answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.”3
Now let’s turn to our inner selves. Have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don’t like? In separate studies, the psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss have posed this question to a demographic that is known to have exceptionally low rates of violence—university students—and were stunned at the outcome.4 Between 70 and 90 percent of the men, and between 50 and 80 percent of the women, admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the preceding year. When I described these studies in a lecture, a student shouted, “Yeah, and the others are lying!” At the very least, they may sympathize with Clarence Darrow when he said, “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
The motives for imaginary homicides overlap with those on police blotters: a lover’s quarrel, a response to a threat, vengeance for an act of humiliation or betrayal, and family conflict, proportionally more often with stepparents than with biological parents. Often the reveries are played out before the mind’s eye in theatrical detail, like the jealous revenge fantasy entertained by Rex Harrison while conducting a symphony orchestra in Unfaithfully Yours. One young man in Buss’s survey estimated that he came “eighty percent of the way” toward killing a former friend who had lied to the man’s fiancée that he had been unfaithful to her and then made a move on the fiancée himself:First, I would break every bone in his body, starting with his fingers and toes, slowly making my way to larger ones. Then I would puncture his lungs and maybe a few other organs. Basically give him as much pain as possible before killing him.5
A woman said she had gone 60 percent of the way toward killing an exboyfriend who wanted to get back together and had threatened to send a video of the two of them having sex to her new boyfriend and her fellow students:I actually did this. I invited him over for dinner. And as he was in the kitchen, looking stupid peeling the carrots to make a salad, I came to him laughing, gently, so he wouldn’t suspect anything. I thought about grabbing a knife quickly and stabbing him in the chest repeatedly until he was dead. I actually did the first thing, but he saw my intentions, and ran away.
Many actual homicides are preceded by lengthy ruminations just like this. The small number of premeditated murders that are actually carried out must be the cusp of a colossal iceberg of homicidal desires submerged in a sea of inhibitions. As the forensic psychiatrist Robert Simon put it in a book title (paraphrasing Freud paraphrasing Plato), Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream.
Even people who don’t daydream about killing get intense pleasure from vicarious experiences of doing it or seeing it done. People spend large amounts of their time and income immersing themselves in any of a number of genres of bloody virtual reality: Bible stories, Homeric sagas, martyrologies, portrayals of hell, hero myths, Gilgamesh, Greek tragedies, Beowulf, the Bayeux Tapestry, Shakespearean dramas, Grimm’s fairy tales, Punch and Judy, opera, murder mysteries, penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, dime novels, Grand Guignol, murder ballads, films noirs, Westerns, horror comics, superhero comics, the Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry, the Road Runner, video games, and movies starring a certain ex-governor of California. In Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, the literary scholar Harold Schechter shows that today’s splatter films are mild stuff compared to the simulated torture and mutilation that have titillated audiences for centuries. Long before computer-generated imagery, theater directors would apply their ingenuity to grisly special effects, such as “phony heads that could be decapitated from dummies and impaled on pikes; fake skin that could be flayed from an actor’s torso; concealed bladders filled with animal blood that could produce a satisfying spurt of gore when punctured.”6
The vast mismatch between the number of violent acts that run through people’s imaginations and the number they carry out in the world tells us something about the design of the mind. Statistics on violence underestimate the importance of violence in the human condition. The human brain runs on the Latin adage “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Even in peaceable societies, people are fascinated by the logic of bluff and threat, the psychology of alliance and betrayal,