The inheritance from contemporaneity includes, among other characteristics, rationality, normativeness, influence from science, a certain quest for legitimation and the increasing value given to permanence. Current essay questions some of these concepts rooted in Western Civilization, with excerpts from Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho as an example for starting a reflection on a few aspects. The tendency for individual diagnostics and the search for anomalies as an answer to the questioning of a society that shuns accountability for the boundaries it stipulates, show that evil may and must be controlled in order to protect the citizenship of those who are considered normal. Questioning, reflecting and being accountable constitute the beginning for social changes beyond the mere repression of that which is different. The fact that the different exists in each and every one of us is to rethink socially determined roles.
Contemporaneity; Capitalism; Psychopathy