In The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill by David M. Buss, he tries to decipher and explain the inner workings of the mind and what pushes us over the edge to kill. Buss starts off by talking about how the mind has evolved over the centuries, and how that has been buried into our subconscious and only comes out when we are in a dire situation. But we all don’t kill in dire situations, sometimes people kill for some unknown and unprovoked reason. Buss, in a thoughtful and informative way, is almost thinking out loud, explaining what he thinks is the cause of these seemingly unexplainable behaviors.
In psychology, there has been a debate that has been going on since the dawn of the subject, and that is the idea of Nature vs. Nurture. That is, when we have grown up, do we have our personality and our behaviors from nature-coming from our genes-, or do they come from how we are raised-did our parents take us to church when we were little? There have been countless studies and the results are still not clear. One test will show that we, without a doubt, are born how we are and there’s nothing to change that. Yet, another test will prove the exact opposite. I, along with a growing number of others, think that it’s a mixture of both.
Even from the title Why the Mind is Designed to Kill you can tell that this book is explaining that we are born the way we are. Which he goes in detail, talking about how in the past when there was constant war, raids, and other situations involving murder, people learned how to kill. Those who won passed on their genes; essentially Darwinism on killing. Of course, in our modern society, murder tolls a high cost, so it takes a lot to push someone over the edge, for them to tap into their inner killer. This is usually attained, as Buss explains, with love and a broken heart.
I don’t disagree with Buss and his argument, but I don’t necessarily agree either. As I said before, this is essentially a nature vs. nurture argument, which I believe it’s a little of both. I think we do have some sort of innate knowing of how to commit murder, since we typically only do once, so there’s no room for practice. Yet, in this day and age there is so many ways to view artificial murder: video games, the internet, movies, and television. All of these have showed murder, and many people are afraid it can taint minds, essentially brainwash them. I think the vast majority of people can differentiate between reality and fiction. It’s just those rare few that can’t-they’re the ones that go out and commit homicide, and they’re the ones that make headlines.
Overall, I enjoyed The Murderer Next Door; it was informative and managed to keep my attention without much effort, despite his constant lecturing tone. I had initially got the book to learn more about criminal profiling, but was disappointed to find only a few pages devoted to the topic. But the information Buss talks about through the rest of book ties in with my career choice, so it wasn’t a total loss.Yes, it all stemmed from the nature argument, but it's just one side of the coin, and it's better to be informed on everything and then come to an informed conclusion. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the fields of psychology or sociology, or police work even. It provides a better look into how the human mind works, and why the mind is designed to kill.
