Jump to content
The Education Forum

Industrialization and the serial killer


Guest Stephen Turner

Recommended Posts

Guest Stephen Turner

OUTSIDE ENVIRONMENT.

Anonymity, Loss of ritual, Urban alienation, Availability of victims.

INSIDE ENVIRONMENT.

PSYCOPATHIC REACTION, Low self esteem, Lack of empathy, Emotionally flat, Loss of ego boundries, Alcohol/Drug abuse.

PSYCHOTIC REACTION, Pressure of thought, Delusional features,Depersonalization, Emotional release, Need for control,

BACKGROUND.

Childhood abuse, physical and psychological, Domineering Mother, weak or abscent Father, or bullying Father (Alcohol abuse) and abused Mother,

CHARACTERISTICS, Withdrawl from peers, nocturnal enuresis, periodic arson, Animal mutilation, self mutilation, Witdrawal from reality. Increase in aggresive behaviour particulaly towards Women, Ritualised, obsessive/compulsive behaviour.

THE RISE OF INDUSTRILIZATION.

The rise and spread of industrialization, with ever dencer,alienated urban life, is the breeding ground of the serial killer. No such phenomina existed, or indeed could exist in a society based on small, personalised agrarian communities, such as were the norm prior to the land clearences of the 17th and 18th Centuries. The serial killer is the living embodyment of modern Capiltalist society, where, commodification and personal satisfaction are everything. This environment breeds Alienated, psycopathic individuals like a Petri dish breeds culture. Another important factor is the loss of high ritual in modern society, the gradual fading of organised Religion, with its rituals, structure,conformity, and beliefe in an after- life and a redeeming Godhead has left a hugh void in our existance, that the mere purchase of consumer goods cannot fill. This is the milieu of the modern serial killer, and here that we find the Grand-Daddy of them all JTR.

Jack was a born and bred City boy. He had an unhappy childhood, witn parental alcohol abuse, leading to physical-mental-sexual abuse, it is also possible that a form of religious mania played a part in his up-bringing. This type of parental behaviour towards a child leads to feelings of low self esteem and at the same time an all consuming rage, these feelings cannot, of course be displayed towards the abusive parent but are transfered onto a substitute figure, leading to inapropriate warped relationships,and the development of a violent fantasy life. It is this dislocation of Self-Environment-Spirit where the wild things grow.

Any Psychologist will tell you, if you change the external environment, you change the internal environment. The comming of the machine, the forced land clearances to provide the factory fodder needed, and the change from personalised,agrarian living, to impersonal Urban doesnt just alter the physical landscape it alters the mental one as well, industrialization is Jacks midwife, murder changes from recognie reasons to reasons that are wholly alien, Jack murders like a machine, and with a machines concience. "Though this be madness, yet there be method in it" Hamlet......

Edited by Stephen Turner
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Stephen

Yes Jack the Ripper might have been a city boy, subject to the urban alienation we see today, and he might also have been the subject of some sort of religious mania in his household, but of course we can't be sure that either possibility was so. The scenarios are good possibilities. He would not have been a city man of course if he was, say, a Malay seaman, a Red Indian from William F. Cody's Wild West Show, or a Zulu warrior, each of which have been mentioned as outside possibilities. Although even in those instances some argument might be made that it could have been the vices and wildness of the city that drove them to do what they did. One thing to bear in mind though is that the atrocities that shocked and scandalized "civilized" London in 1888 would not have seemed so shocking in another place and another time.

Best regards

Chris George

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Stephen Turner

Chris, that phrase probably should have read "IMO Jack was a city boy born and bred." Although I believe much evidence points in this direction. His seeming familiarity with the back streets of the East End being one.

As an historian do you concur with me that the phenomina of "serial killing," only began in earnest with the forced urbanization of large swaiths of the population. Your expert opinion would be much appreciated. Steve.

Edited by Stephen Turner
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chris, that phrase probably should have read "IMO Jack was a city boy born and bred." Although I believe much evidence points in this direction. His seeming familiarity with the back streets of the East End being one.

As an historian do you concur with me that the phenomina of "serial killing," only began in earnest with the forced urbanization of large swaiths of the population. Your expert opinion would be much appreciated.  Steve.

Hi Stephen

Yes on a general basis I would agree that the phenomenon of the serial killer has arisen concordant with the rise of urbanization and modernization, with its concomitant alienation from society.

Jack the Ripper though of course was not the first such serial killer, just the one that got the most attention due to the audacity of his crimes and the fact that they took place on the open streets of a city that arguably was then the top capital of the world.

In July 2004, we did report in Ripperologist 54, about a new novel, Bushwhackers by Steven Philip Jones about Felipe Espinoza, a Colorado serial killer who bushwacked and mutilated twenty-six men in 1863, a quarter century before Jack the Ripper's 1888 rampage. In that those murders took place on the American frontier, they are in contrast to Jack's urban crimes.

I do agree that local knowledge appears to have been displayed by the killer in Whitechapel. His ability to be able to escape clean away each time would seem to show he had good knowledge of the streets and alleys of the East End, which probably indicates he was a local man.

All my best

Chris

Edited by Christopher T. George
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Stephen Turner

Thanks Chris,

Interesting information about Espinoza,I must confess to being ignorant of this case. (although I am sure I have that copy of the Ripperologist :) )

Another case that happens at almost the same time as JTR, is that of HH Holmes the Englewood Murderer,of the infamous "Murder Castle" This was,if memory serves, 1893, and the number of his victims has never been determined. Most of the murders were linked to insurance scams,but the ways in which he dispatched his victims illistrate that these were no mere financial crimes. I shall start a seperate thread on this subject as there is to much information for here.

Steve.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...
Guest Stephen Turner

BUMP. Some good thoughts for newcomers to the case on the "genesis" of the phenomina known as serial killing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...