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October 16, 2002

Snipe hunting

In a prior blog my belief that people do evil things because they justify them, not because they intended on doing evil, ala Enron. The first time I gave much thought to this concept was just after the Columbine shootings. I had to ask why, like everyone else, but instead of getting mired in emotional reasonings like, "they were pure evil!", I wondered what rational thoughts could lead to such an irrational conclusion. I also believe people have a hard time killing other 'people'. That is to say, its hard to kill someone you view as equal. For example, in the case of war, we train our soldiers not to view the enemy as 'people', but as the enemy. They are killing 'enemies', not people. In the case of the Columbine shooting I wondered if the other students hadn't stirred the hatred of the shooters to such a degree that they no longer looked at their peers as people, but as enemies.

This thinking requires a little more stretching with the sniper. Assuming this person isn't evil (quite an assumption), how would he justify his actions as a non-evil action. Probably in a similar fashion the Columbine students did, by dehumanizing the people he shot, such that he was not killing other people. Of course its a big stretch to go from dehumanizing students who are actively making your life a living hell, to dehumanizing everyone around you such that you can justify killing people at random. If we look at the recent acts of terrorism, however, we can see that it is possible to dehumanize an entire country or culture. In fact, just that very thing has been done for centuries. In the last century we saw the jews dehumanized by propaganda such that the average german citizen could justify the inhumane acts done to the jews. It is just as likely our sniper is, for some reason, so angered by our culture and the people around him, he has dehumanized them to a point where he can justify killing them.

To make this idea of murder not being murder by changing the status of the one being murdered, think about how hard of a time it would be to kill your pet cat or dog. However, we wouldn't think twice about killing a cow, even though they are both mammals. I'm sure Kasei might applaud that analogy for other reasons.

The next question is WHY does this person hate this culture so much. It could be the waste he perceives around him. It might be the materialism he sees and can't stand. It might even be that he can't stand our countries arrogance which was triggered by our response to 9/11 and/or Iraq. We can speculate, but we will probably need to ask the man himself as Derek suggests. If we were smart, we would listen to his reason and attempt to understand what would bring a man to such depths. We probably won't though. We'll use so much energy vilifying the man, we won't have it in us to look at ourselves. Thats what happened in Columbine.

I was going to say something about how I am not justifying this mans actions (nor the Columbine kids), but I hope it is understood that such actions can never be justified. To find a reason is different from justification. One assumes moral correctness, the other is just a statement of fact.

Posted by wonko at October 16, 2002 03:23 AM

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Posted by: kasei at October 16, 2002 07:22 AM

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