In my book No Second Chance: A Reality Based Guide to Self-Defense I offer an argument against one point of the criminal justice trinity (the trinity being motive, means, & opportunity). I argued that knowing "why" a vile predator does what he does provides us with little to no useful information about how to protect ourselves or, in most cases, how to punish once apprehended. And yes, I will cop to using the word "punish" deliberately-in the case of violent crime I have no need for rehabilitation-incarceration and punishment are moral compromises I'm willing to make.
To be clear, I am only addressing the uselessness of ascribing motives-we can learn to prevent and protect ourselves better by understanding how an act of violence is committed, but beyond that determination I am skeptical.
I bring this argument up again because a spate of heinous mass killings has occurred and with these occurrences we are treated to numerous speculations as to "why" these crimes were committed. These speculations run the usual gamut of he was "troubled," the subject was a "loner," the perpetrator was on "medication" et cetera, et cetera. As if these "reasons" have any explanatory value whatsoever-they don't. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
I understand the visceral drive to want to understand, to make sense of what has occurred, but I submit that we simply can not ever understand why some one would behave as horribly or cruelly as these individuals do. The reason we will never be able to understand is twofold, and that twofold reason is at once simple and complex. Let's tackle the complex first.
Human beings are story-driven animals. A species with a passion for narrative. We all assemble events into threads that provide meaning to our lives, stories to make sense of our world. We tell stories to ourselves all of the time and accept them as true when, if we get right down to it, we know that they are not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling us heartless liars deliberately dissembling (well, some folks live that way) but I am saying that we prevaricate left and right and give little thought to it.
Case in point; ask yourself (or anyone for that matter) why they love their wife or their husband. Ask them why they are so passionate for a given hobby or sports team. Ask them any such personal subjective question that propriety will permit and you will, more than likely, be offered a short but sweet account of how or why such and such kismet occurred. "He just had the greatest smile and when he gave me flowers for no reason, I knew." "She is caring. I saw how she helped this little girl who was lost at the mall and that was it." "Kazushi Sakuraba is my favorite fighter because of his low-single." Short, sweet fables we use as a sort of narrative shorthand to explain ourselves when in fact, these stories may not be true.
I'm not saying that the illustrative couples don't have great smiles or help lost children or even that Sakuraba has a poor low single (he has an excellent low-single). What I am saying is that there is far more to all stories than what we hear (or tell when we are the interrogated). Let's face it, there are simple tests to determine if the short-hand answers are, indeed, the whole truth; we should be able to test them experimentally. Have 100 men with great smiles deliver flowers to your wife and see if she falls in love with all of them (or any significant proportion of them for that matter). Expose your husband to 100 women of similar disposition and looks helping children in the mall and see if a divorce is imminent. Show me a fighter with a better low single and see if I rearrange my favorite fighter list.
I wager that we all have more complex reasons for why we do what we do than we tell or may even be aware of. So much of what we do, even the smallest of tasks has multiple drivers fueling our motivations. Let's be honest here, have we not all looked at the innocuous behavior of our own loved ones (spouses, children, friends, co-workers) and wondered "What the hell were they thinking to make them do that?" If we are honest, we must admit that it is hard enough to fathom the motivations of those we know well. With our own complex and somewhat unknowable selves in mind consider how much more complicated will be the tangle of choices and chance that go into the making of a decision to kill?
This tendency to weave stories to explain ourselves to ourselves is known as the narrative fallacy-don't let that word fallacy rankle you-we all do it. I'm not being insulting, I'm just pointing out that there's more to why we love, hate, do anything than we tell even our own ourselves, so how can we possibly expect to know what's going on inside another's skull when our own motivations might often be more fuzzy than we realize. When we couple this tendency to possibly not really understand our own deepest motivations with trying to fathom the acts of another, acts that are so far outside the kin of common decency or humanity we are likely to settle on a rationalization that sounds reasonable, but is probably as far from the truth as the likelihood of your wife falling for every florist with good dental hygiene who comes her way.
So why do these predators do what they do? Because they want to. Why do we do what we do? Because we want to, that's why. That's really all there is to it. Pathologizing the motivations of the predators seems to my way of thinking a sort of concession to misplaced compassion. If I can rationalize that a malevolent individual had a troubled life, that may help me with my narrative fallacy tale but it may also start a kernel of clemency where none is deserved. All of our compassion in the aftermath of predation by duty should fall to the victims and those close to the victims. Any hint of "Well, he was troubled" or "He didn't have friends" 'He was a loner" et cetera that may cause someone somewhere to concede a bit of compassion towards those who have wrought destruction seems an unmitigated moral error on two counts.
The first, well, I'll allow this quote from Adam Smith to make the point far better than I
"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
The second point, by "excusing" or mitigating responsibility no matter to what degree, by falling upon unproven narrative assumptions such as "troubled," "friendless," "loner," whatever designation you want to explain/excuse a treacherous act with, do we not consider just how inconsiderate or out and out insulting it is to all other citizens out there who might be troubled, lonely, friendless, what have you, but in spite of these "afflictions" do not render mayhem upon those around them.
Most loners lead productive lives, as a matter of fact many loners author over-long articles. The vast majority of troubled people seek aid or loved ones assist them in finding aid. In a nation with some figures approaching as many as 50% of the populace on medication for "mood disorders" qualifying ½ of all of us as "mentally ill" (assuming you accept this wide-blanket of diagnoses) it seems that a fortunate infinitesimally small number of us resort to atrocity. I contend that these explanatory labels hold no power and unjustly malign those who share the labels and yet remain decent, civilized human beings.
A final point regarding this motive-searching moral cutting-of-slack. By making any behavior we do not understand or simply dislike (major or minor, benign or malignant) a form of pathology, that is, saying one can't help such and such behavior because of this or that diagnoses then we have created a dichotomy where we ignore the other side of that reasoning. The other side of that reasoning, if we are consistent, should also devalue the good among us.
If we state that individuals are not responsible for their bad behavior because of such and such "malady" then we must also accept the fact that good behavior deserves no credit as it is simply the flip side of pathology-good people and good acts are the result of fortunate bio-chemistry, or well-adjusted neurology. I don't think anyone really buys that premise as we never dismiss or denigrate the actions of a philanthropist or hero as an odd bio-chemical quirk; rather we heap praise on them they justly deserve for a freely chosen action. They did good because they wanted to. And many of us aspire to their example. And how do we aspire? By rushing to the medicine cabinet or counselor for our dose of altruism pills or nobility counseling? No, by freely choosing to behave in ways that more closely emulate that which we want to be like.
Those who do evil do so because they want to. Period. Any further explanation is likely a narrative fallacy and we must not lose sight of the fact that the labels we use in our narrative may be doing a disservice to those who share those labels by mere association. Also, by removing one iota of responsibility from the wicked we in turn cheapen the good among us.
Let's park our compassion with the victims, the heroes, the vast majority of good folks in the world and stop "trying" to understand the bad among us. Let's not diagnose with faulty ideas and then subject society to restrictions based upon these falsehoods. Let's call a spade a spade-just like us, these animals do what they do because they want to.
