Thank goodness, the 32 year-old Norwegian multiple assassin on Utoya
Island yesterday was arrested by the police and not killed. This way,
we might find out more of what has gone on inside the aberrant mind
that caused the deaths of so many innocent young people (apparently
more than 80 according to some media this morning). Too often, lone
killers like this are themselves quickly killed in turn and, apart
from hearsay and supposition after the event, we never fully discover
the reasons more precisely.
Was it a brain tumour growing in a crucial part of his brain and
which affected his emotional control? Unlikely, because the
preceding bombing in Oslo and the killings on the island were
premeditated. Does he have a genetic defect which makes him prone to
violence? Improbable, because this would have already revealed
itself. Did he have an unusual upbringing as a child? At puberty, was
his behaviour strangely different from the norm? As an adolescent and
young adult, did he tend to be a loner with few, if any, close friends?
As to the last three questions -- highly likely. At least, that is
the usual profile of lone killers. The same might also apply to the
nurse, currently under arrest in England, who is alleged to have
killed five or more patients in her care by interfering with their
saline drips. Why do we need to know the minds of these people? It
isn't to prevent mass murders in the future. These happen so rarely,
and the childhood symptoms are often so hidden, that we can never
hope to precisely identify such individuals in the years before the act.
We need to know more about the childhood and adolescence of rare
abnormals because this is the quickest way into understanding the
minds of normals. For example, the fastest pace of knowledge about
the precise structure of our brains came from the work of Alexander
Luria in the 1950s who studied brain-damaged survivors of World War
II and the specific handicaps that were caused by bullet and shrapnel
damage in small specific areas of the brain. This knowledge could
never have been gained from normal brains because our ethical culture
would have prevented the sorts of controlled experiments that
scientists usually carry out. (Although today we can probe the brains
of normal people harmlessly by using magnetic imaging machines, the
whole field of brain science would have been delayed by many years
without Luria's pathfinding work.)
In the same way, we need to know more about the accidents of abnormal
childhoods and adolescence in order, if possible, to avoid them in
the upbringing of the vast majority of children and young people. In
our original hunter-gatherer days, most children within a group or a
tribe were brought up in almost identical circumstances and were
treated similarly by all the adults as they grew up. Increasingly
since then, children within any given culture have very different
experiences. Today, in every advanced country, even by the tender
years of puberty, there are several years of difference in
educational skills and social abilities between the lowest classes
and the elites.
And these differences tend to perseverate for the rest of their
lives. It is this childhood phenomenon which is far more important
than the fashionable parrotings of "human rights" by the left-wing or
"the free market" by the right-wing. They're just ideological
abstractions uttered by the would-be manipulators. The fate of an
individual lies far more the luck of the draw of his or her childhood
than in any political shibboleths. Similarly, the health of a culture
(what we now call economic success) depends far more on the
collectivity of childhoods throughout rather than in the particular
type of governance.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/07/
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