12:54am May 28, 2014

so-all-of-this-rar-clearly-mentally-unstable

ramblingandpie:

So all of this “Rar, clearly mentally unstable, sane people just don’t kill people!” stuff has got me thinking.

Sane people do it all the time.

Terrorists who do suicide bombings think they are doing it for the greater good.

Kids in gangs kill people to fit in with a group.

Men kill their…

This is important.

One of the reasons people naturally jump to assuming a killer must be mentally ill is this idea that a “normal” person wouldn’t do such a thing. After all, they wouldn’t kill someone, and neither would their friends. Wouldn’t there have to be something desperately different and wrong about you and your mind in order to be willing to consider something so repulsive?

Except that normal people kill all the time.

Ordinary American soldiers kill. They have to in order to survive and carry out their jobs. They sometimes say being in that environment and being forced to kill or be killed changes you. Given the right environment, a “normal” person can become a killer. (Or a torturer. The Milgram obedience study is a great example).

Then there’s people like Hitler’s followers, or Stalin’s secret police, or terrorists today who walk into cafes and restaurants and blow themselves up. They don’t appear mentally unstable, and statistically given how many such people there were and are, they couldn’t have all been. What they all had in common was an idea that there was something more important than human life. (This is the reason I can’t stand to see people throwing around language like “kill x sort of people” on Tumblr, because I can see where it leads, given critical mass and access to weapons). That something can be religion, political ideology, nationalism, even revenge for oppression; the ideas can even be good ones. Once you see an idea as more important than a person’s life, it’s not such a stretch to use it to justify murder, or commit it yourself. This happens enough that it’s probably just a “normal” part of the way people are wired.

So stop throwing mentally ill people under the bus. Yes, it stigmatizes them and is probably the main reason why mentally ill people are more likely to be victims than committers of crime. But it also isn’t even accurate. “Normal,” sane people kill, for reasons that hit close to home. (After all, many of us strongly invested in certain beliefs have come dangerously close to valuing them over the lives of our opponents, at least). But until we acknowledge that we can kill, too, I don’t think we can confront these tendencies and end the violence.

This is the thing that makes me perhaps the angriest of all. And it’s the hardest thing to penetrate.

There’s this assumption in people’s minds that evil is something done by other people, particularly crazy people.

And that becomes “You would have to be crazy to do this evil thing. No sane person would do this evil thing.”

Except sane people are some of the most violent people on the planet. They abuse and kill people with astonishing regularity in homes, in schools, in institutions, everywhere, every day.

Bullying is normal. Bullying is normalized. Bullies grow up to positions of prestige. Bullies are overwhelmingly sane people. Bullies do things like this too. Nobody keeps an eye out for them, because most people can remember either being one of them or supporting them in some way.

Anyone can be evil. This means that when someone does something especially evil, you don’t leap to “They have to have been touched in the head.” All but a handful of the most people i’ve known who’ve done the worst evil? Neurologically, they were completely normal. And the handful who weren’t? Their unusual neurological status was not why they did evil things (although boy did one of them get away with so much by claiming it was because she had a psychiatric disability… she allowed people to assume it was that, so that they’d feel sorry for her instead of getting mad at her). People really need to divorce the idea of ‘evil’ from the idea of 'crazy’. They aren’t the same thing. And “Nobody could do something that wrong unless they had something wrong with their head” is a horrible assumption that mostly leads to the persecution of people with psychiatric disabilities. It doesn’t save lives to think like that, it only ruins lives.

Notes: