Understanding and Preventing Violence: The Psychology of Human Destructiveness PDF

Preface

To choose to be constructive rather than destructive, we need to know the difference. Typically, however, only large or even extreme differences grab our attention in such a way that we are impelled to action. During the course of my writing this book in the 1990s, certain relatively subtle destructive influences damaging to human life, that were long in the simmering stages, finally began to grab attention in the U.S., particularly the surge in youth violence during the early and middle 1990s.

Overall, rates of lethal criminality in the U.S. lessened in the late 1990s, though not enough to remove the country from the list of the world's violent crime leaders. Meanwhile, certain more massively destructive events, such as the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Federal Center in Oklahoma City, were extraordinary; they were so different from "ordinary" violent crimes as to stir concern of a different kind and level. Those planned "sneak attacks" were utter surprises, the deadly results of conspiratorial planning by covertly organized groups. School violence in the late 1990s, including Colorado's Columbine High School lethal gun and bomb attack that resulted in 15 deaths, combined some of the ingredients of recent kinds of killing with other ingredients that brought terrorism even closer to home. The attacks featured both guns and bombs, youth violence, conspiratorial planning and execution, and a seemingly naive and unsuspecting citizenry ranging through parents, police, school officials, and students — all of them connected by partial, insufficient awareness of the student perpetrators' destructive mentality.

The Columbine tragedy resulted in a mix of reactions and responses. Many suspects were named: the personalities and the alienation of the perpetrating students, the easy availability of guns and bomb-making instructions, violence in the media and in entertainment of almost every sort, parental neglect, police underestimation of threatening behavior, inadequate school security systems, students who looked down on other less-popular students, and so on. As can be understood — but only when the true complexity of violence causation is understood — none of these suspected factors is singularly causative nor are any irrelevant. Not knowing how to understand, together with the wish to deny and not understand such tragic events, results in helpless, despairing conclusions such as, "We will never understand."

Hopefully, and for a change, certain somewhat more thought-out initiatives to prevent further violence have begun to be considered. For example, "the marketing of mayhem in movies, music, and video games," which became blatantly obvious in the 1990s, was finally getting more concentrated federal attention (Broder, 1999) and restrictions on gun availability became seriously considered. But attention peaks in the reactive period immediately after a sensationally destructive event and then fades.

We seem always to need more mayhem to provoke admission of the obvious. Following a further series of "madman shootings," a September 1999 editorial in the New York Times admitted that the "pathology" involved was not merely in the immediate perpetrators: "But there is only one overriding pathology, and it is guns" (Grasping the Obvious Pathology, 1999, page A22). Earlier that month, television's NBC News aired the Centers for Disease Control report that the U.S. has 250 million guns and nine times the rate of gun deaths than the average of the other industrialized nations. The data are available, but denial and deliberate obfuscation of the obvious retards understanding.

No initiatives will really succeed unless they are informed by sober realizations of the longer-term synergistic patterns of violence causation. These patterns must be understood by as many people as possible so that wise initiatives and constructive responses will have powerful grass roots support. We cannot merely depend on government leaders who, inevitably, must follow public opinion at least as much as they lead it.

Adequate understanding of how to counter the age-old problem of violence requires deeper and broader knowledge than we gather from current events at home in the U.S. We are rapidly becoming a world society affected by myriad cultures with deep historical roots. If we remain nearsighted and culture-bound, we will continue to be more reactive rather than knowledgeably initiating constructive changes.

Assuming that we want a long run for humanity on this Earth — a questionable assumption discussed early in this book — we need to discover the complex causation of both destructive and constructive behavior. In the process, we will have to unmask the denial and evasion of discovery that serve to perpetuate and escalate violence.

Why must we come to understand the subtleties of human mentality and relationships? After all, it's not rocket science. No, it's not. The art and science of constructive human relationships is far more difficult than rocket science! Even a glance at the 20th century shows that rockets with ever greater power, range, and precision are being developed at an accelerating rate while human destructiveness is also developing at an accelerating rate. We must dedicate ourselves to the demonstrably more difficult challenge. Humans have clearly demonstrated that rocket science is easy indeed compared to human relationships.

This book is meant to convey a deep and lasting explanation of destructive behavior and mentality to make possible constructive action by as many people as possible. We need everyone to become powerful enough to be a definite constructive influence.