Selectivity
Extreme violence in individuals results from the interaction between psychological disorders and authoritarian symptoms, as we have already seen. Eugen Kogon, who spent several years in detention in Nazi camps, made in 1947 the following distinction: “The men who volunteered for Hitler's elite guards were almost without exception of a type in whom a primitive psychological mechanism was at work. Their minds were enclosed by a hard shell consisting of a few sharply fixed, dogmatic, simplified concepts, underneath which lurked a flood of inchoate emotionalism. The only form of soul-searching to which they submitted amounted to no more than a checkup as to whether the direction of their emotions actually corresponded to the prescribed SS goals.” (Kogon, 2006, p. 283).
This excerpt shows with clarity the crux, and maybe even the secret, of extreme violence: selectivity, which shapes the link between an aggressor's psychological disturbances and his authoritarian symptoms. The perpetrator of extreme violence structures his mind in such a way that his “flood of inchoate emotionalism” is released in violent outbursts, following pre-determined directions. Because the violence is carefully targeted at selected victims, the aggressor protects himself from his authoritarian symptoms, whilst at the same time keeping a stable, empathic relationship with the part of reality which is preserved from his attacks. He thus becomes a functional paranoiac, as FBI agent John Douglas put it (Douglas and Olshaker, 1999).