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If you had heard some of the stories I have from a guy I know who works as an orderly in a hospital for the criminally insane, you would be even more paranoid.
I'm afraid it's far worse than two...
Actually, a 5th child died this morning when she was removed from life support...
IHug your kids... and tell them you love them EVERY CHANCE YOU GET!
IIn todays World... you just NEVER know anymore...Regards,
Andy
People like this are probably damaged beyond repair---the medicines that they need to become reliable, connected member of society probably won't exist for centuries. Under ideal conditions, certain violent individuals probably be rehabilitated, but someone like this... no, I can't imagine it. He's wired for destruction, probably has been for a long time and will continue to be as long as he's alive.
People like this are probably damaged beyond repair---the medicines that they need to become reliable, connected member of society probably won't exist for centuries. Under ideal conditions, certain violent individuals probably be rehabilitated, but someone like this... no, I can't imagine it. He's wired for destruction, probably has been for a long time and will continue to be as long as he's alive.
So..that being said, why is someone like that still a member of society?
Mike
Generally speaking, we have all the methods available to us right now to prevent those who would hurt themselves or others from doing so; but none of these methods will work on the individual determined to do horrible acts anyways.
And I think that the fact that some individuals don't want to be moral and want to be violent is the hardest thing for normal, moral people to wrap their heads around. Some individuals will chose to be horrible no matter what the circumstance, and that is a fact that we need to face.
Paul
I know what you're saying, but the overwhelming stumbling block is identification of the dangerous cases before the fact.
the minds of these people are simply not comprehensible to us; I strongly suspect we can't visualize what's going on in their heads any more than we can imagine what it feels like in the inside of a crocodile's mind.
I am not in full agreement with this notion.
What I mean is that most people who are good people naturally don't want to get into the minds of a "bad" person.
That doesn't mean that we aren't capable of understanding human preditors, or that they are some how alien to the rest of us. This idea is promoted by the understandable tendency to demonize preditors because good people don't want to think that a regular human being could do such a thing.
The thing is, there is nothing special about these preditors. They are just like you or I in more ways then they are not. They are more human, and more similar to good, moral people then they are not. There are only a few elements that are different that makes them monsters to the rest of us.
According to psychiatrist Menninger: "I don't believe in such a thing as the criminal mind, Everyone's mind is criminal; we're all capable of criminal fantasies and thoughts."
Attrocious and horrific acts, although we call them "inhumane," are unfortunatily precisely human. Anyone of us are capable of attrocious acts. You can prove this to yourself; just sit for a minute and think of something attrocious that you yourself could physically do. But of course, your wouldn't. Yet, Any one of us could shot up a school, hurt or torture someone, and the list goes on. Yet, we don't, while a small part of the population does.
What seperates "us" from "them" are simple things like morality, compassion, empathy, but only for the moment. These things are very small and subjective, however significant; and at any given moment changing them could be the difference between a seriel killer or a city worker, a school teacher or a rapist, etc.
These "killer's on the road" aren't from some foreign place; they were born in the same hospitals as the rest of us, and live down the street, shop in the malls, work in the office, etc. They aren't foreign because just as much as there is some of "us" in "them", there is some of "them" in "us".
And that, my friend, is much more frightening then the notion that these people are aliens.
My conception of people like these killers is that they do not see other people as having an inner life, a identity, very much like theirs---they have no sense of affect or personality in anyone else. For them, people are things that it is legitimate to destroy.
I've heard of Menninger's views, but I'm not sure just what kinds of offenders he based them on. I wonder if a clinical acquaintance with Charles Manson, or this Amish school murderer, or that genre, would have given him different perspective... just a thought.
Read Gavin Debeckers book gift of fear.
Some see people as things, others don't. Many see people as people with feelings, thoughts, and emotions, and actually get off on manipulating those through violent acts. They see people as humans, and thrive on the power and satisfaction that being monsterous and horrible towards them brings.
You see, the issue of profiling and prevention came up, and I think that for prevention it is essential to recognize the humaness of these violent individuals. By recognizing this, we can begin to see what factors would cause an otherwise normal human do violence. We need to understand that often these factors are usually not grandious, like the killer was locked in a closet for his entire childhood or something like that. What they are is maladaptive responses and developments of their choosing from occurances that happen to large numbers people, most who choose not to kill.
Only when we realize the normalness of these killers will we be able to successfully seperate what elements are not adaptive, so we can take preventative measures on any scale.
But I don't think that that's quite the same thing as identifying with other people's emotional responses.
If you explain the Golden Rule to a normal child, one with an undamaged capacity for emotional rapport with others, s/he will not have any trouble intuitively grasping the underlying basis of `do unto others as you would have them do unto you'---normal children can picture themselves undergoing something painful caused by another's actions and typically take their own aversion to suffering as a self-evident reason not to subject others to suffering.
From what I've read about autism, the difference between normal and autistic children is that the latter do not see why anything that affects their own emotional state has any implications for how they should relate to other, because autistic children don't feel any connection between themselves and others.
But, in the end, doesn't this amount to saying that yes, what we have to look for are certain tendencies or inclinations in a population which suggest that the people possessing these tendencies are not going to respond to other people according to `normal' restrictions on action---i.e., that their tendency to violence won't be constrained by the fellow-feeling we take to be one of the crucial aspects of `normality'?
This of course is way independent of the question of how you do any kind of screening so that you catch these cases early without having an Orwellian level of routine intervention and monitoring in the lives of individuals...