UNIQUE TAKE ON VIOLENCE
Author considers his own actions
Mad Blood Stirring: The Inner Lives of Violent Men Daemon Fairless Random House Canada
These days, Daemon Fairless makes sure he carries a $20 bill in his wallet whenever he is on the Toronto subway.
The journalist and author of Mad Blood Stirring: The Inner Lives of Violent Men hasn’t had to use it yet, but he keeps it at the ready just in case. The plan is that if he sees someone getting riled up on the subway, making life uncomfortable for his fellow riders, being a bully and generally doing something to bring out his “fight or flight response,” he will walk up to him wielding the $20 and suggest they both get off the subway and get a six-pack of beer.
A few years ago, on New Year’s Eve, he handled such a situation in a very different manner. It ended with him head-butting a drunk idiot on the subway.
“I still believe you have to stand up to guys who are being assholes,” says Fairless, in an interview with Postmedia from a tour stop in Winnipeg. “I just don’t believe you have to escalate it. And that’s what I was doing. I was doing that for my personal indulgence.”
Fairless opens his book with a detailed account of the New Year’s Eve confrontation, offering a play-by-play of how his own mad blood stirred him into a rage that led to the violence. In Fairless’s telling of the story, it’s hard to fault him for his actions. His fellow travellers were firmly on his side. The police found that he did nothing wrong. After all, he was protecting his wife and his fellow passengers. The other man was charged, Fairless wasn’t.
But the journalist says this and other encounters he writes about eventually forced him to confront his own proclivity to violence, even if it often seemed spurred by a noble sense of battling injustice or standing up to bullies.
“It’s a part of the frontier justice mentality that may be a little antiquated in today’s world, but it sure feels important to me still,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how you confront those people. Violence doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, in terms of confronting those folks. But it sure was an easy go-to. And I think once you’ve been successful at physically intervening, it becomes a tool that’s an easy go-to.”
It was Fairless’s attempts to come to terms with the gap between his intellectual aversion to violence and the apparent ease in which he resorts to it when provoked that first gave rise to Mad Blood Stirring. At first he intended his personal story, including that subway anecdote, simply to be a jumping-off point for a more outward-looking endeavour studying the inner workings of violent men and their need to fight, kill, beat and rape.
“I didn’t really intend to talk about myself, or certainly not to the depth that I did,” he says. “It was a real transition for me to do that. I thought I’d talk about myself a little bit and then go into the more interesting, more violent stories of other guys.
“I realized after I started to ask myself ‘Why are you so interested in this? Why do you want to do this?’ it became very autobiographical. I started writing better and differently and it took me to places I didn’t expect to go.”
Which is not to say Mad Blood Stirring is pure memoir, or a selfhelp book or even a cautionary tale. Despite its autobiographical nature, it’s still a work of impressive journalism. Fairless, a former producer of CBC’s As It Happens, put five years into researching the subject, leaning on his background as a science journalist with a master’s degree in neuroscience to look at the historic, scientific, sociological and psychological research into male violence.
He also went to some extraordinarily dark places, interviewing both a serial rapist and a serial killer in hopes of unravelling how certain men can let an inherent instinct for bloodlust run wild.
The killer, who raped and murdered a number of girls, agreed to a number of sit-down interviews in prison.
“I had to spend a lot of time sitting across from him,” Fairless says. “I was really quite intimidated by the first interview. But it was just so anti-climatic. He’s a boring guy to talk to. He’s very self-centred, very self-interested. I found myself in this weird place where I had to remind myself to try and respect him at some level because he is giving me his story, even though his story is inaccurate. He has done these terrible things, so it’s really a conflicted state to be in.”
Still, while there is an understandable need for people to emotionally distance themselves from men like the killer, Fairless says that to understand violence and our species’ capacity to do abhorrent things to each other, it’s important not to simply dismiss him as a monster, or “the other.”
“What I was most interested in wasn’t the one to three per cent
out there who are a psychopath and don’t have compassion,” Fairless says. “What I was more interested in was how is it that guys like you and me under the wrong conditions end up being part of a military force or a political force that dehumanizes another group of others.
“It’s us temporarily, selectively shutting down our compassion, our ability for empathy, in a way that is analogous to the psychopath. We can become these selective psychopaths under various conditions.”
But he says these deep-seated, inherent impulses toward violence in seemingly normal men is rarely talked about, comparing it to how Victorian society prudishly avoided talking about sex.
“What I’m hoping for is that this book will help us acknowledge a set of emotions that is everywhere, but we don’t talk about,” he says. “We are heavily influenced by these emotions.
“We spend all this time watching all of the gory, exciting, titillating violence on Netflix and very little time thinking ‘Why does this interest me? Why is 90 per cent of my viewing true crime and slaughter? Why are all the anti-hero heroes I enjoy watching essentially sociopaths?’ Why are we so heavily into this stuff and yet denying it in ourselves as an illicit thrill?”
He says studying these impulses in himself was helpful and enlightening.
“It becomes a lot easier to see myself as just a big alpha-male primate responding indulgently to another alpha-male primate who is displaying his dominance on the subway,” he says.
“I don’t want to get trapped by those archaic emotions. Until you start to face that they are there, and where they come from — that we have a lineage of this kind of behaviour as a species — it’s a pretty hard pattern to break out of.”
Violence doesn’t make a lot of sense to me ... But it sure was an easy go-to. DAEMON FAIRLESS