Life and Death in Taiwan: Humans, Human Monsters and Those Who Kill the Monsters

Post date: Mar 28, 2016 5:45:30 AM

HSIEH Yu-wei

College of Law, National Taiwan University

translated by Wan-hsiang Hsu

As a Japanese common saying goes, “There is no bad person in the world,” meaning that people may seem horrible, but they are kind-hearted by nature. This common saying is praising the bright side of human nature. Celebrated Japanese screenwriter Hashida Sugako changed this saying into “Wataru Seken wa Oni Bakari (There are all but bad people in the world),” which became the title of a popular TV drama series that resonates with people. This, of course, is not a horror drama, but it tells the story of friendliness and alienation in the world in a jocular and whining tone. Regardless of the bright or dark side of human nature, or the commonplace of distinguishing good people from bad people, it seems that “there is neither absolute good nor absolute evil in people.” However, whenever appalling crimes happen, the public always eagerly label the criminals as “human monsters” as if they look human, but they are devils inside because only devils are capable of committing absolutely evil crime. Since human monsters are “inhuman,” they become the ones that everyone says should be killed. After all, if the ones being killed are not humans, but human monsters, then killing them is not homicide. It is exorcism, and it seems only natural to completely eradicate all evils.

After the mass stabbing spree happened at the Taipei Metro station this May, sensational headlines depicted the suspected attacker Cheng Chieh as a “human monster,” which echoes with what I mentioned earlier. The mass stabbing spree at Taipei Metro sent shock waves to Taiwan’s society and triggered the deepest fear of victimization in the public. It is particularly frightening when it hits us that a person who looks just like us, speaks the language with the same accent, and lives in the same country as we do is in fact a cold-blooded human monster. It is possible that the stranger standing next to me at this very moment can be the next Cheng Chieh, and I am very likely to be the victim of the next random stabbing spree. This fear of victimization breeds the rare collective fear and spurs the public to demand a speedy trial and execution. At this point, the “death penalty” becomes the common language in Taiwan, and ironically, it also becomes the “consciousness of belonging” and “common value” that shape the community.

In contrast, amidst the condemnation, some people call for the understanding of the cause of crime. They believe that we need a comprehensive analysis of the offender’s formation of personality, mental state, and their experiences as they grow up, and we should adjust the safety net in family, school, and society in order to prevent the tragedy from happening again. Paradoxically, criminals are considered as human monsters exactly because their humanity dies out, making their motive and behavior incomprehensible to common people. Why are we able to or why do we want to understand the “incomprehensible cause of crime” from multidisciplinary perspectives, including in psychiatry, psychology, and sociology? What values do these attempts bring, and what can we learn from them?

Let’s start with the etiology of the random mass murder. According to the report, there have been five random killings in the past five years. Among the five random killings, the ones people paid the most attention to are the Huang Fu-kang homicide in 2009, the Zeng Wenqin homicide in 2012 (or commonly known as throat-cutting case in the Tom's World), and the Cheng Chieh homicide in 2014. A random killing is, as the name suggests, killing someone randomly without differentiating between objects, so the motive of killing is not a dispute over romantic relationship and money or revenge on a particular object. Criminal psychopathology defines “mass murder” as “intentionally murdering five or more persons during an event and resulting in three or more deaths.” Based on this definition, only the Cheng Chieh case is likely to be counted as a mass murder. However, we have to note that the suspect’s homicidal intent needs to be affirmed through trials in this case in order to know the number of people he intended to kill in the first place. According to research, many suspected murderer killed “many” people, which resulted in multiple deaths, but when committing murder, they did not necessarily hold a clear homicidal intent towards every victim, but they might only wish to harm them. As a result, we have to factor in the circumstances when crimes were committed and the standoff between the suspected murderer and victims etc. in order to get the full picture. Cheng Chieh’s case is no exception.

Regardless of the theoretical definition, this kind of incident has a significant impact because of the “severity of casualties” and “incomprehensibility of motive,” especially the latter. The public find it difficult to understand why the suspects wanted to kill the people they had never met before. In sentencing, the incomprehensibility of motive is often linked to the actor’s negative personality such as “brutal,” “lack of humanity,” and “cruel,” which often become the sentencing factors for the death penalty. For example, during the trial of the Akihabara Massacre, which happened in Japan in 2008, the prosecutor sought the death penalty and told the court that “this is a ferocious crime rarely seen in criminal history. This is the Devil’s deed that completely eradicates humanity.” The courts of first and second instance convicted the suspect based on the evidence provided by the prosecutor and sentenced him to death. From this example, we learn that the “incomprehensibility of motive” of a random killing incident often disqualifies the suspect from being a human, which, combines with the depiction of the suspect as a devil, become the determining factor of imposing the death penalty. Paradoxically, on the one hand, the offender is shaped as a “human monster,” while on the other hand, the offender is considered to have full capacity when imposing a sentence (otherwise the death penalty cannot be applied). What exactly cause these “humans” with full capacity and without any mental disorder to become “human monsters”? I think all of you can’t help but ask the same question.

