"The monster of Amstetten", the Austrian Josef Fritzl, was condemend to life in prison today. I could almost hear the clapping of the media followers... "Yes, burn the monster!"
Interestingly enough, this world needs monsters for the rest of us to "feel better about ourselves". Monsters are cruel, wicked and inhuman creatures. They display psycho-pathologies that sit at the extremes of the spectrum. They are "what we are not" or "what we fear to become". They need to be pointed at, taken out of the bunch, segregated, sentenced to death because they are poison, bad weed, malice, perversion.
Josef Fritzl did committ "serious crimes", those perfect capital sins, sweet desserts for a sensational media feast. Hungry photographers harrased him around the courthouse to capture his evil nature and reporters drooled over their computer keybords while narrating the list of human rights violated by the monster, the beast, the raper, slaver and murderer.
Why are we obssessed with such "creatures"? is it their uniqueness or their similutude to ourselves? Is it our fear of them or our fear of being like them? Our hunger of such details is almost pornographic... it generates excitment and sells quite well in the shock value, attention-grabbing market.
I have an idea. Monsters are clear examples of what "we shouldn't be". They are easy targets that remind our society what happens when we misbehave. They are warnings of how justice can implacably reach the violators, grab them and punish them. Monsters cause chaos, and we don't want chaos, we want order, we want good people, obedient people that behave, follow rules and orders, respect others... wackos and outsiders should be taken out of comission, caged... so we can exhibit them as samples of what has gone raw.
We often centre our attention on the weak and vulnerable, meaning the ones who have suffered the impact of "monsters". The monsters don't matter, they are monsters, and they have to be treated as such... their remorse is non-existent... remeber, they are monsters... And what about their mental health?... hmmm.. that's an excuse to let them go free... and be careful... they are dangerous!!! What about our social responsability in their acts? Well... there is no such thing, it is all about individual actions, we cannot take charges for what other people do...
When "mosnteres" arise we hardly ever take a look at ourselves... we don't look inwards, we search outwards... Hardly ever societies take resposability for the "success and the failure" of individuals, or try to understand differences, or consider the beast as much as the beauty... isn't that the paradox of such tale? That there may be the "haunted soul" of a human being behind those beast-like features? Beauties and Beasts form part of the Black and White world we love to believe we live in... but our societies also produce many grey offspring like the ones conceived from the incestous relationship between Fritzl and his daughter Elizabeth.
Austrians (and with them us all) may prefer to identify ourselves with the "victim" than with the agressor, because it sounds and feels better to be the tortured beauty than the raping monster.
Society: all the bridges that you burn may come back one day to haunt you!
