Making Sense of Monsters

Jerry D. Kaifetz, Ph.D.

Americans everywhere are aghast at this summer’s spate of child abductions and murders. It is difficult for us as a nation rooted and steeped in moral principles to fathom the mindset of any person who has degenerated to the behavioral level we have seen in the recent abduction murders in California and Oregon. Our moral landscape has tilted and we are all walking about cocking our heads to try to restore the horizon and make sense of a world in moral chaos.

We have been systematically desensitized to evil by the shifting sands of moral relativism foisted upon us by liberal thinking academics and social architects. We have been indoctrinated by those who have not demonstrated the ability to distinguish between freedom and license, and for whom all human behavior falls on a purely arbitrary scale of right and wrong.

In order to bring this national picture into something resembling a discernable focus, we must enter the minds and lives of the perpetrators. Although it has been noted before, it bears repeating that one element that all of these moral degenerates have in common is an addiction to child pornography. If we would but for a moment make the effort to discard ourselves of our emotions and political ideologies, it is my firm belief that most of us can “walk the cat back” to the dark alley from which he emerged.

America’s moral climate has undergone significant change. What was unthinkable fifty years ago has become commonplace today. We have been systematically desensitized to evil by the shifting sands of moral relativism foisted upon us by liberal thinking academics and social architects. We have been indoctrinated by those who have not demonstrated the ability to distinguish between freedom and license, and for whom all human behavior falls on an purely arbitrary scale of right and wrong. We have allowed those who think this way to dominate our institutions of so-called higher learning, turning them in thought factories complete with thought-police, capable of mass producing only what is ejected from their molds. In so doing, we have discarded the principles of righteousness and decency that have charted the success of every civilization for the last four millennia. We are going the way of the Roman Empire, and what is most stunning, for many of the same reasons.

When a body of water becomes deeper, the bottom feeding fish no longer feed at the same depth; they still, however, feed on the bottom! When a culture redefines what is morally acceptable, those who live on the fringes or beyond the limits of those moral boundaries move accordingly. Since deviant behavior intrinsically does not satisfy, we must understand that there are no plateaus, no stable footing, no place of satisfaction there—only a slippery, downward slope whose end we may well have not yet imagined.

Ultimately, we may come to the inescapable conclusion that our culture is in a kind of reverse evolution. As we embody more and more the behavioral models that revolve primarily on the gratification of individual desires, and as we de-value such time-honored concepts as life, family, and innocence, it should be obvious that what defines our very humanity is slipping from us and that our behavior seems to resemble more and more what we have observed through the lenses of film makers on the African Savannah.

The question is, is this the way we want to go? Are organizations such as the A.C.L.U. helping or hurting our society? Can any ally of the pornographic industry retain an element of virtue, or is the blood of more and more innocent children too high a price to pay for what they would call “freedom of expression?” Is theirs the correct interpretation of the First Amendment, or could a moral anarchy resulting in a complete societal divorce from religious principles and tradition in fact be their goal? Can those professionals who seek to measure and quantify moral deviancy in clinical terms and consider that they have shed light on ghastly behavior by giving depravity a dispassionate name be truly helping anyone?

These are difficult questions. They do, however, become much easier if we will simply take one, small step. The next time you see a picture of a child victim—innocence slain by a monstrous predator—just put your child’s face on that photo. My guess is that this simple exercise will perhaps help you to understand what the little old lady in the back row of church last Sunday has understood all her life: terms like “first-amendment-rights,” “alternate lifestyle,” “nonjudgmental,” and on occasion even “tolerance and diversity” are often little more than clever euphemisms for what we used to call evil.