VT Massacre: Why did he do it?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Katherine S. Newman, author of a book on school shootings suggests that peers see them as losers and they want to show themselves to be important; to “go out in a blaze of glory”, like a super hero or something.
[/QUOTE]

The thing is, if that was what he wanted, this was the wrong way to go about it. Everyone’s talking about what wonderful people the victims were, and what a loss it is. About Cho, they’re saying, “He was a weirdo,” and why. He’s actually brought, if not glory, certainly praise, to his victims, while casting a spotlight on his aberrations. The whole world knows him now, sure. He only thought he was hated before.

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I think in his mind’s eye he didn’t want to be cast as a super hero so much as the personification of a vengeful God.

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[QUOTE=Queen Bruin]

The 16th century called. They want their worldview back.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think that’s a fair criticism of Scumpup’s comment. There are evil people in the world. Simply because someone is suffering from mental illness doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re powerless against their illness. For that matter, while the reports I’ve read about Cho’s manifesto highlight a number of obvious signs of instability, there’s little in the reports to leave me thinking he was unable to differentiate between right and wrong - rather he was so angry that he didn’t care about it. Which is a different thing altogether.

I don’t know why Cho chose to do this, and frankly, I suspect that on the most basic level we’ll never know. I’d lean towards a fundamental lack of empathy - perhaps even straight solipcism, but again those just describe his behaviors, not explaining why.

24

I saw someone on CNN this morning who said that Asians, and Koreans in particular, tend to not deal with mental illness in the same way others do. It is considered shameful and not something that you would discuss outside the family. I have no stats on that, but if it’s true, it would explain why this guy’s behavior would have gone on like this for so long.

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[QUOTE=Kalhoun]
I saw someone on CNN this morning who said that Asians, and Koreans in particular, tend to not deal with mental illness in the same way others do. It is considered shameful and not something that you would discuss outside the family.
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Actually, that doesn’t sound any different from how mental illness is treated in American culture.

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[QUOTE=Telemark]
Actually, that doesn’t sound any different from how mental illness is treated in American culture.
[/QUOTE]

I’d be interested in seeing the percentages. The Korean talking head said it was her experience that it is worse among Koreans.

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I think he may have been sexually abused, he referred to John Mark Karr and Debra Lafave.

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[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Simply because someone is suffering from mental illness doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re powerless against their illness.
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You don’t really understand his sort of mental illness. People who make the remarks you and Scumpup make think that these people might act ‘wierd’, but think just like you. You are dead wrong. They actually completely believe totally bizarre and illogical things the way you believe the grass you walk on is green. His type of mental illness impedes logical thinking. Sure, he was hostile, but he was angry at imagined wrongs. You see someone looking at you and think (if you even notice it) that it’s just a person looking at you. Someone like Cho sees someone looking at him and firmly believes the person looking at him is plotting to kill him.

You can’t grok that because your brain works ok. Go find some books by people who have suffered mental illnesses. They’ll shock you with the things they fully believed when they were ill.

In fact, I just saw a show about mental illnesses the other night. You saw a psychiatrist speaking to a patient who, in one short time, was talking about the 75 billion dollars he had and how he owned half of Montreal but he sold it to an Italian family - a nice family, no drugs or anything, but it was Paul McCartney, his business manager who arranged the sale. And Paul was his business manager because he himself looked like Paul. The man then, when the psychologist said maybe he didn’t look like Paul, rubbed two fingers over his forehead, each cheek, and his chin and then rubbed his whole face with both hands three times - then he spread his hands apart and then said ‘see? Paul McCartney!’. He did this several times until the doctor finally agreed that the guy looked like Paul.

Afterward the doctor said this guy has been doing this for twenty years!

This is just a sample of the kind of utterly disordered thinking that someone with a mental illness can have. Now Cho also suffered, they say, from paranoia, which means he believed that the world was conspiring against him, in this case, he felt he had been victimized by the world - he may even have had hallucinations that he was being physically harmed by others.

He wasn’t ‘evil’. He just had a seriously broken brain.

