Chapter 3 Anger and Rage

Chapter 3

Anger and Rage

Michael Philpott; Charles Manson

Michael Philpott (Born 1956)

The following words have been used to describe Michael Philpott, an Englishman who, together with his wife Mairead and one of their close friends, was charged with manslaughter in the deaths of six of his children. Philpott is a loud, arrogant, cocky attention seeker. The man is violent, controlling, full of bravado, vengeful, dangerous and he is also a shameless misogynist.

This is not a description of a Melancholic, it is a description of a Choleric gone to extremes in every possible way. It is a description of a Choleric who resides mentally at the very bottom of the choleric emotional scale. Mike Philpotts as he is known, is a sickening individual. He is rage personified but there is a different pattern playing out in his thought processes, a pattern that can be used to illustrate the difference between a murderous Melancholic and a killer Choleric. Philpott did not have the ability to think his crimes through. His crimes were always an act of revenge, revenge that grew out of his loud, uncontrollable, choleric rage.

Mike Philpott’s first recorded attempt to kill someone happened when he was twenty one years old. He became so enraged that he stabbed his girlfriend over a dozen times just because she had given him a letter telling him that their relationship was over. Philpott did not carry a murder weapon with him when he rushed over to the house where his girlfriend lived with her parents, but he found a knife in a kitchen drawer and he used that knife for the stabbing. He also stabbed his girlfriend’s mother while he was at it.

If Philpott had been a middle class, educated, business man of good standing in the community, his crime would have been labelled a crime of passion, but there was no sympathy for him in the neighborhood where he lived because he was not a well respected man. Philpott made no attempt to cover up his crime and he received a jail sentence of twelve years, but was released after only three and a half years. There is no public information as to whether or not he received any counseling or therapy during his incarceration.

The mass media described Philpott as a belligerent, lazy layabout who lived off welfare. He was the father of seventeen children and he lived openly together with his wife and his mistress in a rented house where there seemed to be no secrets.  This man openly bragged that all he thought about was sex, perverted sex, any kind of sex and this was his whole life’s desire.

Philpott had a reputation for never running away from danger. He made no secret of the fact that he was a sex addict and he made no secret of the fact that he liked the notoriety of being depicted as an unwashed, sleazy, bully who lived off society. This is one of the main differences between a choleric killer and a melancholic murderer. Melancholics do not enjoy the notoriety of being labelled as deviant murderers.

Philpott has been described by some criminologists as a psychopath, a sociopath and a moral degenerate. Only two of these labels apply to him. Because he openly exhibited tremendous, natural emotion i.e. anger, pride, indignation, friendship, enjoyment etc., he cannot be labeled as a psychopath. He proudly bragged about his shiftless, useless lifestyle, and he did openly flaunt the rules of society, but nevertheless he enjoyed spending time with his male friends and he could be a very convivial person whenever he was with a crowd of party goers.

Melancholics for the most part are more adept than Cholerics at controlling their emotions, because Cholerics always feel justified when they rush to express negative feelings but Melancholics tend to hesitate and give it some thought. Sometimes Cholerics do make the effort to exert a measure of control over themselves and with some determination they can succeed in part, but the rage that is inherent in a person with a choleric temperament writes itself in body language. A Choleric may harbor what appears to be icy cold rage but the rage is never icy; it is red hot and it is never hidden from view.

Cholerics are not meticulous planners and after Philpott’s live-in mistress decided to leave him, he concocted a plan for revenge, but the dirty plan backfired on him and he ended up in jail with six dead children to his name.

Philpott’s plan was to set fire to his own house with two hoped for outcomes. He planned the fire in order to frame the mistress who had left him taking her own children with her. Philpott wanted to win custody of the children he had fathered with his mistress but it wasn’t out of love for the children. To him these children represented income and he needed that income in order to pay the rent.

The second hoped for outcome was that he planned to rescue the children born of the marriage to Mairead, and then he would be lauded as a hero who had risked his own life to save his children. The plan failed because neither Philpott, his friend nor his neighbors were able to rescue the children who were sleeping upstairs at the time of the fire.

Nothing much is known about Philpott’s childhood except that he grew up in a large rambling Roman Catholic family. There is no doubt that the inherent anger in him had been passed on down through the generations, anger that exploded in unmitigated rage at women and society at large. Philpott personifies the problem child, the abscess that constantly burst forth spewing its pus all over the place, but he was also an exploiter. He had learned well over his lifetime how to exploit women, children and society at large.  

