When people start to do really bad things....

On 14 December 2012 a maniac, Adam Lanza, in Newtown Connecticut went on a shooting spree that left over 20 children and 6 teachers dead. At the same time a similarly incomprehensible event took place in China, where one Min Yongjun stabbed 23 children, including chopping one child’s ears off. Last year, in Norway, in an act of terrible violence, a smiling Behring Breivik went on a shooting spree killing 69 people at a Youth Camp; this after bombing a government building earlier in the day, where 8 died.

 

Violence committed against children is probably the easiest and least contentious to classify as horrific and of inexcusable evil. But what about other acts? What about suicide bombers? The victims are almost always random, and are as likely to include children as not. It seems we live in a world where we are not yet able to explain, scientifically/ medically, why these sorts of things happen.

 

Some, on the face of it, might appear easier to explain, if not justify. A suicide bomber has presumably been brainwashed into believing whole sale slaughter and sacrifice will lead to a positive outcome for him or her, both in terms of the cause they support and for them personally as individuals. In these cases, personal dysfunction has met collective dysfunction as morally and intellectually bankrupt ideologies confront the 21 century and are exposed by its immense challenges and realities. Classification of them as lunatics or fanatics is easy, truly understanding what turn individuals into these killers is not so simple, but it is becoming increasingly important that science is able to do so.

 

Take Youngjun above, a severe epileptic. Local Chinese Government reports say he had been “strongly psychologically affected” by the wave of ridiculous speculation and hype about the end of the world on 21 December. If this somehow triggered his horrifying attacks, then in retrospect, could this ever have been predicted? At the very least, his and the others acts should focus our attention on the science of mental instability, and specifically, what genetic, environmental or sensory triggers, internal or external, can suddenly compel people to behave like this.

 

This is becoming increasingly important, because the world is becoming an ever more challenging environment in which to exist, both for individuals and collectively. Our ways of life are changing faster than at any previous time in the history of the human race. And it is these changes, which as they speed up and multiply, it will prove ever more difficult for dysfunctional individuals, communities and the more conservative sectors of society to adjust in future.

 

As individuals, we are facing pressures and challenges that simply did not exist just a few generations ago and for which perhaps our current state of evolution is going to leave us increasingly unprepared. As technology arcs at increasing speed up a curve of progress tending towards the vertical, it draws lifestyles, social behaviours, economies and all sorts of issues which influence us along in its slipstream. It seems highly likely that the speed of this transformation will mean that increasing numbers of us, individually and collectively are destined to be left stumbling in its wake as it accelerates away from us.

 

For instance, in the east, the move from an agrarian society to an urbanised one has taken place in a generation; it took place at a much slower more measured pace in Europe (although still quickly). In East Asia and China a generation is emerging from universities with degrees in computer science that will have grandparents, if not even parents, who worked in an agrarian economy. Although this illustrates just one particular aspect of this huge process of global change, clearly just from this we can see how the scale of economic and social transformation is simply breath-taking.

 

Change on this scale and at this pace can only have major implications for the societies experience them, and indirectly, on all of us regardless. How as individuals we respond is going to be increasingly difficult to predict. The impact upon established norms of behaviour will become increasingly powerful (and disruptive), and how those mentally "less able to cope" respond (and I don't mean those who we might currently classify as suffering from any mental condition) may seem to be increasing dysfunctional.

 

The same will apply to societies and social groups who find sacred and cherished beliefs and perspectives challenged, even overwhelmed. The manner of their reaction cannot always be known or predicted yet, in one small and chilling illustration of this risk, the recent attack by the Taliban on a Pakistani teenage girl for promoting the right of girls to attend school, demonstrates how ridged and backward ideologies react to perceived changes to their status quo.

 

I am not for a moment suggesting in any way that the terrible killings or acts mentioned above, can simply be blamed on poorly managed lunatics' inability to cope with accelerating technology or medieval mind-sets confronting reality.

 

It may be though, and this is the somewhat obscure point to the blog I guess, in the years ahead an inability to adapt smoothly to what will become a technological, social, economic and political tsunami that gets faster and faster, may see increasingly frequent acts of dysfunctional and often tragic behaviour. This will be from the swelling numbers of individuals, groups and communities whose coping mechanisms have become redundant in a world that is overwhelming all that they understand and whose speed of endless transformation means their previously manageable and understood ways of life are vanishing before their eyes. 

Also see "Future Shock"