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[QUOTE=Telemark]
Actually, that doesn’t sound any different from how mental illness is treated in American culture.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t have any statistics, but my best friend for years was Chinese-American (born in China, but grew up mostly in the US) and when we “broke up” as friends, several years into getting her Psy.D. She certainly believed, anyway, that Asian (or at least Chinese) culture was suspicious of psychology. When she changed her major in college from Economics to Psychology, her dad freaked out until she managed to convince him that psychologists don’t live in cardboard boxes on the street.

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Besides, I think that although people in the US don’t necessarily talk about mental illness, scads of statistics show that we are indeed being treated for it…in droves.

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/40/17/1-a

It appears we’ve got 11M prescriptions out there.

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I read something yesterday that relatives from Korea said that he was autistic. That, along with the fact that he was picked on in high school kind of put some of the puzzle together for me.

IMNA psychologist, but what I thing might have been going on in his head:

 Getting picked on builds up a fair amount of ager in a person. Add to that the fact that being autistic, he wasn't going to make frieds or try other activites to vent that anger, and suddenly what is being bottled up in an already fragile psyche becomes a raging interal inferno.

 He goes to college. Inside in mind he knows that people are cruel. Those people saying hello or trying to be his friend are just trying to set him up to be picked on, how dare they. Teacher disturbed by his writings, and girls worried by his stalking behavior reinforce his belife that the world is against him, so...
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[QUOTE=Kalhoun]
I saw someone on CNN this morning who said that Asians, and Koreans in particular, tend to not deal with mental illness in the same way others do. It is considered shameful and not something that you would discuss outside the family. I have no stats on that, but if it’s true, it would explain why this guy’s behavior would have gone on like this for so long.
[/QUOTE]

It wasn’t too long ago that this was how mental illness was dealth with in the US. You shipped the crazy person off to an asylum and forgot about them. Family members pretended like the person had died, or never even existed, and doctors encouraged that, because they knew that the incarcerated person would probably spend the rest of their life locked up anyway.

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[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
I don’t think that’s a fair criticism of Scumpup’s comment. There are evil people in the world.
[/QUOTE]

Blaming ‘evil’ for social ills is IMO pretty ignorant.

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Maybe he is evil or cuckoo or whatever, or maybe he isn’t, but in either case those descriptions don’t do us much good. We can’t exactly just splash holy water on evil people and bring them back into the light of society…

Okay, so now we’re seeing a few possibilities… maybe he was sexually abused, autistic, picked on, paranoid, schizophrenic, or all of the above. Hmm.

I wonder: Was he always this way? Has anyone mentioned what his high school or family lives were like?

And Quiddity Glomfuster, did those doctors ever say how they “got through” to their patients? Or did they? How did the mentally ill guys recover and write books?

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[QUOTE=Reply]
Maybe he is evil or cuckoo or whatever, or maybe he isn’t, but in either case those descriptions don’t do us much good. We can’t exactly just splash holy water on evil people and bring them back into the light of society…

[/QUOTE]

:rolleyes: If ‘evil’ people exist, why the hell wouldn’t that be a viable option? Look, I’m not trying to say that slaughtering 32 people is OK, but people have seriously got to look at the root of the problem rather than assigning some nebulous and nonsensical descriptor to it. I understand that people have a hard time wrapping their brain around sociopathic behavior, but just dismissing it as ‘evil’ does nothing to prevent this sort of behavior and IMO is thisclose to “the Devil made me do it” mentality.

The kid was mentally fucking ill. Go sit down with the DSM-IV-TR for an afternoon.

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[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]
You can’t grok that because your brain works ok. Go find some books by people who have suffered mental illnesses. They’ll shock you with the things they fully believed when they were ill.

<snip>
He wasn’t ‘evil’. He just had a seriously broken brain.
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First off, Quiddity, a little background: My brain is FUBAR. I’m a mental health consumer of long standing, and can’t get a job because of it. Don’t tell me to read up on mental illness. At least not in a general sense, if you have a specific point to make, or a specific argument you wish to point out to me, that’s one thing. Do not assume I’m uneducated, unaware, and ignorant of mental illness issues.
Second, I’m not saying his brain wasn’t broken. I’m saying that he chose to respond to his broken brain, his anger, and delusions by deliberately trying to kill vast numbers of general oppressors - knowing that he wasn’t going to actually reach the heart of any of the conspiracies against him. IOW, he chose to kill people who were easy targets, not the ones responsible (in his mind) for his problems.

