Sanity Squad podcast: Virginia Tech
Join me, Siggy, and Dr. Sanity, as the Sanity Squad discusses the killings at Virginia Tech. (Shrink was on vacation this week; he’s due back next time).
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
What a way to come back from a vacation, eh.
I’m not convinced that large scale massacre type attacks really are a modern thing. I seem to recall, after Columbine, hearing about a school bombing from something like 1927.
I think that we probably view such events differently. I don’t think that mental illness or murderous rages is something new. How silly!
I also think that when my father went to school they brought their guns to school and stacked them by the door.
What happened if someone went off the deep end with a gun?
(Even when I went to school the boys in shop class made fancy hardwood stocks for their shotguns.)
Though the point of “understanding” terror and violence playing into this has a big role. Not, I think, in the cause, but in the reaction and the fact that crazy people can go on so long without being stopped.
Someone I was talking to (I can say who, if need be) about something else altogether made this remark:
“In this context, I’d like to note that the Virginia Tech shooter has claimed for his actions that he was helpless to do otherwise. I don’t think the root problem here has anything to do with *relationships* per se. The transience of relationships, or the faithlessness of the people in them, are symptoms of the root problem. The root problem is scientism: The idea that we can jettison a classical moral psychology and model the choices that human beings make as the helpless effects of social or genetic causes.”
He wasn’t quite happy with that explanation and I’m not sure if “scientism” has an accepted meaning.
But I think he was on to something. How much is this due to a societal view of people’s choices as “helpless effects of social or genetic causes?”
What I had been talking about that got this response was my objection to the concept of “true love.” I’d said:
“The assault on relationships so rampant in our world, it seems to me, is due to a great extent on viewing love as something people are helpless about. Helpless when they fall into it (and only *hope* they fall in love with a decent person), helpless when they fall out of it, and helpless if they happen to be in a marriage or relationship and start to have feelings for someone else.”
Heh, I was listening in a different window. I’m surprised I remembered the year, 1927 correctly.
This is strange that the first, knee-jerk reaction to obvious madness is search of “root cases” to it – social or psychological. Madness is a simple fact of everyday life: around 1.5% of general population are shizophrenics. It means that in every underground car, where 200 persons are present, in average 3 nut-cases are here. (Even assuming that half of such patients do not commute because they are locked up in mental institutions, this still gives 1.5 of them in every metro car.) Human socialization processes are very complex and prone to errors; ontogeny itself is also not so robust as generally believed. And there is also genetic load, which in principle can not be lowered below certain treshhold by natural selection. No surprizes here.
In modern western society tolerance to every kind of abnormality became a pagan religion. Its proponents imposed on society impossible standards of sensitivity to most weird “feelings” and demand us to sacrifice to it freedom of speech, intellectual honesty, our own natural feelings of reluctance to perversity, unjustly labeled as “phobias”; and, at last, quite predictably, this idol has required human sacrifices.