In April of 2012, in a trial that took place in Nottingham Crown Court, located in the East Midlands of England, this despicable excuse for a man was found guilty of manslaughter and given a life sentence, with a minimum of fifteen years. Rage was the dominant force in Philpott’s life and lust came in a near second. The man made it known from the jail cell where he was confined for life, that he was already engaged in planning future sex acts for he was sure that one day he would be set free. Like all volatile Cholerics, the man just couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Charles Manson (Born 1934)

Charles Manson also had a choleric temperament and it can be seen from a recent televised interview, that he is still the epitome of rage personified. A description of this notorious killer is as follows; anti-social, evil, paranoid, glib, a showman, blunt, bizarre and a high energy person who was able to persuade his followers to do whatever he asked.

After a life of petty crime that resulted in him being in and out of schools for delinquent boys, and spending most of his adult life in jail, it looked like Manson had turned over a new page in his book of life. He had hopes of become a professional musician and songwriter but instead, he ended up as the leader of a notorious, murderous cult and he is still counted as one of the most hated men in America.

Because his original death sentence was commuted to life,  Manson now spends his time in a California jail, but according to Manson, jail is home. Jail is the only place where he ever felt comfortable and the man actually got the reward that he wanted. Manson the home body, now lives in his familiar surroundings, and that according to him, is where he wants to be.

It was the sixties and it was the age of hippies, beatniks, flower power, free love and LSD, a potent mood changing drug that was not deemed to be dangerous at the time. LSD is a hallucinogenic drug and under the influence of this drug, Manson’s followers committed some gruesome murders that hit the headlines all over the United States.

Charles Manson swears that he did not give his followers any orders to go out and commit murder and it was established that he did not actually participate in the murders, nor was he at the scenes of the crimes. But testimony at his trial indicated that four of his followers, one man and three women committed a total of seven murders, including the murder of an eight and a half month, pregnant, American actress, just because Manson asked them to do it. These murders were Manson’s acts of revenge against the society that had rejected both him and his music.

Manson was a cult leader and at the beginning the cult, like all cults, the message was all about love. The Manson followers lived on a farm that was owned by an eighty year old man who was half blind. In exchange for being looked after, this old man allowed the Manson family to take up residence on his farm. The members of the love cult took care of each other; they shared everything, there were frequent sexual encounters between members and they obeyed Charles Manson as if he was a God.

Charles Manson seemed to have some special kind of power over these people and they seemed to follow his every command. He offered them physical love, spiritual love, brotherly love and unconditional love as long as they surrendered to his will. The cult members were like lost children who had found a kind and loving father who promised to take care of them forever. He was an extremely capable man and he wooed them in with his own magnetic force.

The women who were arrested and convicted of murder were intelligent, educated, middle class females but they all showed signs of having been brainwashed. It was a situation where, over time, Manson had somehow managed to kill their individuality until there was nothing left in their brains. Their egos were gone and they had become mirror images of their Lord and master, Charles Manson. But whereas Manson was a Choleric, the murderers were all Melancholics. The LSD had made rise in them something that was already there; the killer instinct. The killer instinct in humanity is an animal instinct but unlike humans, animals only kill for food or for defense purposes.      

Because of their inability to empathize with others, when the killer instinct rises up in a Melancholic, it is brutal beyond belief. The Manson followers went overboard with their bloody stabbings.

Nature will always fill a gap and Manson filled the gap in the brains of his followers with his own perverted philosophy, long before nature had a chance to move in. They believed every word that he said, and they swallowed his story that the black people of America were getting ready to rise up against the white people of America, and this uprising would start a civil war.

According to Manson, the black Americans were so strong that they would win this war and after the war was over, Manson and his followers were planning to come out of hiding to become the supreme rulers over black America. These addled brained people believed that the black American victors would need the superior intellect of the white, Manson survivors to help them run the country.

Manson and his followers weren’t insane. Because of the hallucinatory effects of LSD, their brains had just become trapped in a lethal fantasy not unlike some ordinary, harmless human fantasies that sometimes come to fruition.

People do fantasize about all kinds of things and quite often they act on these fantasies, but Manson’s fantasy was rooted in evil. He was exactly like his Nazi counterpart Adolf Hitler only on a smaller scale, and his followers were exactly like the ordinary German people who were sucked in by Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric. Thankfully Manson‘s followers were few in number, the murderers were caught including one who had plans to assassinate the President, and the remainder eventually disbanded and were absorbed back into society.

