EVIL

Hmmm, a nice topic like this is good for once in a while.

Let's see, a lot of stuff can trigger "evil" inside people's heart.
It could be bad experience, your environment, a lot of stuff has to do with it.

For people who live a normal life, normal friends, have a girlfriend, it seems impossible to you, right?
But something as little as love can be a trigger.

For example:

A guy has a girlfriend, he loves her so much and vice versa.
He lives normal life and etc etc.
One day, he found out that some guy is hitting on his girlfriend.
Act in the name of love, he bashed the guy until that guy is dead.
But, he didn't regret of what he was doing, he found out that killing is fun.
So, the killing goes on and on and on.

Moral: Anything can trigger the evil inside the people's heart. When I say anything, it means anything.

For myself, I am proud of myself that I never done such thing, I can contain my anger good enough.

Even something as simple as being a passive person, and letting rage build up over time can make someone snap. Science believes that the 12% or whatever number it is of the brain that is still unmapped holds the key to genetic moral fibre, evil/good tendencies, and the soul. We as a species are one of the most undecided creatures that walks the earth and have the ability to be completely soulless or be an angel sent from above. That 12% scares some people, saying its the part of the brain that allows us to decide to kill or save. Any decision can be on a scale of "turn around and walk away" right up to "kill, maim or seriously injure" and there is barely any degree of space between decisions allowing leeway.

Aside from psychological problems, its possible that poor communication skills can lead to these overly extreme acts. Often times people can have some serious problems in their lives, and if they can't find another human being to talk about some of this stuff with, those problems can escalate until they pretty much explode. Hell, it could even be to the point where they simply don't have the communication skills to talk with people, and that in itself can cause an intense feeling of isolation. What better way to get attention than by being violent, and when they see that their acts don't go unnoticed, it makes them feel a little better and so they continue to do it to keep that attention intact.

Of course, this is simply my two cents an extremely small spectrum of possible causes for this behavior. Like you said, perfectly normal people who appear to live rather fulfilling lives end up doing this too. Humans are a strange creature indeed.

I'd like to throw in some information that is based on my years of practical experience in dealing with the human mind, as much as in gained knowledge from people who have even more years of practical experience in dealing with the human mind.

I don't claim that I know everything, but there is a certain principle that shows pretty quick:

Everything people do is self serving. They do it because it makes them feel good, and by "good" I mean here that whatever we do, we do according to our most basic values.

So everything that is in harmony with our most basic values is "good" for us, everything that isn't, is bad for us. Pure self-interest.

From the point of view of your subconscious, evil is everything that isn't according to your core programming. If your basic programming is to lie, than you will feel bad telling the truth. If your basic programming is that eating meat is gross, than you will avoid eating a steak at any cost.

It doesn't matter if the serial killer was abused as a child or not. Some of them were actually quite the social creature. Having friends and even families and nobody would have ever assumed that they would do such horrible thing.

So if you want to know, if you are capable of murder. You should critically analyze your basic values in as much scenarios as possible. Would you kill in self defense? Would you kill to protect your child? Would you kill a human for food?
The same process applies to the question, if you would kill in a certain pattern a certain type of people (not all serial killers do it for fun). For example: Would you kill everyone who is not acting according to your religious believes?

Hardly any serial killer kills without a pattern. If we look into the pattern, than we gain knowledge about his motivation and his core values.

So, yes, you are a potential serial killer, if that kind of behavior agrees with your core values.

Somethings "Ticks" them.

Can not be 100% sure on what "Ticks" them but it had to be something even if it was minor.

Here is some quick examples.

Watching a slug going to almost nothing with some simple salt.
A pigeon laying dead in the park.
Watching a bad / sad / good? / odd movie.

Or it can happen when they become older.
As you had said that some of these people have normal childhoods.
So it is possible that the adulthood is not "normal".

Men are the most peculiar creature to be created by God. As we have the ability to judge right and wrong, we also know of the act but on the flip side, we also know of fun and boredom. Yes, there are some nutjob out there that are really completely crazy and kills people for the fun of it but that is only a very small minority. I would think most of us have enough sense not to do it.

Good and Evil, however, is a different topic. Although in my opinion good and evil are purely subjective. I might judge killing a convict that murdered someone as a good act but you might think otherwise. It's all according to a scale you set yourself. I think killing a slug for fun is evil but you might not think anything of it.

Just a few examples...

Everyone is born different and not everyone has the potential to become serial killers. Many serial killers lack empathy and remorse, a.k.a. psychpaths, and cannot feel the terror they inflict on others. Not all serial killers have this pattern but most do.

Many normal people get torn up inside by empathy when killing others and could not imagine doing it again. A psychopath feels only excitement when murdering. It's not something you train yourself to do, it's something that is apart of you.

There are some who are naturally evil, but very very few.

Evil is indeed that wrong term for these people. But it isn't simply a choice they made either.

Hervey Cleckley (M.D. and author of "The Mask of Sanity") describes the psychopathic person as outwardly a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise the fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others. Despite the seemingly sincere, intelligent, even charming external presentation, internally the psychopathic person does not have the ability to experience genuine emotions.

It is called Antisocial personality disorder. Some aspects could be associated with other mental disorders, but there are a few core aspects that I find most important:
- deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
- incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment
- callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of the capacity for empathy

A person, who lacks empathy and guilt, is not capable of understanding other people's hurt. If they are intelligent enough, they can mimic empathy and compassion enough to appear normal, but they will never truly understand it.

To some point they are very similar to autistic people and for all I know some of them could have been somewhere along the autism spectrum.

And what about a method of finding these people? Of helping them? Do you consider your feelings to be the only true ones, so that when compared to other peoples they can be a good guidance as to whether somebody lacks those feelings and hence is a sociopath/psychopath?

I don't think any of us experience guilt, remorse, and an outward felling of belonging to a society. In fact, it's the opposite. The problem is with how one perceives himself, and what he counts as his responsibilities and duties. Consider a man who knows he will die( or shall we call it a process of extinction, in which not nay his DNA but also his ideas disappear) if he doesn't play along with the rest of the community. And so he goes to school, gets a job, has a family, helps out in the village life and dies.

80 years later his children do the same. Isn't that what you call normal? But if it's only that bond of keeping ones ideas and children -aka oneself -from becoming extinct, then what about people who dnt want to achieve, don't want to have children, don't want to belong? Well they still don't have to become sociopaths assuming they see themselves as normal human beings, and thus associate with other humans as being a part of themselves, which in turn stops them from inflicting harm.

It is those individual's who start seeing everything as external from themselves who get the urge to standardise and normative everything, and create it in their own image. Nothing to do with mimicry, although if you decide to call it that then I suppose those people would want to change their environment by becoming similar to it. ONCE they decide that plan has stopped working they start altering it more physically like through the use of firearms.

Sorry for the ramble. TLDR humans must belong by accepting the surroundings as themselves, as opposed to accepting themselves as a part of the surrounding because it is in our nature to change things in to the way we see ourselves and our lives.