation, suicide, and social dysfunction.
I support people not being drunk, drugged, isolated, suicidal, or socially dysfunctional. But I also don’t feel soldiers or veterans deserve automatic respect. I don’t feel they are all heroes. The reasons why they should be given special treatment always seem to break down to ‘just because’. These people would not need special sanction from society unless they’d been out there doing something they KNEW was wrong. That’s why they need absolution. While I don’t mind giving absolution, it is the widespread, guaranteed absolution that allows this behavior (soldiers, war, killing people on the battlefield) to continue.
Many other people put themselves in danger for their jobs, like fishermen, roofers, truck drivers, and loggers. But they aren’t accorded special respect. Firemen, police officers, EMT workers, and the like aren’t even in the top 10 most dangerous professions. Soldiers in Afghanistan rate around #3 in the most dangerous profession category (2.5M deployed since 2001, ~2,200 killed in action), behind fishermen and loggers, neither of which has a median salary of more than $35k. Society does not reward people for taking up dangerous professions, so it’s not the selfless sacrifice angle. If you doubt this, then take a look at your feelings towards professional mercenaries and independent contractors. They are usually feared, seen as parasites or vultures or troublemakers, and not respected at all. Yet they’re out there engaging in even more danger than soldiers. So it’s not the job duties either.
I think a little bit of the ‘respect my authority’ thing is that soldiers (and police) have guns and can kill you if you disrespect them. It’s like thing ‘respect your father, because he brought you in this world and he can take you out’. It’s respect born of fear. A lot of society seems to conflate fear and respect.
My boyfriend wants me to respect him for his service. I do not. I respect him for many other reasons, but his willingness to join the military is not among them. I’m kind of like, ‘Yeah, okay, you got a job. Cool. And it was a job that taught you a lot of cool things, had you go to interesting places and do interesting, stressful, difficult things. I respect that you endured that and were capable of doing those tasks. I respect that you were able to conform to the job requirements until your health gave out. I do not respect your choice to put yourself in that situation in the first place, or the nature of the job you were required to do. And yes, I hold you partly morally responsible for enabling a fucked-up war effort through your participation.’
When a soldier carries out his nation’s orders, the obedience doesn’t make the orders moral or just. Would our take on it be different if we were looking at German soldiers from WWII, or Nazi prison camp guards? Would we so easily say, ‘They were just following orders?’ or ‘They were just doing what they’d been trained to do?’ Was it really wrong for Vietnam war protestors to take out their frustration and moral indignation about the war on the soldiers who came back? When the author speaks of war protestors and soldiers, he seems to be saying the war protestors behaved badly. But when he speaks of people in the entertainment industry who produce violent media, he says, “they are ultimately individuals making individual moral decisions to participate in the destruction of their fellow citizens.” Why does this logic apply to people in the entertainment industry but not those in the military? Why should the military be blindly respected without evaluating their choice to participate in the destruction of their fellow human beings?
So that’s the can of worms.
On to Sylar!
Let me recap a few things about Sylar:
Killed his victims face to face, at short range, with them entirely aware of him. Supposedly, the only thing more traumatizing is putting your hands directly on the victim. Given that he was holding them with telekinesis, which might qualify.
Killed his victims alone, without any peer group to diffuse responsibility to
Killed all but one victim on his own initiative, without any outside authority ordering him to it. (The one exception being Elle urging him to kill Trevor.)
Gabriel Gray had no background or conditioning to train him to practice violence or harm other people
Knew his kills were entirely illegitimate as far as society was concerned. Even his mother didn’t think he could hurt anyone.
His victims were of no danger to him, nor was their killing important in any larger strategic goal (other than for him to become more powerful)
He engaged in very little dehumanizing of his targets. He obviously thought of himself as superior and they as being unworthy of their abilities, but that was it.
Rarely, if ever, did Sylar show any remorse about killing. More than once, he’s laughed over someone’s corpse or cracked jokes. He’s staged kill scenes for others to find. He’s shown great premeditation in tracking his targets, isolating them, killing, and evading authorities.
In a late-season flashback that contradicts much of his other formative character development, we discover that Gabriel Gray, after the brutal and unprovoked murder of Brian Davis, decided he was fundamentally flawed and attempted to commit suicide. At other times in the series, Sylar behaves in an overtly suicidal fashion, asking or allowing people to kill him. So it wasn’t the suicide that was an aberration - it was the remorse, or seeing himself as unworthy of living.
The Hunger - Sylar described it as a numbing sensation, like having his brain packed with ice. Interestingly, as soon as it was removed, he wanted to have sex with someone (a procreative, life-creating urge), he acted selflessly in saving them, and sacrificed himself for another. As soon as his ability returned, he reverted back to being a remorseless killer, including killing the person he’d been intimate with. However, the Hunger is not a consistent precursor to killing - he didn’t have his ability after Kirby Plaza and he was a remorseless killer then, too, killing at least three times with his own hands (or gun) and not hesitating to urge Maya to kill others. When activated by Peter Petrelli, the Hunger drove him to murder his brother and attempt to murder his mother.
If I were to apply the lessons in Grossman’s book to Gabriel Gray/Sylar, then I would say he was in that 2% of people whom Grossman’s book doesn’t apply to. That is, he’s a sociopath who is willing to kill people and might even enjoy it. There is a very strong indication that the Hunger makes a person into a sociopath, somehow overcoming ALL barriers to killing people, including common sense and self-preservation at least initially. There is also a very strong indication that Gabriel was capable of remorseless killing even without the Hunger. So he was a sociopath to start with, who manifested an ability that also makes a person into a sociopath. He was, like, a sociopath x2.
Maybe only a sociopath can come to control and direct the Hunger? Maybe only a sociopath can rise above it, see the urge impersonally, and learn to control it?
I’m intentionally dismissing everything that happens after Sythan. He had too many different psychological things going on at once for any of that to be meaningful for analysis, except to observe that at the end of it, he doesn’t seem to be a sociopath anymore. He is genuinely and repeatedly reluctant to kill people, walking or running away instead of taking someone’s life. This also goes to illustrate how simple it would have been in the past to not kill - many have written that he was ‘forced’ to kill, but he was equally forced when confronted with Samuel (or Angela, or Peter, or Matt), yet he passed on the opportunity once he had a conscience. So the issue isn’t the situation, or how much pressure he was under, or how justified he was - the issue was whether he had a conscience, ie, was he a sociopath at that point?
The book answered a lot of questions for me and posed quite a few new ones. Sylar remains largely…out of the box. He’s not normal. He’s one of those extraordinary few with the will to take what he wants, as he told Luke. That’s useful for me to know, because it means I’ll quit toying with trying to stuff Gabriel into the ‘normal human emotional response’ box. It’s possibly something he’s not capable of, or at least, something he wasn’t originally capable of. After/during S4, all bets are off about his emotional capabilities. Almost anything can be justified as a holdover from shape-shifting, memory-alteration, or the experience of having lived another life. (Not to mention simply learning from one’s mistakes.)