The Truth About Criminals
In all likelihood, I have been inundated with messages about the good versus evil since I was born—from my Protestant upbringing to Disney movies with heroes and villains to schoolbooks with simple stories about such dichotomies. My love for literature began to take hold when our middle school classes began to focus more on understanding what a text was trying to say, uncovering the themes and meaning behind chosen words, thoughts, and ideas. In middle school and high school, I remember reading short stories from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery to Euripides’s tragedy of Medea, the mother who killed her own children to get revenge on her husband. College involved classes on Christopher Marlowe’s take on Faust, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and my own deep dives into the father of sadism, the Marquis de Sade, who claimed that murder is something natural and worth pursuing in his libertine philosophy.
Not too long after graduating from college, I began writing my debut novel, The Paper Pusher. It was at that time that I continued to have this burning desire to know what makes a person commit evil. I felt like I understood the good pretty well because I was constantly surrounded by it. But evil, though I had suffered through tragedy in my life that could be considered evil, still boggled my mind. Ever since I had read Crime and Punishment for the first time near the end of high school, I’ve been searching for some “deep” Raskolnikov figure who killed for a good reason. Perhaps I put criminals on a pedestal and felt a certain empathy toward them because I was mixing up real criminals with the Lucifer types in literature who just wanted more out of life; they wanted to learn more about the world. Maybe the world of literature made those two overlap so much in my mind that it was hard to dissect them—the criminal from the “sinful” scholar. Or perhaps, I just needed to gather enough concrete examples to prove to myself that evil was simply an individual with no values left to protect, a vacuum, and one capable of absolute destruction.
For five long years now, I kept coming up short. I sat on my hands and listened to the criminals speak. I watched countless hours of documentaries on serial killers, watched YouTube channels like Soft White Underbelly, Dr. Grande, Jimmy Can’t Swim, and Explore with Us, or podcasts like Hidden True Crime. I read books by criminals about their crimes, namely all of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s books. I was obsessed, addicted to finding the “answer,” the “why” of evil. I thought I could discover something in literature that no one had, and while I learned about a great many varieties of crimes and how evil may come about, I still lacked a central source.
I believe my thinking began to shift on this problem once I gave birth to my daughter. All I could think about was how could someone intentionally harm something so fragile and so beautiful. It is much more difficult to keep a vulnerable human being alive than it is to kill them. The idea of someone doing something like the child abuse rife throughout de Sade’s works or the predators speaking out on channels like Soft White Underbelly made me cringe, feeling full of disgust. It is people like that who are brutes, usually men without a mature sense of empathy. They are not “geniuses” or “misunderstood intellectuals,” but partial human beings with their souls lagging behind them like their own shadows. Dr. John Matthias, a forensic psychologist and co-host of Hidden True Crime, says that most criminals don’t actually know why they committed the crime. They don’t even have the self-awareness to understand that their violence may stem from someone else’s violence on them—that they are caught in a cycle of destruction begetting destruction.
In that way, actual criminals, evil people, are obtuse. Only the innovator, the businessman, creators, or valuers have any worth. Criminals are obsessed with destruction. Ayn Rand says that “Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.” Rand comes to this conclusion, not in a religious way but in a very natural way. She says, “The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man. Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.” Plain and simple.
The only time worth giving to criminals is learning how to defend yourself at all costs from them, not giving them a voice or their “fifteen minutes of fame” on television or the internet. Criminals are not cool or deep in any way. I’m sure there are plenty of people who meet the clinical definition of a psychopath out there who see no reasonable point in being cruel, and they, instead, turn to a career like surgery, the most delicate and costly of human procedures. They are valuable members of society, just as are people with a multitude of other mental disorders who do not make excuses and commit crimes against others. Those who may see hallucinations, such as schizophrenics, can learn to understand that those are not real and take their medication to enable them to live a productive, meaningful life in reality.
There is no excuse for committing a crime. People should learn to become less shocked when someone commits a serious crime because there usually are many red flags beforehand. If I’ve learned anything from my research, it’s that criminals, just like the rest of us, have an internal calculator. The more values a person achieves, the less their ability to evade or distort reality and commit a crime. The fewer values a person achieves and begins to lose, the more their ability to evade or distort reality and commit a crime.
A murderer, like Bryan Kohberger who stabbed to death four college students in their beds, is not someone who has a lot of values—he failed socially with people, especially women; he failed academically, when he was growing up and doing heroin; he failed physically, when he was fat and doing drugs; he failed to understand himself introspectively, and why he came across as creepy to everyone. With so few values left, he felt no guilt in killing four people. In fact, he thought that his crime probably gave him the virtue of pride or the value of power. When, in reality, he showed himself to be a brute without a soul, a hollow nobody, stuck on the surface-level. There is nothing left for me to search for. In a way, Bryan Kohberger’s case proved to be like my real-life version of Raskolnikov, only he has yet to fall ill from his conscience because he does not appear to have that either. I dug and dug deeper into the ground like a mole rat for psychological depth, and what did I find? Emptiness, lack, and in the words of philosopher Hannah Arendt, a certain sense of the “banality of evil.” Kohberger probably didn’t think very hard about why he had obsessive harm thoughts; he just wanted to do it and relieve himself, if you will, of those thoughts. He allowed the fog of an unthinking mind to evade the consequences of his actions just enough for him to snuff out four lives. Now he will be behind bars, forgotten, a name tied only to a horrific crime, forever. There is no flourishing behind bars, no freedom, no nothing, just as evil deserves.
Since my daughter turned one on October 28, 2025, I have given up my bottomless search into the souls of men who evade reality and unsubscribed and unfollowed all true crime channels—for her sake and mine. My daughter may someday go on her own journey through what makes people evil or good, since she won’t be relying on the words of a religious text to tell her. But that will be her choice and not mine. I will not expose her to a vacuum, but to a constant well of values and the good.
I hope each day will be filled with learning and a longing to live. I want our days to be unsullied by the unthinking, irrational people of this world. I am sure that the story of good and evil will continue in my reading and writing, but it will no longer be an obsession with the wrong side. I will always stand up for the “fallen angel” in stories who is only considered fallen for outrageous reasons, like desiring to know more about reality or for feeling the virtue of pride and having an ego. I will not cheer for the Satan who rapes, steals, and murders people for pleasure. Literature (and religion) would do well to stop intertwining the good, the valuer, with the evil, the anti-valuer.
***
Links: https://www.rbth.com/arts/literature/2016/12/28/crime-and-punishment-150-years-on_665891; *Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: https://amzn.to/4orL9wz; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-true-crime/id1521619380; https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/evil.html; *For the New Intellectual by Ayn Rand: https://amzn.to/48b836C; *The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand: https://amzn.to/4pIKO9S; https://www.newsweek.com/owner-restaurant-where-bryan-kohberger-reportedly-ate-speaks-out-1775577; *Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt: https://amzn.to/442LVZE; https://voices.uchicago.edu/witnessingmedievalevil/2022/03/21/better-to-rule-in-hell-a-comparison-of-milton-in-paradise-lost-and-the-old-english-genesis/
*As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Views Expressed Disclaimer: Please know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand's philosophy visit: aynrand.org.