After the Cheng Chieh stabbing spree, the public compared it with the Akihabara Massacre. Japan’s society conducted a comprehensive analysis of the suspect’s life, parent-child relationship, socioeconomic status, work environment, and the process of committing that crime, and critics often sympathized with the suspect’s life experience and the situation he was in. In neo-liberalism, regular employees and dispatched workers are classified into two groups, which create a new society with class antagonism. Once a person is categorized as a loser, one negative thing leads to another, which makes it impossible for him/her to turn the tables. The suspect was isolated and socially marginalized. The attempt to revenge on the “winners” directly or indirectly led to that tragedy. To put it simply, the causal inference is as follows: neo-liberal policies lead to a widening gap between the rich and the poor, which leads to increasing number of young workers who fail to be regular employees, which leads to the inhuman treatment of dispatched workers in companies, which leads to desperation resulting from isolation, which leads to the loss of rational judgment, which leads to random killings.

Nevertheless, this line of argument, which discusses the cause of crime from family background and social structure, may be beneficial to those who seek institutional reforms because the public can more or less identify with the problematic background that the suspect is from. However, it does not lessen the amount of responsibility that the public think the suspect should shoulder, which is different from what is expected. Even those who adopt the aforementioned casual inference still maintain that the suspect is “acting on his/her free will,” and that the actor should pay full criminal liability. This results in an intractable problem because when explaining the remote cause of the crime, the offenders are “human figures shaped by the environment” (determinism), whereas when explaining the proximate cause, they are the “moral subjects with self-determination and self-responsibility” (indeterminism). When explaining the motive of their behavior, they become “devils without any humanity,” which is used to establish the legitimacy of imposing the death penalty. I think when Cheng Chieh faces trials and verdict in the future, the problem of these three different roles changing arbitrarily is bound to happen.

Basically, if we have a preliminary understanding of “constructive responsibility,” it’s not difficult to understand that free will is a concept constructed in order for the liability scheme to operate effectively in modern law. Psychologist Toshiaki Kozakai from The University of Paris VIII accurately points out that in order to understand the negative emotion in society after the incident and for the subject to be “responsible” for the result, we have to fabricate the logic that “free will leads to liability.” By doing so, naturally we can understand the arbitrary change among three different images and the purpose of it. However, the thinking should not end here. We should think further on how to view the “incomprehensibility of motive” in random homicide. If we try to comprehend the incomprehensible, what lessons can we learn from it?

In her book entitled “Musabetsu satsujin no seishin bunseki (Psychoanalysis of Random Killings)” published in 2009, Japanese psychiatrist Tamami Katada took the Akihabara Massacre as an opportunity and closely reviewed the random killings in Japan in recent years and compared their similarities and differences. The cases she reviewed include the Ikebukuro Random Killing, the Shimonoseki Random Killing, and the Osaka School Massacre. She categorized the Akihabara Massacre, the Ikebukuro Random killing, and the Shimonoseki Random Killing as “revenge on the society as a whole,” whereas the Osaka School Massacre was categorized as “revenge on a particular group.” She dug deeper and looked into the psychopathology of these cases and believed that the personality that “refuses to mature,” permeating the society, was the structural factor behind these cases that should not be ignored. The so-called “refusing-to-mature” personality means, on the one hand, one is unable to accept oneself in reality, while on the other hand, one is unable to fully accept the “loss of the object (whom one feels attached to).” The so-called “object” here refers to someone whom a person are emotionally attached to, including in romantic relationship, kinship, friendship etc. This personality that refuses to mature increases one’s narcissistic tendency and makes external attribution more likely. Simply put, Tamami Katada points out the pathology of random mass murder: a strong narcissistic tendency and the fragility in the face of a lost object.

Let’s not discuss if the psychoanalysis mentioned above is oversimplified. Katada clearly points out that it is dangerous to attribute random killings to “victims of class society.” However, we cannot neglect the influence social pathology has on individual pathology. When we look into social pathology and individual pathology, inevitably we have to confront the structural factors in society. We can say that a random killing is like a comic that mocks current affairs, depicting our faces at a loss when facing the “lost object.” It is also like a mirror, which harshly and directly reflects our strong narcissism.

