Monsters And The Moral Imagination Summary

Why is the element of fear always associated with monsters? Is it because these creatures are as touchable in real-life as they are in the movies? Alternatively, perhaps the human mind creates their monsters? Stephen T. Asma explores the human mind’s attempt to create monsters in his article “Monsters and the Moral Imagination” by stating that “monsters are a part of our attempt to envision the good life or at least the secure life” (63). Humans envision monsters based on emotional fears, personal life experiences, and psychical conceptions.
As most behaviors develop over time through evolution, Charles Darwin, one of the largest contributors to the science, studies primal fear to understand where from human horror stems. In one of Darwin’s experiments, he brought real and stuffed snakes to a

zoo and found that primates, especially the chimps, had an extreme fear of the animal, possibly resulting from a species or taxonomic recognition (Asma, Monsters on the Brain 943). Darwin theorizes that the chimps’ emotional response to fear gave them a primitive dread to the cold-blooded species, live or taxidermy. The well-renowned scientist of evolution relates this fearful response to humans and their “deep-seated monster fears” (Asma, Monsters on the Brain 943) when in contact with predators and environmental threats.
Even if a person never ends up in a harmful situation, they practice scenarios in their minds to combat their fear-created monsters.

In his article about monsters in the modern world, Chuck Klosterman claims that “we tend to classify [monsters] as personifications of what we fear” (41). This classification means that we associate monsters with real-life threats such as robbery, physical assault, and murder because our brains hardwire feelings of horror and fear to the emotional process of attack. According to Asma, a person’s nervous system, when put in the position of an emotional, personal attack, tends to follow three common physiological changes: fight, flight, or freeze (Monsters on the Brain 941). Loosely translated, the human body either attacks the threat in a dangerous situation, attempts to escape for the sake of personal survival, or in cases of extreme fright, is unable to move or think. Asma, in another article titled “Monsters and the Moral Imagination,” believes that for humans to attempt control over our fears of given surroundings and potential attacks, we create and imagine monsters to assess our moral abilities when forced into a threating situation

(63).
Many monster films insert social messages about relationship issues or politics to embed subtexts that humans can relate to subtly. For example, the Irish film director, screenwriter, and author, Neil Jordan, believes that the best monster movies tend to have realistic, humanized themes (224), so audience members can relate to the creatures. People usually do not link with the need to kill, but can connect and understand monsters that went through realistically similar life events, such as brutal wars, forced loss of possessions, witnessed death, and even personal sexual assault. Morten Hesse, an associate professor of behavioral sciences, calls this human connection to monster-like events “the narrative of the human monster,” which he explicitly describes to be “tales of evil, aggressive, selfish humans giv[ing] powerful structure to narratives of events. Telling the story of a crime, the emergence of a dictatorship, a failed marriage, or a failed business regarding a single evil individual,” (208). Therefore, when people behave outside of the social norm and perform evil acts, they earn the titles of the villain, the bad guy, and, of course, monster.
Well-renowned supernatural horror author, Stephen King, claims that “we’re all mentally ill” (16) and “insane, [our] sanity becomes a matter of degree” (17). Of course, he did not mean all humans should reasonably witness evil for sport or turn into heart-lashing murderers, but that sometimes our brains need a place to escape the strict guidelines of acceptable acts. Personal life experiences force a mold of how to behave, and King believes that we crave horror movies because we crave the freedom of the corrupted people (18). In addition to King’s statement, Jeffrey Cohen also believes that we desire monsters, rather than fear them, because they represent a mystical realm of mysterious possibility that consistently brings about serious thoughts on if something so charming and unique, actually exists. Both authors also agree that our exposure to monsters in the media should be temporary so that our minds will be able to find peace in “the world of comfort and light” (Cohen 191) after experiencing the jolts and panics associated with monsters in movies, books, and the real world.
Unfortunately, society members aware of Psychiatry minimize these human-created monsters’ wrongdoings for one simple psychological concept: psychopathy. Hesse, with his study emphasis on the diagnoses, treatment, and rehabilitation of personality disorders relating to psychopathology, explains the disorder to be a psychological concept of guiltless deceit, lack of consciousness, and habitual immoral behavior (207). King refers to this mental disturbance as an act of “anticivilization emotions” (18) since it is entirely opposite of socially accepted behaviors and tends to appear in people that create inhuman crimes. Although psychopathy is a highly dissocial and dysfunctional disorder, it often correlates humans with sociopathic, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders; explaining why many “monsters” in the real world tend to be people suffering from personality disorders, desensitizing them from the pain they cause and the fear that follows them.
According to Hesse, many movies portray psychopaths as “callous, calculating and aggressive individual[s], but such a character tends to only scratch the surface of the problems associated with psychopathy” (207). Hesse claims these psychopathic characters in movies tend to lack at least three core concepts of psychopathy (209), turning them into classic, unrealistic villains with a lack of purpose and motivation, rather than an individual with a genuine personality disorder. These ideas include conniving detailed plans replacing impulsivity, psychopathy linking to exceptionally high intelligence, and the inability to make a change in their personal emotion-based behaviors. So, although Hesse believes “[p]sychopaths in the movies are often portrayed as predatory monsters,” he also thinks that movies purposefully only represent the monster side of the mental disorder (211), completely ignoring the emotional aspects making these characters relevant to psychopathy-suffering humans with the appearance of an Earth-walking monster.
We associate monsters with the fears of real-life because of our evolutionary abilities to spot predatory or environmental threats. Psychopathy, the mental disorder that credits criminal thoughts and acts as well as the psychological phenomenon that subconsciously makes humans create a place in their mind for monster substitutions of feared real-life situations, are two explanations as to why people envision or claim to see monsters in reality. Movies typically present psychopaths with the psychopathy disorder, but a further analysis by Dr. Hesse shows that there is more to the common criminal disorder than a highly intelligent super-villain. In fact, this behavioral disorder closely links to the monster-like humans that gain their titles from criminal acts of dishonesty and physical assaults. Therefore, monsters are in our minds because we create the creatures out of emotional and psychological fears in the inhuman acts of people on the screen, or the secret criminals lurking in the shadows.