Why Angry Men Kill—and How to Stop Them Before They Do
some good quotes from the article:
“One of the most challenging reasons that we lack such a system is the nature of the problem. The individual who has anger dysfunction and is violence-prone, unlike almost any other physical or emotional dysfunction, is uniquely, powerfully unappealing. This emotional disorder evokes no empathy in the rest of us. We think “He’s an asshole!” “Expel him from school!” “Lock him up!” “Let him live on the street!” “Teach him a lesson!” Or, simply, “It’s not my problem.””
“The responsibility is on all of us not to turn our backs on the lonely, ostracized and angry, even when we find them off-putting and offensive. The fact that they raise such negative emotions in others should be recognized as evidence of the degree to which they need help. This does not mean that we must take them in, or put our lives at risk, and absolutely does not require that we give them a pass for socially unacceptable behavior. It does not even require that we like them—only that we get professional help for them, and that we do not allow our defensive reaction to them to feed into a vicious cycle of escalating anger.”
Sigh. I do apologize for using this as a jumping-off point about a pet peeve, but –
I hate the way that “get help” (or “get professional help”) is used in contemporary discourse, especially in do-the-reasonable-and-compassionate-thing discourse.
As far as I can tell, it translates to “cast the magic spell that will solve a person’s psychological problems and make him the functional member of society that we want him to be.”
Look. “Help” can be divided into two categories:
1. The kind that might conceivably do some good under some circumstances.
2. The kind that definitely won’t do any good at all.
Category 1 includes various drugs. It also includes therapy sessions where the patient comes in and says “I am desperate to change, I will do anything that might help me change, tell me what to do.” That kind of therapy is (potentially) great…although, even then, it’s important to remember how clunky this technology is and how often it fails to do anything useful whatsoever…but it can’t be applied to people like the ones being discussed in this article, who don’t want to change and who think that you’re the one with the problem. I assume I don’t have to explain why “forcibly drugging your problem citizens” is a horrible minefield of a solution.
Category 2 includes any coercively-assigned therapy session. Having the Nice Lady talk to you for an hour, if you have no respect for either her goals or her methods, does not have any power to make you anything other than “angrier” and “more resentful of the system and its power over you.”
You have to be honest here. You have to say “these people are dangerous and destructive, and we wish they weren’t, but there actually isn’t anything we can do about that.” (And, really, you should have enough respect for their autonomy and identity to say “…and we’re not interested in forcibly altering their personalities just because we find those personalities inconvenient.”) Then you decide what policies are best in terms of security, compassion, sustainability whatever constellation of values you decide that you’re working with.