What Moors murderer Ian Brady teaches us about human nature

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired prison-doctor and psychiatrist. When Moors murderer Ian Brady wrote a book The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and its Analysis, by the “Moors Murderer” Dalrymple was invited to review it for The Sunday Telegraph. The title of the review was ‘Inside the mind of a moral monster’ and in it Dalrymple offers an insight into what ‘moral monsters’ reveal about human nature:

‘I have noticed in the prison in which I work that the more conscienceless the prisoner with regard to his victims, the more prickly he is about wrongs he believes to have been done to him, however slight or trivial they might be.  A man who won’t hesitate to stab a complete stranger if he feels like it, will call down anathema on the world if his tabacco ration arrives but 10 minutes late.

And if it were not for the fact that Brady came to his conclusions by torture and killing rather than by reading Derrida and Foucault, he could have found a post in any contemporary university department of literature: ‘Legalities, moralities and ethics are simply questions of geography, passing modes of fashion and taste, shaped and dictated by the prevailing ruling class of whatever country one happens to be in at a certain time.’

It is sometimes said that a psychopath is someone with no moral sense.  This is not quite accurate.  Even as thoroughgoing a psychopath as Brady sometimes lets slip an almost normal moral judgement that threatens to undermine his stance as a man of iron realism, amoralism and relativism.

Neither is it true that psychopaths such as Brady are unable to think in moral categories.  Indeed, his denunciation of almost everyone around him pollutes with such moral categories as corruption and hypocrisy.  He presents himself as the only honest man he knows.’

As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans chapter 2:

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else…you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.

For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. ¹⁴ (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. ¹⁵ They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them).