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Reason First: The Selfless Slayer-The Co-ed Killer

What leads a man to be a homicidal maniac?

By Skyler SaundersPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Some of Kemper’s victims

Incarcerated instructor to the blind, with an IQ of 145 (for whatever that's worth), convicted serial killer Edmund Kemper is an ideal inmate in the California Medical Center. We know his conviction for the murder of ten human beings led to his incarceration, and his preference for killing, mutilating, and engaging in post-mortem taboo sex acts with young girls and college women, led to his new name: “The Co-ed Killer." But what turned him into the kind of person who could do such horrible things?

Apparently there were signs early in his life that Kemper was not like other children; Aside from being intellectually gifted with his high IQ, he engaged in acts of violence and cruelty when he tortured and dismembered the family cats. At 15, he shot and killed his paternal grandparents.

But why did he behave this way? What differentiated Kemper from a gifted child curious about anatomy, perhaps even destined to become a world-famous surgeon? Why did he use his gifts to become a monster living in the same facility that once housed the late psychopathic killer Charles Manson, that is still home to the serial killer Herbert Mullin? How did someone allegedly so smart end up part of the “California trio” of serial killers, notorious for terrorizing the Golden State in the 1960’s?

Maybe the question isn’t why did he do these things, but why didn’t he stop himself, and resist his darker impulses? Why didn’t he consider his own rational self-interest? Had he considered his own life, selfishly, he would not have struck those people down. He would not have been relegated to the position of animal in a cage had he focused appropriate interest in his own long-term well-being.

Keeping in mind the precious lives he ended, he also destroyed his own life, literally and in spirit. His inability to empathize with other human beings, including and especially the women he butchered, made him incapable of using his formidable intellect to construct a life worth living. Perhaps that’s where it began, because without the ability to fully comprehend the boundaries separating his individual life from the lives of others, he was unable to separate rational from irrational self-interest in the first place.

Kemper could only have been elevated to the position of someone who could tell the difference between relating to and killing the women he encountered if he actually cared about his own future. His myopic vision for himself didn’t stop him from killing his pets or his grandparents, and the grisly murders of young women that followed serve as even more evidence of a man desperate to interact with life, but completely incapable of doing so without destroying it.

To show empathy for someone is not selfless or altruistic. If an individual remains in the context where appreciation for another person does not conflict with one’s own convictions, it is, in fact, rational selfishness to imagine how others feel, and to appreciate where we end, and they begin. Only when we see and respect such boundaries can we protect our own, and in so doing, serve our rational self-interest.

Despite Kemper’s obvious capacity to use his intellect to plan and carry out his crimes, read books for the blind, and achieve a high score on an IQ test, his lack of empathy made him incapable of living a moral life. His disrespect for others’ well-being made him a brute. He cast aside all ideas of maintaining healthy, rational, selfish relationships, and chose to be a barbarian instead. His acts reflect a diseased spirit that has no business interacting any living thing, even a fly.

As he wastes away in the hospital with other deranged individuals, he must always remember the hell he brought his victims and their families. It’s unlikely he cares though. Without the same empathy that could have stopped him from taking their lives in the first place, he won’t be able to care. What is evident is that he ought to be regarded as an ogre who deserves to rot away because he is responsible for such evil.

The only remedy for current and future evildoers of this magnitude to champion rational selfishness in our culture. We need to reframe Kemper’s actions as selfless, self-sacrificial, not just vicious. Until there is a world where individualism is championed, the fight must be for rational selfishness. Rational selfishness would have inhibited Kemper’s destructive impulses. It would have made it possible for him to anticipate the destruction, not just to his victims, but to his own life and soul. Only the rationally selfish fully comprehend what personal boundaries are, and that respect for those boundaries is what differentiates us from animals, and makes us human.

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Skyler Saunders

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