Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist and professor at Columbia University, is a reference in the knowledge of “the anatomy of evil. “He developed the scale of evil, a tool at once curious and surprising. This scale is useful for evaluating different degrees of aggression or psychopathic impulses, the darker side that man can develop.
Do some people define it?Scale of evil ?, as a descent to Dante’s hell, where each circle or bond defines a series of sins, acts whose perversity ranges from those who can be justified or even understood, even those who are simply incomprehensible.
“The world is not threatened by the wrong people, but by those who allow evil. “Albert Einstein?
First, it can be said that this tool, although developed by a renowned forensic psychiatrist, has no clinical value in judging a criminal, however, the doctor himself and much of the scientific community claim that, from a detailed analysis of more than 600 crimes, the method is rigorous enough to be used to better understand the origin of violence and the very key to evil.
Perhaps the skepticism of legal services and the forensic community about this extent of evil comes from its own origin. Between 2006 and 2008, the American channel Discovery broadcast a program called “Most Evil”. In this work, Dr. Stone analyzes the profiles of various murderers, serial killers, and psychopaths. He also reviewed hundreds of criminal cases, discussing his methods and motivations.
Also, through several interviews with countless criminals in prison, he was able to show the public how and how he articulated his famous classification tool.
The magnitude of perversity fascinated the public almost instantly, this scale contains 22 different levels where each type is analyzed by such important variables as education, genetics, neurological problems or environmental factors that can determine these acts of violence.
What happens if one man kills another in self-defense?What happens if a woman carefully contemplates murdering her aggressor, the person who abused her?Do we consider these acts to be reflections of “evil” Is there a “limit”?
As we have already said, there are facts that are justifiable, some that we can understand but not justify, and others that are incomprehensible, we know that we can all be violent and aggressive, but there are nuances, degrees, levels, trends and dynamics that Dr. Michael Stone himself has defined.
The crimes of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader and other murderers of the highest level (22) are so horrendous that most people don’t hesitate to call them “bad,” but?They all fall into the same category of ‘evil’.
So what sets us apart, what puts a barrier between what is conceivable and what is not, is our personality, which is part of our genetics, our education and the social context in which we grew up. These and other factors helped Michael Stone build his 22-level scale of evil.
Level 1 refers to self-defense, in this case there are no characteristics of psychopathy and Dr. Stone himself concluded that these people had no malice.
This second group includes all profiles that commit murders out of jealousy, those who move for revenge and who are also able to act as accomplices, to the point of collaborating on a violent act. We can also point out that while many of these people have narcissistic characteristics and a considerable level of aggression, they have no psychopathic characteristics, let’s look at the classification in detail.
There is a confusing, complex and chaotic limit where specialists have great difficulty diagnosing psychopathic profile, this third group includes all people, all violent behaviors, which, by themselves, do not always clearly show a psychopathic personality (although there are certain or temporary). characteristics that show it).
In this last degree of the scale of evil, we probably have Dante’s last circle, the most primitive and atavic evil. We are talking about psychopaths unable to feel remorse and for whom the purpose of murder is the pleasure of the violent act itself.
This journey to the depths of evil has many nuances, so in some cases it is not easy to classify a murderer or a violent person, we can more or less agree with that, we can recognize the usefulness of the scale of evil or simply see it as an attempt to classify evil with sensational statements.
What we can see on this scale, however, is that we increasingly understand the criminal mind and have better tools to recognize it, what we need right now is to provide more mechanisms for our society to prevent these acts of violence from happening. In most cases, they were born of social inequality, lack or uprooting.