Kars, leader of the Pillar Men in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, is no ordinary villain. He is not driven by greed or revenge, but by something far colder: a project. Kars wants to become the «Ultimate Life Form» —a perfect being, immune to everything, standing above any other creature on the planet—. In his mind, life is a ladder and he is destined to occupy its top rung; every other being, humans included, is expendable material on the way to his perfection. For criminological evolutionism, which traces the roots of violence to the cold logic of natural selection, Kars is a textbook case: not the ancestral impulse misfiring, but the theory itself —«survival of the fittest»— deliberately turned into a license to kill. His crime is born not of the heart, but of reasoning. And that is what is unsettling.
// The theorySurvival of the fittest, from the lab to the alibi
Criminological evolutionism —formulated by psychologists such as Martin Daly and Margo Wilson in Homicide (1988), and expanded by David Buss— holds that certain patterns of violence fit strategies that were advantageous for our ancestors: competing for status, dominating rivals, prevailing in order to pass on one’s own genes. It is a fertile theory, but also the easiest in the whole discipline to pervert, and for one concrete reason: the naturalistic fallacy —the illegitimate leap from «it is natural» to «it is good» or «it is inevitable»—. That an impulse has an evolutionary history makes it neither obligatory nor just. Kars commits exactly that leap, but elevated to a philosophy. His premise is that nature rewards the strong and punishes the weak; his conclusion, that he —the fittest— has the right to dispose of everything inferior. Where serious evolutionism says «this explains why the impulse exists», Kars says «this gives me permission to act on it». He turns a descriptive hypothesis into a moral mandate, and in that fold the monster is born.
The fallacy that «the natural is good»
The error that defines Kars is ancient and has a name: the naturalistic fallacy. From the fact that natural selection favors the best adapted, it does not follow at all that «eliminating the weak» is right —just as from our ancestral predisposition to sugar it does not follow that we should empty the pantry—. Biology describes what is; it never dictates what ought to be. Kars erases that boundary: for him, being the fittest is not only a fact, it is a title of nobility that authorizes him to treat others as resources. That confusion —between what nature does and what a moral being ought to do— is precisely the door through which, in real history, social Darwinism and eugenics entered. Kars is not a crime-of-passion offender: he is the fallacy made flesh, proof that the coldest logic can also be the cruelest.
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// The subjectThe perfect eugenicist: cruelty with a scientific alibi
What makes Kars memorable —and disturbing— is that he is a genius. Not a brute who crushes by instinct, but a refined intellect who plans his ascent to the summit of life over millennia. And therein lies the criminological lesson: his intelligence does not redeem him, it aggravates him. Kars represents the criminal who has rationalized his violence until turning it into a coherent system, shielded against guilt. Every murder is, for him, a formality of natural selection; every victim, an organism that simply was not fit enough to survive. It is the exact logic of social Darwinism: if nature rewards the strong, then cruelty is not cruelty, but biological efficiency. Under that disguise, empathy becomes an evolutionary weakness and compassion, a design flaw. Kars does not feel he is doing evil because he has built a theory in which evil, quite simply, does not exist: there are only the fit and the unfit, and he is destined to stand above the very category of good and evil.
Kars
// The crackA historical and discredited theory (and why it matters)
Here we must be blunt, because the danger is real. Criminological evolutionism in its «social Darwinism» version is a historical and discredited theory. It is not current science: it is the ideology that in the 19th and early 20th centuries took the phrase «the struggle for existence» and turned it into an alibi for racism, for eugenic laws of forced sterilization and, at its most atrocious extreme, for extermination. Serious evolutionary science today —that of Daly, Wilson or Buss— distances itself from all of that with an almost obsessive insistence: it explains why certain violent impulses exist, never to justify them, but to be able to prevent them. Kars embodies precisely what that science fears will be misinterpreted: the drift from «nature is competitive» to «the inferior are expendable». That is why his file does not validate the theory, it uses it as a warning: this is what social Darwinism looks like when its logic is followed to the end.
And here the usual rule operates: to explain is not to exonerate. We can understand the mental architecture of Kars —his fallacy, his rationalization, his cold coherence— without granting him an ounce of right. Understanding how someone comes to believe they have the right to exterminate excuses not a single death; on the contrary, it is the only way to detect that belief before it arms itself. Memory is not for the genius who believed himself above life, but for all those he considered expendable material. A human being is not fitter for surviving the rest: they are, if anything, for refusing to treat them as stepping stones.
When biology stops explaining and starts commanding
Kars matters because he marks with clarity the line that no biological theory of crime should cross: the one that separates describing an impulse from ordering that it be obeyed. Criminological evolutionism, well used, is a map for anticipating where violence will erupt and defusing it. Misused —as in Kars, as in historical social Darwinism— it becomes a machine for manufacturing alibis for cruelty. The difference lies not in biology, but in what we do with it. The same natural selection that gave us rivalry and aggression also gave us empathy, cooperation and a sense of justice: we are the only species capable of recognizing our own impulses and deciding not to follow them. Kars chose the opposite, and that is why his story is not proof that the strongest should win, but a reminder of what —within us and within our ideas— civilization must be built against.
Three key takeaways
- Kars, leader of the Pillar Men, embodies criminological evolutionism in its perverted version: social Darwinism made into a life project. Obsessed with being the Ultimate Life Form, he regards everyone else as inferior and expendable beings, mere stepping stones toward his biological perfection.
- His crime is born of the naturalistic fallacy: the illegitimate leap from «I am the fittest» to «I have the right to eliminate the unfit». Biology describes what is; it never dictates what ought to be. Kars erases that boundary and turns a hypothesis into a permit to exterminate.
- Social Darwinism is a historical and discredited theory, the basis of eugenics. Explaining the logic of Kars neither validates nor exonerates it: it disarms it. Memory is for those he considered expendable, not for the genius who believed himself above life.
Sources · further reading
- Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. Aldine de Gruyter.
- Buss, D. M. (2005). The Murderer Next Door. Penguin.
- Hofstadter, R. (1944). Social Darwinism in American Thought. Beacon Press.
- Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature. Viking.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Kars?
Kars es un villano de JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He does not kill out of rage or for money.
¿Por qué Kars se convierte en villano?
Kars, leader of the Pillar Men, and criminological evolutionism: "survival of the fittest" turned into a license to exterminate. When biology stops explaining crime and starts justifying it.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Kars?
El caso de Kars se analiza desde la Evolucionismo Criminológico. Criminological evolutionism traces the roots of violence to the logic of natural selection: competing, dominating, prevailing. Kars, leader of the Pillar Men in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, embodies its most perverted version: social Darwinism made into a life project. Obsessed with becoming the Ultimate Life Form, he regards everyone else as inferior beings, mere stepping stones toward his biological perfection. In him, the fallacy that "the natural is good" becomes a license to exterminate. Explaining that logic does not excuse it: it disarms it.
