I wish the answers would be this easy. I think of those "heroes" in wartime who kill the enemy in large numbers and then are rewarded with medals. And I think too of their comrades who are less "courageous" and can't find the anger and will to kill.
People go "off the deep end" for a variety of reasons. Sometimes rewarded for their actions and sometimes punished. This Norwegian killer clearly believed he was doing the right thing. Horrible. A monster. How do we identify those individuals who are at the margin and might do harm. And there are those at the margin who end up artists or operating wall street hedge funds. I am oversimplifying but I think that looking at brain structures might be useful and early childhood experiences, etc. But to think that we can identify this sort of person early on and treat him or otherwise deal with him is simplistic. In a time of war this sort of person might otherwise emerge as a national hero for the way in which he dealt with the enemy. arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, July 23, 2011 4:11 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] The shibboleths of "human rights" and "the free market" 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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