The Criminal Mind

Ajay is a 38-year-old builder. He has an outstanding debt of 4 crores. He refuses to pay the money even though he has it. The apartments he has built are damaged every now and then, and the tenants are always complaining of poor construction. He can cheat on almost anything and everything without remorse. His employees are bitter about the way he exploits them.

He has a very poor relationship with his clients and maintains them only as long as they serve his self-interest. His wife and children are tired of his dominant and demanding behavior. All efforts to make him mend his ways are met with anger and hostility.

Ajay is a criminal mind. He is a person who takes a different direction to achieve his ambitions, often at the expense of those around him. People have often tried to find out the reasons behind such criminal minds. Some attribute it to heredity, others to environmental difficulties. However, this is not always the case. Ajay comes from a family of irreproachable reputation.

Some believe factors like poverty, adverse familial environment, physical deformity, childhood over-permissiveness, over-pampering, indulgence, corporal punishment, and physical abuse contribute to such behavior. However, none of these factors alone are solely responsible. The real failure is in not being able to arouse interest in other people.

Due to this, Ajay never learned to respect others and their feelings. He has taken to manipulation as an imitation of heroism. There is a certain thrill in committing a crime or manipulation and getting away with it. He considers himself important merely by existing, without making any effort to deserve the good opinion of others. He expects to be noticed without sustained effort.

Ajay is striving for a fictitious goal of leadership, but in essence, it is a cowardly way of avoiding the difficulties of hard work. He is fooling himself, feeding his vanity and pride by outsmarting other people. His starting point was committing acts that went undiscovered, leading him to believe he could get away with it indefinitely. He sees his actions as achievements of cleverness.

It is very important to dispel this myth. Whenever he is chided for his behavior, he takes it as a challenge. He feels that he is fighting everyone, and the scolding gives him an even bigger thrill.

Another factor is the perception of his needs. He feels overwhelmed by them and, to avoid the misery, resorts to easier means of fulfillment. However, it is not true hardship that drives him to manipulation. If that were the case, everyone in the world would turn to such behavior since all people face problems at some point.

Instead, it is his personal limit for tolerability that drives him to antisocial behavior—it is his way of facing problems. He considers friendships and relationships as conquests and acquisitions, a means to possess others rather than a part of a lifelong connection. He follows a private logic, a private intelligence that explains his behavior—sensible to him, but not in a common-sense way.

What to do?

Success in curbing this… (To be continued?)