Chad, one of the two protagonists of In the Company of Men by Neil LaBute, is a young executive, attractive and charming, who proposes an atrocious game to a colleague: during a work relocation, the two of them will seduce the same vulnerable woman —a deaf, lonely coworker— only to abandon her at the same time and destroy her emotionally. The plan seeks nothing tangible: no money, no sex they could not get some other way, no revenge. It is cruelty for the pleasure of cruelty, an exercise of power and contempt carried out in cold blood. For Durkheim's anomie, Chad represents its purest and most disturbing form: not the man deregulated by boundless ambition, but the one in whom the void of all moral norm is so absolute that doing harm becomes, quite simply, a pastime.
// The theoryThe normative void with no alibi
Durkheim's anomie describes the state in which the norms that regulate conduct —and that have been internalized as conscience— have weakened to the point of vanishing. In most of its manifestations, that void is bound up with a deregulated desire: limitless ambition, the craving for more. Chad shows an even colder variant: the normative void without even that alibi. He pursues neither success nor wealth; his cruelty is not a means to anything, it is an end in itself. What the theory underscores in him is the total absence of an inner norm to rein in conduct. For most people, the mere idea of deliberately destroying an innocent person collides with an internalized moral wall —empathy, guilt, a sense of the limit— that Durkheim called the collective conscience made flesh in the individual. In Chad that wall does not exist. It is not that he transgresses it after an inner struggle; it is that it simply is not there. His freedom to be cruel is absolute because nothing, outside or within, contests it. Chad is anomie taken to its extreme nakedness: a human being with no moral compass at all, for whom the suffering of others weighs no more than the chips in a game.
When cruelty seeks nothing
What makes Chad so terrifying —and so revealing for the theory— is that he shatters our need to explain evil by a motive. We tend to console ourselves by thinking that whoever does harm is after something: money, power, revenge, survival. Those motives, however perverse, make evil comprehensible, almost human. Chad offers no such consolation: his cruelty pursues no benefit, it is gratuitous. And that is where Durkheim's anomie illuminates the case better than any theory of ambition. Chad's evil does not come from an excessive desire, but from a void: the complete absence of the inner norm that in others acts as an automatic brake. He needs no reasons to be cruel because he has no reason not to be. The moral conscience, which Durkheim understood as society speaking inside us, falls entirely silent in Chad. That is why his cruelty can be so calm, so methodical, so amusing to him: there is no inner voice to question it. Chad demonstrates that the purest form of anomie is not desire without a ceiling, but conscience without content —the human being from whom the «no» that makes us livable to one another has been taken away, or was never put there.
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// The subjectCharm as the tool of the void
Chad does not look like a monster: he is charismatic, witty, socially impeccable. The film uses that charm as its most uncomfortable weapon, because it shows that the absence of a moral compass does not show on the face. Chad moves with ease through the corporate world —competitive, hierarchical, indifferent to harm— precisely because his lack of scruples makes him effective in it. LaBute suggests, without underlining it, that an environment that rewards ruthless ambition and treats empathy as weakness is the natural habitat of the Chads: a space where the normative void not only goes unnoticed but often rises. Chad is entirely responsible for his cruelty —the film grants him not an ounce of excuse—, but his figure also points to the terrain that shelters him: a culture of pure competition where the moral «no» gets in the way and the one who lacks it thrives. It is anomie in a suit and tie, smiling while it destroys someone because nothing, in him or around him, tells him to stop.
Chad
// The fault lineNeither simply a psychopath nor purely a victim of his environment
The fault line with Chad is twofold, as it usually is. An easy reading dismisses him as a «psychopath», a label that isolates him as a clinical anomaly and spares us from thinking about the world around him. The opposite reading dissolves him into his environment —«he is what corporate capitalism produces»—, erasing his personal responsibility. Durkheim's anomie helps hold both truths without collapsing them: Chad is an individual fully responsible for a cruelty he chooses and is legible as a symptom of a normative void that certain environments cultivate and reward. The theory does not exonerate: it does not say that corporate culture forces anyone to destroy a deaf woman for fun —most people in that same environment would never do it—. What it says is that the absence of internalized norms, where the environment does not impose them either, leaves the field open to whoever already lacks brakes. Chad is not an excuse against himself; he is a warning about what flourishes when a community stops sustaining, inside and outside people, the «no» that keeps us from treating others as toys.
That the film ends with no punishment for Chad —that he comes out unscathed, even satisfied, while his victim is left destroyed— is LaBute's most brutal choice: moral anomie does not always get its due: sometimes it wins, smiles, and moves on to the next prey. Durkheim would recognize the discomfort —when the inner norm is missing and the outer one does not supply it, there is nothing to guarantee that the harm will be paid for.
The "no" that makes us livable
Chad matters because he embodies the hardest question in criminology: what to do with evil that has no motive, the kind born not of need or ambition but of the pure void of conscience. Durkheim's anomie offers a key: this evil is not the presence of something monstrous, but the absence of something essential —the inner norm, the automatic «no» that keeps us from instrumentalizing another human being—. And that norm is not innate: it is built socially, sustained among us all, transmitted. Chad reminds us that a society does not protect itself from evil with laws and punishments alone, but by cultivating and keeping alive that shared moral conscience that makes most people, without even thinking about it, refrain from destroying the vulnerable for sport. Where that collective conscience erodes —where success justifies everything and empathy is ridiculed—, the Chads do not merely appear: they thrive. Tending the «no» that makes us livable to one another is not moralism: it is, according to Durkheim, a society's first defense against its own dissolution.
Three key takeaways
- Chad embodies the coldest form of Durkheim's anomie: the absolute normative void, without even the alibi of ambition. He destroys an innocent woman for sport, because there is no inner norm to stop him.
- His cruelty is gratuitous, and that is where its horror lies: it seeks neither money nor revenge. Chad's evil is not an excessive desire but a void —the absence of the moral conscience that Durkheim understood as society speaking inside us—.
- Neither a simple isolated "psychopath" nor a pure victim of his environment: he is responsible for his cruelty and at the same time a symptom of a competitive culture that shelters the normative void. He matters because a society defends itself from evil by cultivating the shared moral "no" that makes us livable.
Sources · further reading
- Durkheim, É. (1897). El suicidio. Alcan.
- Durkheim, É. (1893). La división del trabajo social. Alcan.
- Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. W. H. Freeman.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Chad?
Chad («—») es un villano de En compañía de hombres, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He does not do it for money, or revenge, or love.
¿Por qué Chad (—) se convierte en villano?
Chad and Durkheim's anomie: the individual for whom moral norms simply do not exist, who plots cruelty the way others play a game. The normative void in its coldest form, without even the alibi of ambition.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Chad?
El caso de Chad se analiza desde la Anomia (Durkheim). Durkheim's anomie describes the individual with no internal norms to restrain them. Chad, from In the Company of Men, is its most glacial form: an executive who, together with a colleague, deliberately seduces and destroys a deaf woman for pure entertainment. He seeks nothing material —the normative void is so absolute that cruelty becomes a game—. Anomie without the alibi of ambition.
