Are you overly-sensitive to images of cruelty?

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I know I am. I was watching "Henry...potrait of a serial killer" last night. The movie is loosely based on the serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole. As always after seeing images of such monstrous sadism, I am actually traumatized today. I was unable to fall asleep until 5:00am this morning and I just can't get it out of my mind. Now ofcourse the obvious question is; "then why do watch things like this if they bother you so much"? It is a dichotomy between being utterly sickened by the cruelty of some people and being fascinated by it. I am just desperate to understand why some people are so sadistic. I know enough about psychology and in our times at least, there are plenty of plausible explantions
within the boundaries of nature and nurture. Nevertheless, all the materialistic and derministic explantions in the world just serve to generate more questions in my mind. Assuming they are valid, it would suggest something about the fundamental nature of reality. It would suggest that we are nothing more than products of dead, mechanistic, non-conscious forces that neither know nor care anything about suffering, injustice, etc...It would suggest that there are no rewards for behavior most of us call "good" and no punishments for behavior most of us see as "evil". I am not naive about any of this. From all the scientific evidence at our disposal as well as my own observations over the years, existence just seems objectively meaningless. I adopted an existential outlook on life a long time ago...but I must admit that it's been very little comfort to me overall. I feel that there MUST be something *more* to existence than the chaotic and pointless by-products of physics-chemistry-biology. All the same, I have NEVER heard a remotely acceptable "immaterial" answer for the problems of "evil" and suffering and believe me....i've looked under EVERY philosophical, spiritual and mystical nook and cranny. So until some alternate answers are forthcoming from "elsewhere" (whatever the nature of some potential "elsewhere" may be) I feel the only rational, albeit unpleasant, answers emanate from the perspectives of scientific materialism and hard determinism.


In the interest of full disclosure...I have been diagnosed with NLD...not Asperger's or anything else *officially* on the spec. My own personal life is troubling enough these days and I realize it's pointless to make matters worse by getting upset over the unspeakable horrors of existence which I can obviously do little or nothing to change. But like some unconsciously masochistic fool or something....I am still compelled to cry out for answers to questions that have eluded humankind since it's inception. If all this misery, hatred, cruelty, suffering and injustice is simply the unavoidable result of a non-conscious cosmos, why on earth do we continue to justify it? Why don't we just stop procreating and allow the human species to become extinct? To my mind, it would seem like the most merciful thing to do. When pondering both the wreckage of history and the present, I must ask if this is truly the best we can do as a species. If so, i'm afraid I feel that our best just isn't good enough.


Eh well....sorry....I know i'm just babbling right now. I am so depressed, anxious, confused, etc....about everything right now. I feel like this inexpressible anguish has cost me 30 IQ points. My mind seems like an infinite whirlwind of disconnected thoughts, images, emotions and focusing on any one idea seems impossible at this time.

Basically.... i'm just wondering how many of you feel literally traumatized by the horrors in life which do not affect you personally and which you can do nothing about.

Sadly...nature doesn't seem much less cruel than human beings. Okay...we can forgive nature on the grounds that it "knoweth not" what it does.

Call me crazy....but this hardly seems like cause for celebration to me.

But other people aren't you. I could equally say that you don't have the right to not care but I don't.

No "right"?

What exactly is the average individual supposed to do to prevent serial killers (and other such fiends) from commiting their vile acts?

Even those in law enforcement and the forensic sciences haven't been able to do so.

But other people aren't you. I could equally say that you don't have the right to not care but I don't.