Motivational Seeking

The news feeds I follow contain much debate about that man who went on the murder rampage in Atlanta last week and whether he was motivated by anti-Asian racism. It was a pretty horrible thing to do, no matter what drove that guy and it's curious to me that some people seem to think it can or should be narrowed down to one reason. Misogyny and racism would certainly seem high on the list of factors but a person that screwed-up might have a pretty long list.

I think back to a college-type course I took back in the seventies about Criminology. The instructor, who seemed overwhelmingly qualified to teach that subject, got to talking about a kind of novel or movie that was prevalent then. They were stories in which the crime-solver caught the serial murderer by studying what little was known about that serial murderer — his actions, his modus operandi — and achieving some sort of mental connection.

The premise was that to catch someone who was criminally-insane, the Good Guy had to go to the darkest of places and think like the criminally-insane…and my instructor said that was largely hokum. You couldn't think like a crazy person any more than you could think like a cocker spaniel or a grizzly bear. The serial killer might as well have been of a different species and he — assuming it was a he — might have no conscious thought as to why they were doing what they were doing.

There was a limit, my teacher said, to the usefulness of applying rational reasoning to irrational thinking; of trying to put yourself in the place of someone who would do something you would never in a million years do. He said, "A truly crazy person might kill someone because he didn't like the color of their socks or because the Mind-Masters of Saturn told him to."

I don't think it's quite as pointless as that and I certainly don't think any of the motives ascribed to the Atlanta killer — hatred of a race, hatred of a gender, sex addiction, et al — can be ruled out. I just think maybe we sometimes try too hard to boil these things down to a one-sentence explanation when it might take a book the length of one of Stephen King's to really explain it. A lot of that book might very well be in the language of the Mind-Masters of Saturn.

We should fight racism and misogyny and all other kinds of hate in every way possible. We just shouldn't think they explain everything.