This leads us to a very profound question; where does evil come from? Are there spiritual beings in this world of ours who influence us or is this evil generated in our own psyches?  Evil deeds have spawned the centuries but a belief in the existence of ‘Satan the Devil’ is just too simplistic an explanation; there must be something else going on in our Universe. The devil made me do it just doesn’t hold water any more.

Charles Manson used his leadership qualities together with his inherent, choleric rage to wreak havoc in the communities around him. He was a small scale megalomaniac, but he was not much different from a Gadaffi or a Hitler who ordered their foot soldiers to go forward and kill in the belief that the killings were justified for the sake of the rest of humanity.

Manson was another example of an unsuccessful, choleric man who wanted to play God. He revelled in having power over his minions and he used them to do his killings for him. But the drugs made them stupid, they were caught and they were punished.

In Manson’s own words, he never had a childhood. He was born to a sixteen year old, single mother and he never knew his father. However at an early age, Manson’s mother did turn him over to his aunt and uncle who attempted to raise him in a church oriented family atmosphere. The mother was a prostitute who had been arrested and jailed for armed robbery and after she got out of jail she refused to take her son back. Manson was an abandoned child, he was a runaway and he was an exploiter.

During televised interviews, it could be seen that Manson fidgeted a lot and he could never sit still. He was still brimming over with choleric energy, he couldn’t keep his big mouth shut but he was too clever to ever have been considered insane. He was play acting all the way but he was not convincing as an actor on the stage of life pretending to be insane.

Most educated people would concede that we are all a mixture of good and bad but most educated people never stop to ponder the simple question of why we are all a mixture of good and bad.

Of course there are those who believe the account written in the book of Genesis of how the serpent tempted Eve to sin and then Eve persuaded Adam to sin as well. The actual sin was disobedience to God. They disobeyed God by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, something that God had forbidden them to do. This act of disobedience wiped out Adam and Eve’s innocence, thereby releasing their sinful natures that were subsequently passed on down to their offspring. Take note that Adam and Eve’s sinful natures were already there, inherent in their flesh, waiting for the opportunity to rise up and defy God, and nothing much has changed since then.

If that indeed is the story of our beginnings, since no one really knows the truth about our beginnings whether by creation, evolution or both, we can leave it at that.

The first human beings on earth had sinful natures and so also do each and every one of us. Since Adam was supposedly made from the dirt of the earth, and Jehovah the great God creator breathed life into Adam, obviously it was Jehovah’s breath of life that infused Adam with the ability to sin, i.e. commit evil.

Instead of saying the devil made me do it, we can always blame God. Note that according to the books of the Old Testament, Jehovah was or still is a raging, angry, murderous tyrant who at one time wiped humanity off the face of the earth. In life it doesn’t really matter what you believe, it only matters what the truth is and nobody can prove or disprove the existence of this terrifying God.

The murder instinct lies dormant in all of us, waiting there ready to rise up to the surface at any time, but most of us manage to not act on our murderous thoughts. We do not commit heinous acts and we even manage to stifle most of the murderous thoughts that run through our own brains. These murderous thoughts rise to the surface disguised as jealousy, envy, irritation, bad temper or even just a having a vague dislike for other people.  

Sometimes we harbor a great deal of hatred in our hearts, hatred that is directed towards another human being, a group of human beings or even a whole nation of human beings. Even the most docile looking people experience episodes of anger ranging from the loud, hungry, incessant cries of a newborn infant to the sad, silent depression of a suicide victim or the homicidal rage of one spouse towards another.

Suicide and Depression

Depression is anger turned inwards and a suicidal person is so angry at him or herself that he or she is willing to commit murder on his or her own behalf, in order to accomplish whatever goals are in mind. These goals can be varied. They can be a form of revenge on those who are left behind, escape from emotional pain, escape from physical pain or escape from memories that continue to haunt the victim, memories from childhood that have perpetuated themselves on into adulthood.

In many cases suicidal persons often carry the belief that those people who have rejected them will feel guilty as a result of the suicide, thereby forever changing their thoughts and actions from rejection to acceptance of the dead person. The person who is contemplating suicide hopes that this change of heart will be accompanied by an outpouring of love for the dead person. It is an attempt to manipulate the feelings and emotions of others, from the grave, i.e. they don’t love me now but they will when I’m dead.