The harder we try to understand the incomprehensible cause of crime, the more we realize that there is only a fine line between human and non-human (human monster). How easy it is to degrade oneself to non-human, and how difficult it is to secure humanity, the prerequisite to be a human. This reminds us of the description technique in Noh play Dojoji. In the Noh play, after the protagonist Kiyohime is betrayed by Anchin, she is so furious that she turns into a serpent and burns Anchin, who hides in the bell of the temple, alive as a human figure. When describing how Kiyohime transforms into a serpent, without any computer animation, it can have such a shocking impact only by using flute, drum, wailing, and the performer’s change of posture. It turns out that in the blink of an eye, the person standing in front of you is no longer a human anymore. While you’re gazing at the non-human, you’re also gazing at yourself. Perhaps only art and literary works make it possible for us to understand the complexity of humanity and inhumanity, which is hard to explain or describe with rationality.

Unfortunately, it is difficult for the trial system upheld by modern law to demonstrate this kind of humanity and inhumanity reflection. In the current sentencing of the death penalty, the incomprehensibility resolves the problem of “impossibility to be indoctrinated” because comprehensibility is the prerequisite for indoctrination. If something cannot be understood, then it cannot be indoctrinated or corrected. The psychoanalysis of the random killing cases mentioned above seems to clarify the last mile of incomprehensibility in humanity. However, in analyzing the story, we still comprehend it from our points of view and try to come up with a “reasonable explanation” for the incomprehensible story as an afterthought. This is acknowledging the incomprehensibility residing in the depth of human nature. If we are able to realize this, then perhaps we can have new enlightenment.

After all, when everyone says he/she should be killed, it merely exiles the socially marginalized from the community. The “inhumanity” resulting from eradication and banishment is fed back and becomes what maintains the “humanity” that keeps the community alive. This is the so-called “humanity shaping mechanism.” The universal value of humanity is how community members develop their consciousness of belonging. However, we know very well that if we build ourselves on the territoriality such as the “consciousness of belonging” and “common value,” then community members will inevitably exclude those who are different from them in order to survive together (i.e. symbiosis). If we want to construct a community that does not exclude those who are different us, we have to overcome the restraint of territoriality and membership. Are we able to solve the community aporia mentioned above and think in line with the community in (post) modern society? Since the 1980s, Western modern thinkers started from this problematic and have been pondering over all kinds of possibilities. Jean-Luc Nancy’s “the inoperative community,” lphonso Lingis’s “the community of those who have nothing in common” demonstrate the faint possibility of a non-exclusive society. The community in the making does not yet have a concrete shape, but we still have to assuredly pursue the possibility of change. Here, perhaps we can draw on Lingis’s explanation of “the other community” to have a new way of thinking. That is, get rid of the existing imagination of “humanity,” cultivate the imagination of “possibility to be victimized (potential victim),” “possibility to victimize (potential victimizer),” and the imagination of all kind of social suffering. Stop at the ultimate incomprehensible part, and acknowledge without any reserve or purpose the part at the depth of our heart which cannot be described with words, explained with rationality, or simplified with communication.

Lastly, let’s bring focus back to the death penalty. Legal psychology study finds that in sentencing, for common people and judges alike, “retributive instinct” often comes before rational judgment. Of course, the so-called “retributive” here is in fact a mixed of socio-psychological emotions and contents difficult to be self-justified with rational discourse. However, as the life experiences of the offender become more concrete and visualized and display vividly in front of us—in other words, as the object receiving the penalty becomes clearer and turns into a “live person”—our legal system also needs to have an appropriate “correction mechanism,” which widens the field of vision dominated by the “retributive instinct.” If we can try our best to understand the suspect’ cause of crime during trials, perhaps we can better understand how fine the line is between human and human monster, and we are able to acknowledge the incomprehensible part of humanity without any reserve.

As people so urgently try to sentence the “devils without any humanity” to death, it is my hope that this speech enables you to rethink about the “line between human and human monster” and “how humans kill human monsters.” Simply put, perhaps what we can do is not imposing exclusive penalty again and again and label people as monsters. We should not enter the cycle of humanity shaping, using transcendent concepts such as humanity and rationality to ensure the boundary and territoriality of the community. Instead, we should move from an exclusive society to an inclusive community. We should return to the original concept of a community: cut the wound together, get infected, and work together to find a way to adapt to and deal with the social crises.

原文發表於2014.12.6 主題演講〈鬼島生與死：人、人魔、殺人魔 (Life and Death in Taiwan: Humans, Human Monsters and Those Who Kill the Monsters)〉《「鬼島」生與死：2014台灣國際廢死研討會 International Conference Against the Death Penalty: Life and Death in Taiwan》於台灣大學法律學院