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The following brief blog post at drhelen.blogspot.com dated Jan 6, 2011 got me to thinking if there was a relationship between the rise of nihilism in the 1960's and the rise of the phenomena of serial killers or not? The decline of the serial killer From Slate: Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by—the FBI doesn't keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman—but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, keeps a database of confirmed serial murderers starting in 1900. According to his count, based on newspaper clippings, books, and Web sources, there were only a dozen or so serial killers before 1960 in the United States. Then serial killings took off: There were 19 in the 1960s, 119 in the '70s, and 200 in the '80s. In the '90s, the number of cases dropped to 141. And the 2000s saw only 61 serial murderers. (Definitions of serial murder" vary, but Fox defines it as "a string of four or more homicides committed by one or a few perpetrators that spans a period of days, weeks, months, or even years." To avoid double-counting, he assigns killers to the decade in which they reached the midpoint of their careers.) |
I don't know if nihilism escalated in the 1960s or not. However, a number of other activities did escalate. For example, objectivism really expanded during that decade. Also, folk singing, antiwar demonstrating, and numerous other activities. I find it difficult to see any relationship between these movements and the evil individuals who commit serial murders. Put differently, the fact that one or more things occur synchronously does not prove any relationship.
The concept "serial killer" was rare before the 1950s, and no statistics were kept prior to that. I'd bet there was no such concept at all prior to Jack the Ripper. Yet it is easy to believe that sociopath serial killers existed throughout history. Thus, we really have no hard evidence to compare recent stats against.
From what I've read, most serial killers are motivated by pure sociopathy, an inability to view others as human beings, not philosophy. If they're nihilists, it's because that fits their psychology, rather than nihilism warping their psychology.