It is well to note that long periods of depression are sometimes, but not always, followed by greater insight into the person’s life circumstances.  

Martyrdom and the Bible

Martyrdom is not suicide but martyrdom is a misguided notion that the life of the martyr is so valuable that their death has an incredible high value. A good example of martyrdom can be read in the New Testament where Yeshua of Nazareth commonly called Jesus Christ, decided to accept martyrdom instead of taking the avenue of escape that was open to him. The decision to become a martyr is another strong melancholic trait although many men and women throughout history have died as martyrs, without actually having made the decision to be one.  

According to the Christian belief, Jesus Christ’s life had immense value beyond that of any common man. In fact it is believed that his life was worth more than all other human life combined. Jesus Christ is or was an oxymoron. He was a contradiction in every way possible.

The story is that Jesus Christ was half God and half human. He was described as a man who knew the way that Jehovah wanted us to live and just like a peace loving Phlegmatic he advised us to turn the other cheek and forgive wrongdoers.

But Jesus Christ was also described as losing his temper and taking a whip to the moneylenders who, by their very presence, were desecrating the temple of the Israelites in Jerusalem; this story sounds very much like a Choleric in action. Jesus could also have had a sanguine temperament because Sanguines easily befriend others no matter what station they hold in life, and this is the way that Jesus Christ related to people, he had an innate ability to treat rich and poor alike.  

According to the men who wrote these accounts of his life, Jesus Christ was an individual who promised life everlasting to his faithful followers, but he also promised horrific, eternal damnation in the flames of hell for all evildoers. He does sounds like a complete human being with neither one temperament nor the other, but the sad thing is that he does promise revenge on those who do not worship him and who do not believe that he is the son of God.

Are these real threats from a vengeful son of God or do people really believe that all it takes is a simple faith in Christ to earn a ticket to heaven? No one knows whether these stories are one hundred percent true or not. Perhaps these stories have only a grain of truth in them or perhaps they are totally false because the stories of the life of Christ were written approximately seventy years after his death and the stories could have been exaggerated.  

In the book of Revelation the plan for all humanity is revealed. It is an account of a vision that was supposedly related by the apostle John. This account which was actually written many years after the death of the apostle John, unveils Jesus Christ’s final solution. The premeditated plan is to first torture human beings incessantly until they cry for mercy and then the plan is to murder them in the flames of Hell, i.e. burn them alive. It sounds like a real Holocaust!

In the Old Testament, a book that was also written by ordinary men, Jehovah seems to be giving us a message, “Love and obey me or I will murder you.” He is depicted as a mass murderer. This story of mass murder was documented in the historical tale of the Israelite slaves and the Egyptian overlords. Jehovah supposedly killed every first born, Egyptian, male child in order to force the Egyptians to give the Israelites their freedom.

Jehovah is depicted as totally aggressive but Jesus Christ is depicted as both passive and aggressive. Are we just like our so called creators? It seems that some of us are but on the other hand most of us are not. A possibility exists that in the act of writing down the story of creation, it was man who created God in his own image and not the other way around. Hopefully the Gods have moved into the twenty first century and like us are becoming rehabilitated.

Aggression

Psychologists, psychiatrists and family therapists often do categorize their patients as either aggressive or non-aggressive but we are all aggressive. We are all born with aggression in our genes but we just express our aggression in different ways. Suicide is an aggressive action. The decision to accept martyrdom at the hands of certain enemies is also an act of aggression; it is designed to pacify the martyr’s brain into believing in their own importance, i.e. I will suffer for the sake of others because my death will have more meaning than the death of an ordinary person. In ordinary life does anyone admire a person who likes to play the martyr?

Aggression is anger and there are all kinds of anger. People display anger in a myriad of different ways. Easy to recognize vocal anger consists of shouting, screaming and yelling. These sounds are so loud and so vicious there is no doubt that the screamers are feeling and expressing anger. Angry actions consist of physical brutality, punching, kicking, fighting, slapping, prodding and poking at another person. The temperament types that prefer open aggression are the Cholerics and the Sanguines.

 But other ways of expressing anger are sarcasm, silent brooding, sulking, ignoring a person, looking straight through a person as if he or she isn’t there, and these forms of anger are particularly irritating to those who have to live with such behavior. But one of the most aggressive and insidious, forms of anger is called passive-aggression.

