"A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout"
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Gaylin doesn’t just condemn violence; he anatomizes it like a clinician, reducing the romantic myth of the “hard man” to a chilling occupational identity. Calling the thug and the paid killer “professionals” is the knife twist. Professionalism is supposed to mean discipline, standards, maybe even pride. Here it means competence at predation, a craft honed through emotional amputation. The phrase “beasts of prey” pushes the reader to stop imagining crime as a social glitch and start seeing it as a mode of being: not impulsive, not misunderstood, but organized around pursuit and capture.
The real work happens in the metaphor of trout fishing, because it smuggles in a whole worldview without moral grandstanding. Fishermen don’t hate trout. They don’t negotiate with them, empathize with them, or treat them as peers. Trout are targets within a hobby, an ecosystem, a story you tell afterward. Gaylin’s point is that the killer’s dissociation isn’t just numbness; it’s a perceptual shift where other people become a category of object, something between resource and sport. That’s why the line lands: it frames dehumanization as a practical tool, not an ideological slogan.
As a scientist (and, historically, a bioethicist-psychiatrist), Gaylin writes with the confidence of diagnosis: violence is less a loss of control than a re-engineering of attention and conscience. The subtext is accusatory toward any culture that trains this gaze, rewards it, or pretends it’s an aberration rather than a skill some learn to perfect.
The real work happens in the metaphor of trout fishing, because it smuggles in a whole worldview without moral grandstanding. Fishermen don’t hate trout. They don’t negotiate with them, empathize with them, or treat them as peers. Trout are targets within a hobby, an ecosystem, a story you tell afterward. Gaylin’s point is that the killer’s dissociation isn’t just numbness; it’s a perceptual shift where other people become a category of object, something between resource and sport. That’s why the line lands: it frames dehumanization as a practical tool, not an ideological slogan.
As a scientist (and, historically, a bioethicist-psychiatrist), Gaylin writes with the confidence of diagnosis: violence is less a loss of control than a re-engineering of attention and conscience. The subtext is accusatory toward any culture that trains this gaze, rewards it, or pretends it’s an aberration rather than a skill some learn to perfect.
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| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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