We will always be obsessed by violence

Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy, I’m sure you’ve
heard of at least one of these names, they’re all names of killers, but why would we know them.
I’ll be honest “we will always be obsessed by violence” is quite a cynical statement and perhaps a bit
nihilistic. But is it true? For most of us violence is something of the past or something far away. Being
obsessed by violence sounds scary, I mean that is something a socio or psychopath would do. We’re
not capable of things like that, right? But that is a very optimistic view on human nature, a quite
dangerous view. Violence surrounds us more than you think. Action, thriller, and horror movies are
very popular and so are news stories about murder and mayhem, but that’s only the tip of the
iceberg. For example, the most prolific serial killers are plastered in every newspaper and news show.
Or other media Richard Ramirez for example was a character in season nine of American Horror
story. Or take shows like Criminal Minds, NCIS, the CSIs and Castle, most of those shows are popular
enough to have over 10 seasons and that is something that doesn’t happen often. In the Netherlands
we have three tv-channels broadcasting crime and true crime shows 24/7, again that doesn’t just
happen. But something that’s a bit more trivial, every time a car accident happens people go look at
the accident. Something else, public executions have existed for almost 4000 years and this is as far
as we know, because this was written down by the Chinese. In 16 th century England, they used to
burn people, because they were thought to be witches. Public executions were common, but why
would we watch something like that. Because in that situation we can take the moral high ground,
we haven’t done anything so when someone gets punished or hurt we can feel better about
ourselves. We in the western world don’t have public executions anymore, but we can see that
behaviour reflected into how we watch horror movies, most people laugh when the stupid one dies.
Why? Because we’re at least smarter than they are. It all boils down to someone dies or gets hurt
because they weren’t good enough and you don’t die or get hurt so you’re better than them. A great
example of the craze about public executions is the execution of Eugen Weidmann. Weidmann a
German criminal who kidnapped rich tourists in Paris, was executed on June 17 th, 1939. This was
France’s last public execution and the reason for this was the crowd present at the execution.
Weidmann was executed by guillotine and the crowd had brought cloths and handkerchiefs to dab
up Weidmann’s blood. This disturbing event made the French president decide to prohibit public
executions. All this happened less than a hundred years ago, can you truly say that we as a society
have changed enough for this to not happen again? If your answer is yes, you should think more
about human nature.
Look, I am a big horror, crime, true crime and detective fan myself and I don’t deny that the things I
watch are violent and my point isn’t that we shouldn’t do or watch anything that has to do with
violence. My point is that we should recognize the fact we’re obsessed by it and watch out for that.
Because you don’t know what someone is capable of.