Or to put it another way, he chose to react by killing random people who may or may not have offended him. Even if one accepts the delusions put forth in his manifesto, his response is not that of someone reacting to a threat - it’s a fucking tantrum.

That he killed isn’t what makes his actions evil, in my mind. It’s how he chose his victims that make them evil. And, again, the impression I have from his manifesto, is that even though he was highly delusional, he still met the legal standard for accountability for his actions in being able to recognize that what he was going to do was wrong.

Queen Bruin, I’m not trying to say that evil is anything but a description of his actions, at this point. But to deny that ‘evil’ (Or if you insist on a more technical term: sociopathy, sadism, or the like.) can be a potential explaination is likewise limiting, I think. I also would need some strong evidence to accept that what happened at VT this week was the result of a ‘social ill’ rather than a single person’s insane reaction to a situation.

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[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]

Queen Bruin, I’m not trying to say that evil is anything but a description of his actions, at this point. But to deny that ‘evil’ (Or if you insist on a more technical term: sociopathy, sadism, or the like.) can be a potential explaination is likewise limiting, I think. I also would need some strong evidence to accept that what happened at VT this week was the result of a ‘social ill’ rather than a single person’s insane reaction to a situation.
[/QUOTE]

Insanity != an outside supernatural force.

The massacre itself is a social ill, as in problem that occurs in society (i.e. school shootings, murder, etc. etc.). I did not mean a “sociological illness,” although it is probably a factor in Cho’s behavior.

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[QUOTE=Queen Bruin]
Insanity != an outside supernatural force.
[/QUOTE]

When did evil=an outside supernatural force? I agree that’s a medieval world-view, but that’s not the common use of the word these days, I don’t think. From Dictionary.com, the first, most common, definition for evil mentions nothing about supernatural possession, so I don’t think it’s just me that doesn’t share your definition of the word. (I grant that the fourteenth of the listed definitions is a specific reference to Satan, and some of the other ones could be interpreted to mean an outside supernatural force, but those are far from being the majority of the listings.)

The word evil is often used to describe the acts of people like Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, without ever implying any supernatural aspect to them or their actions. Why can’t we use that same word to describe the acts of Cho?

Saying that it doesn’t explain any of the causes of the acts is one thing, and one I’ll agree with, even. Saying that to label someone evil means that you’re accusing them of demonic possession seems a bit wild. There are people like Ted Bundy, Charles Ng, or even Arthur Shawcross - all of whom I believe suffer or suffered from some forms of mental illness, but all of whom were also judged competent to be held accountable for their actions, and all of whom I believe are/were evil men. There isn’t always a more satisfying, more reasonable, explaination for why people do senseless things - sometimes it’s just done because they want to.

39

Simply saying “he did it because he is evil” is not the same as describing his acts as nefarious. I don’t think anyone tried to argue against that. But describing his motivating force as “evil” deflects further investigation and encourages active ignorance. If you [generic you] want to keep things like this from happening in society, saying “he’s evil - case closed” isn’t going to lead anywhere. It’s a dead end answer, and it’s one that belongs to ages past.

With that said, I am bowing out of this thread.

40

[QUOTE=Queen Bruin]
:rolleyes: If ‘evil’ people exist, why the hell wouldn’t that be a viable option? Look, I’m not trying to say that slaughtering 32 people is OK, but people have seriously got to look at the root of the problem rather than assigning some nebulous and nonsensical descriptor to it. I understand that people have a hard time wrapping their brain around sociopathic behavior, but just dismissing it as ‘evil’ does nothing to prevent this sort of behavior and IMO is thisclose to “the Devil made me do it” mentality.
[/QUOTE]

Why the rolleyes? You said the same thing I was trying to say. Maybe I just wasn’t clear.

OtakuLoki, that’s a good point about the various definitions of evil… but wouldn’t that be an indicator that the word has gotten too ambiguous? Unless people define it before every use, it just causes misunderstandings like the one in this thread.