Welcome to a Society Run by Serial Killers

I am fascinated by serial killers.

This is mostly because I cannot help but wonder how much they may be simply reflections of our society in general. In the same way "believers" like to imagine they are made in the image and likeness of a benevolent God,  in other words, I wonder if serial killers are really made in the true image and likeness of ourselves and our society.

By the time we reach the age 18, for example, American children will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence, according to a 1998 study done by American Psychiatric Association. This does not include the amount of violence found in video games, by the way, which increasingly blur the line between what is virtual and what is real. Along those same lines, then, the APA also noted that “many younger children cannot discriminate between what they see (on television) and what is real."  And if you wander into any given Church on Sunday, you'll see throngs of highly educated adults who come together to celebrate the virtue of having the very same inability.

To all of these acts of violence and our inability to clearly distinguish the difference between facts and fiction, add our ubiquitous addiction to violence in our entertainment, the fact that our economy runs more on profiting from war and imprisonment far more than anything else; the fact that our political system runs on every kind of "terror" politicians can design for us; and  that our religious systems all exploit "evil" everywhere as the reason each of us must worship the brand of "God" only they can provide. 

The flip side of this coin, of course, is that we have created social arrangements that only "enrich" us  financially, by turning everything in the world, and even the universe, into a commodity, including ourselves. This is why we can assign a cost to everything, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde, but the value of nothing.The politician, the slave owner, the king, the capitalist and the serial killer, all equally view other human beings not as having as much value as themselves, but merely as their property, with which they can do whatever they wish. And all those who subscribe to such arraignments, only give their tacit approval of such valuations.  

There are kings who have marched their own soldiers off of a cliff like so many lemmings, as much for their own amusement as to verify the loyalty and obedience of all those they dispatched to the grave. And like so many martyrs who ever sought to prove their love of God by willingly feeding themselves to lions, so the soldiers honor their oath to a maniac to prove they are worthy of their God. 

Being well aware of this fact, politicians all send men and boys everywhere into the meat grinder of one war after another, with all of the ease of sacrificing pawns in a game of chess. The slave owner and the capitalist, on the other hand, rape their employees of their humanity in their perennial pursuit of enriching themselves, possessed as they are with an incurable addiction for profit that makes any amount of collective human misery well worth the price. And because we are all so thankful for the scraps from their table, which "trickle down" to us like manna from a rich man's heaven, we count ourselves lucky to prove our devotion to those who would sacrifice us all on a whim.  

Religion promises us all that its incantations and ever more complicated theological perspectives, no matter how blatantly contradictory they may appear to all ideas of virtue or moral absolutism, are the only thing that can override these underlying evil yet altogether latent addictions to money, power, and greed, but only if everyone has enough "faith" that it can do so. (That this is like assuring people the Titanic will stay afloat if they have enough 'faith' it will, is simply ignored.) 

And if there are any remnants of such evils left in the world, naturally enough, then it can only be because of all those who have failed to believe sufficiently enough.  The man who was healed by simply touching Christ, priests will tell you, had enough "faith" to move a mountain, while all of the world's problems today are the result of all those who haven't enough of the same kind of faith.  And since hell awaits all those who have failed to try and try again, despite the Bible assuring us all that religions best efforts in the world are all destined from the beginning of time too culminate in unavoidable failure, we have no choice but to keep on "believing" anyway.