How can hurting people one doesn’t know, be a solution to personal disappointments? What could possibly be satisfying about shooting a crowd of people who have gathered for prayer or driving a truck of explosives into a market place? This is the baseline profile of the social killer. We do not seem to be prepared for it because, as a society which has designed numerous systems to keep order, we are failing quite spectacularly to identify human time bombs as they grow in our midst.
We have to ask ourselves what makes a random killer or a terrorist because, it is a phenomenon on the rise. Are we, all of us, in some sense, to blame for an atmosphere and a moral environment which has produced the kind of person, who was surely not with us 50 years ago? In keeping with the exhibitionism of our times, the shooter live-streamed his demonic act.
As technology establishes its dominion over our lives and demolishes distance and time, it also erupts in wrinkles and fissures between people and communities. The very screen which brings virtual landscapes and personalities into your life in an exciting way, also gives you close-ups of differences which were, at one time, blurred by distance. But when messages are sent out repeatedly about the possible threat to local communities from visitor races arriving in search of a better life, it is not very difficult to introduce a thread of fear and move on to active campaigns against populations whose origins lie elsewhere in the world.
Matters of consequence
With isolation and loneliness intensifying and alienation from parents following hard upon teenage years, youngsters spend a lot of time away from their families, and possibly with people they have never met face-to-face, but who reach into their minds through devices. Gradually, wreaking violence on strangers appears more and more attractive and an answer to imaginary grievances and slights. A young man who has grown up without a parent or parents, or neglected by the surviving caretaker or aunt or grandparent, begins to feel an anger against everyone and everything. Someone who plays an electronic game of death and ‘taking’ characters ‘out’— what if he or she shifts to ‘taking out’ real life people?
“New Zealand was a safe place. Until now,” opened an email I received from my writer friend who is visiting family in that country. When the perpetrator shows not the slightest repentance for what he has done, it signals an ethical emergency which anyone who has anything to do with raising children and training young minds, needs to counter. There are researched courses on how to be a better manager of people, a better speaker, and so on. What about a course on being a better person?
A dramatic 18th century painting by Benigne-Gagneraux shows four powerful horses: black, roan, grey and brown being controlled and halted in full gallop. Their reins are held back by a delicate looking youth, unclothed, but for a robe wrapped decoratively about his middle. The helmet and sword of Mars, the Greek god of war, lie on the ground. His chariot stands still. The genius of peace, of freedom has won without weapons. Art and literature have a great deal to teach us, if only we would find the time to draw on our heritage of humanism. If readings in peace and personal ethics are not taught in schools and actively worked into curricula all over the world, at the undergraduate level, with teacher training to support it, we can never hope for better times.
The writer is Series Editor, Living in Harmony, OUP India.