There is no passivity involved in passive-aggression. The person who uses passive-aggression as a battering ram is adept at masquerading as a passive person but is in reality so angry that their seemingly passive words and or actions will make you flinch. Often the passive-aggressive person will figuratively stick a knife in your gut while inwardly satisfying themselves with a belief in their own innocence. The passive-aggressive person wants to be viewed not only by him or herself as innocent and without malice, but also wants to be viewed that way by the person being attacked.

The temperament types that prefer silent aggression are the Melancholics and the Phlegmatics but this rule is not set in stone. When pushed to the limit, both Melancholics and Phlegmatics can erupt into pure rage and vice versa. Most Cholerics and Sanguines know how to revert into silent aggression if the circumstances prevent them from erupting, but, they have a difficult time masking their anger because their faces are too expressive.

The main focus of this book however is not the aggressive nature of the whole human race, it is the murderous, aggressive nature of fifty percent of the human race, and a common denominator does exist that distinguishes those people who are part of that lethal fifty percent. This denominator is called temperament type and it appears that the majority of murderers have either melancholic or choleric temperaments. These people are the aggressors in society, they have strong willed temperaments and they can be brutal, but the Melancholic is more likely to be an introvert and the Choleric is most likely to be an extrovert.

Temperament is not personality; it is not character and it most definitely is not related to race, nationality, sex, age or religion. This is not to say that all Melancholics and Cholerics are murderers, it is only pointing out that most murderers have melancholic or choleric temperaments and when one aspect of their temperament expands to the maximum and gets out of control, i.e. lust, greed or rage, Melancholics and Cholerics more easily turn to murder or killing as a solution for what ails them. The other two temperament types seem to have more ability to stop short of committing those particular crimes.

Religious Zealots

Religious zealots are the exception to the rule because religious zealots come from the ranks of all four temperament types. Some zealots believe that their mission in life is to murder for the sole purpose of pleasing God. But there is a catch. Religious zealots hope to receive God’s favor in return for committing murder in his name. They don’t murder for nothing; payment in the form of heavenly blessings is expected in return.

Religious zealots want to play God or at the very minimum they believe that they are playing second fiddle next to God. They do kid themselves because it is a religious zealot’s own need for revenge coupled with jealousy and hatred of others that are most often the underlying factors in any killings that are done in the name of religion.

A murdering spouse can quite often be a religious zealot. The spousal murders are committed by people who fool themselves into believing that God understands the reasons why the spouse must die. The murderer believes him or herself to be so special to God, that the great almighty surely understands why the murder needed to be committed.

Psychopaths and Sociopaths

Many criminologists have actually zoomed in on the fact that there seems to be a distinct personality common to serial murderers. This personality is described as self-consumed, manipulative, sometimes seductive, charismatic, controlling, cold and unable to empathize with the feelings of others. These descriptions are not the characteristics of a specific kind of personality; they are the characteristics of a specific, genetically inherited kind of temperament.

The Melancholic can more easily become a psychopath or a sociopath than the other three types. Psychopaths and sociopaths are similar; they both disregard laws and social mores, they disregard the rights of others, they don’t seem to be able to feel guilty and they both lean towards violence.

But a psychopath is more dangerous than a sociopath because psychopaths have predator instincts. The psychopaths of our societies are the best actors on the stage of life. They can be charming and seductive but feel absolutely nothing while they are practicing their terrible techniques on their unsuspecting victims. They are able to mimic the finest of human behavior but they are only pretending because they have no normal functioning emotions except for rage, and even this rage is disowned by the psychopath him or herself.

Sociopaths have emotions and can explode into rage but both sociopaths and psychopaths have equal capacity to commit murder and both types are most commonly found in the ranks of the Melancholics, quite often in Cholerics, rarely in Sanguines and almost never in Phlegmatics.

Some but not all of the established experts of the day believe that these anti-social disorders, psychopath and sociopath, are the result of either nature with a genetic component, or nurture, meaning how they were raised. It is actually both. Nature is inherited and nurture consists of environmental influences but inherited nature can also be translated as inherited genetic, temperament type.

Much has been written on the subject of human temperament and lots of experts disagree vehemently with each other about the built-in, inherent tendencies of each temperament type, but the reality is that the experts of our day have only tapped the surface of the four temperament types. We must dig deeper in order to understand not only ourselves but also other people.