Quote:
Originally Posted by BirdDancer
I am not religious, so I don't believe in the concept of evil. I rather believe we are all influenced by a combination of nature and nurture, though sometimes much more one than the other.
I don't believe a child is born a racist or terrorist. They are taught/influenced to be. Sadly misguided! Honestly, it's a shame for them. And many criminals without mental illness are brought up under terrible conditions, misguided themselves, perhaps desperate, often influenced by drugs.
So what about psychopaths that kill or torture for "pleasure"? Many psychiatrists do believe they have a mental disorder that made them think dysfunctionally. So, stigma against psychopaths (or say, pedophiles) is particularly harsh because their illnesses seem particularly scary.
"Did he/she choose to have antisocial personality disorder?" Or "Did he/she choose to be taught that killing infidels is good and will result in a better afterlife? That it's a good deed and not a bad one?"
I wrote a blog post sort of on this topic a while back. I did get some angry responses. A fellow person with bipolar disorder wrote that he "sort of agreed with my points, but in the case of pedophiles, he'd be the first one to pick up a gun and shoot them dead or torture them." Well, his strong feelings are indeed more common than rare. Though I absolutely agree that dangerous people must be kept from hurting others, I sort of feel that it's a double standard coming from a person with a mental disorder who claims to hate stigma. So, don't stigmatize people with a mental disorder who are not "as sick" as other people with a mental disorder? Might he be thinking he doesn't deserve to be stigmatized because he can work a full-time job while having bipolar disorder, but I do because I am on disability and a "leech on society", as my brother calls some people, though of course not his little sister.
Mass shootings are horrible tragedies, indeed, for all of the people who lost their lives and the people who loved/cared about them. There are surely plaques with the names of the murdered people on school walls and elsewhere, but those plaques don't include the killer who also may have died that day. It's understandable in this day and age, but those persons are also quite tragic figures.
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Hello Bird Dancer. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I found your post and viewpoint to be very enlightened and rare. We seem to think along similar lines regarding these topics. Not long ago, I watched a Ted Talk given by the mother of one of the Columbine shooters. I found her presentation to be deeply humbling and important. On that terrible day, she was also a mother who lost her child but many people would deny her any comfort or empathy because supposedly "she created a monster." I wonder if you have seen her Ted Talk?
Your points are very well made about selective resistance to stigma. I believe there is another poster on PC who pointed out that some folks living with depression are judgmental of people with "personality disorders" but in his/her view depression is another type of personality disorder. I found that to be a very interesting perspective. I live with chronic depression myself...I've been thinking a lot about that post since I read it.
I agree with you that for someone to live with pedophilia or a desire to hurt or kill others is a tragedy. That does not in any way condone their actions, as you already pointed out, but still remains tragic. I believe the research also indicates that not all pedophiles present in the same way. Some struggle with their feelings their whole lives and never act on them. Some commit criminal acts of which they are ashamed and some (after being caught) seem to take pleasure in those acts and continue to brag about them. My friend and I were talking about child-killers one day. My friend is a loving father of two young children. I asked if becoming a parent changed his thinking at all with regard to child-killers and society's responses to them. His response was profound: "Yes, my thinking has changed because instead of thinking child-killers should be killed by death penalty, now I sometimes wonder what I would do if one of my children grew up to be a child-killer. What would I say? What would I think?"
Sam Harris (neuroscientist) reminds people: "If you had the brain wiring of a serial killer, you'd be killing people too."
What I always come back to is, whether we are comfortable admitting it or not, we are all humans regardless of what we do or say. If someone commits a heinous act, they don't suddenly morph into a new species. And, like you, I do not believe in the concept of abstract "evil" or an evil baby or toddler. I do not support torture or the death penalty under any circumstances. When humans do terrible things, we need to figure out how to prevent them from repeating those acts while still remembering that they are in fact human.
I watched a documentary about solitary confinement..at a U.S. prison where the prisoners are confined to their cell every single day for 23 hours of 24 for many years...often indefinitely. This is not ordered by a judge. The system allows other prisons to send prisoners to that site where solitary confinement is the norm. Supposedly, solitary confinement is designed to make the prisoners safer. However, the reality is that when prisoners are confined to a small cell for 23 of 24 hours every day without interaction or stimuli...they become more and more mentally ill and often more aggressive...therefore they are less safe than before. I perceive it as a form of torture and believe the practice of solitary confinement should be illegal.
Tribalism is a very common and very dangerous human phenomenon. We are all prone to it and must continually monitor our biases. To say that some humans deserve peace and safety while others deserve to be tortured or to die via death sentence is another form of tribalism. "We are right and good, they are wrong and bad, therefore they must be punished." As I said in another post, that one idea has been used by humans all over the world for as long as there have been humans...to hurt, torture, or destroy other humans. When we turn our backs on living peacefully, (there is no peace to be found in torturing criminals) we could wind up on a road leading to the destruction of others. Nobody is "pure" or completely free from the biases of tribalism...we have to self-monitor and hopefully surround ourselves with others who self-monitor....in order to live in peace.