Is Violence "Crazy"?
I've become more and more uncomfortable with "Boy that Jared Loughner is craaaaazy" talk. Like Time's diving in to be servicey: "If You Think Someone is Mentally Ill: Loughner's 6 Warning Signs." Time says it's "easy to see" that he's crazy: because he laughed randomly a lot and posed strange questions! That's literally what those mental health experts over there suggest. Which: uh oh? Am I headed for a psych eval again? But people's first rationale for Loughner being crazy is that he shot a bunch of people. (Their second is that he believed that language enslaved you—yeah, well, so did bell hooks—and something something the gold standard—which, have you been to rural Vermont recently, for instance, or other parts of the U.S. where these beliefs about currency are actually rather common?) So the point is that people commit heinous, antisocial acts of violence all the time and we don't think they're crazy. And on the other side? Most of society's "crazy people" (which range from perhaps you and I to a number of less "functional" people) don't actually commit violence. But in our minds, thanks probably to the TV, people are most crazy when they are 1. weird and 2. mass murderers. But then you have to start asking hard questions, like: is bin Laden a murderous monster who knows what he's doing? Or is he "crazy"?
I'm going to run this question by the voices in my head and get back to you.
I agree, and there's a good Sciency (that's a word) take-down of mental illness as reason for violence over at slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2280619/
I remember in 8th grade Sociology class (I know. Right?) the teacher wrote on the blackboard, Is Mankind Fundamentally Good or Evil?, and I instantly started waving my arm, and yelled out, "Good!!" But Donny Miller–who liked to attach firecrackers to grasshoppers, said "Evil! Real, REAL evil!" but then Lori Epstein looked up from her nails, slowly raised her hand, and sighed, "Depends on the man."
DId Lori smile in that supercilious way that she had when she knew she'd gotten in good with the teacher? That used to piss me off. That and the pilgrim collars.
This one kid Ed White used to do weird things like crap his pants and then throw his underwear away in the boys bathroom. There was quite a crowd and it was really hard to get up close and have a look yourself to see that, yes, there was indeed some stained underwear in the garbage. It didn't take long to find out who was missing some underwear.
I had the unfortunate fate of being in line for recess once ahead of Ed and as the line suddenly stopped, Ed, who had been holding a sharpened pencil inches from the back of my head kept moving forward and the pencil entered just behind my right ear.
I wonder some days what ever happened to Ed.
The insanity charge also betrays a certain amount of intellectual laziness and unaccountability, since as soon as a given act is deemed "crazy" and thereby relegated to the outskirts of what we're most comfortable defining as "civilized" society we absolve ourselves of asking or fielding any of the tough questions about what role we might have played on a cultural level.
But then again I read a lot of Foucault in undergrad, so I may just have a thing for bald men with the crazy-eye.
Boy do I have the the shirt for your crazy/reading needs.
THANK YOU.
(but not on the Foucault thing. That just nasty)
I may be crazy but in my defense, I am also sexy and cool.
I'm going to run this by Gnarls Barkley, Prince, and Patsy Kline and get back to you.
Seal might also have something to say on this topic.
And can we also agree that his mugshot is not a "face of evil" or whatever? Just a douchebag trying to look scary.
This x Infinity
Yep.
Time says it's "easy to see" that he's crazy: because he laughed randomly a lot and posed strange questions!
He was on VYou?
bell hooks [sic] isn't crazy, just a solipsistic hack.
Violence isn't crazier than most aspects of Right-wing beliefs and lifestyle, just more violent.
I mean you'd gotta be crazy to think we need food industry deregulation and regressive taxation, right?
Well, OK, maybe killing a bunch of a people is a bit lacking, as far as criteria for crazy.
On the other hand, people thought he was crazy before he killed people. Not merely eccentric, crazy. People who liked him thought this, even. Is that maybe…I dunno…suggestive of something or other?
We like our crazy people because it affirms our right to snowflake specialness: craziness in the end becomes just another offshoot of individualism, if maybe more Free to Be You and Me than Ayn Rand.
They thought he was "crazy," as per Choire's argument above, meaning they conflated abnormalities in behavior with actual mental illness or psychosis, despite lacking any qualifications or expertise to do so.
A layperson positing this view is engaging in pure conjecture, which is fine as long as it's recognized as such and not accepted as a legitimate diagnosis.
Doesn't using the word "abnormalities" imply the same kind of judgement call you're ostensibly trying to avoid?
Abnormal vis-a-vis one's own perspective. I thought that was a given. YOU ARE CLEARLY INSANE.
Some of the signs from the TIME article include that he was a regular pot smoker and that he read a poem out loud in a creative writing class which included a line about touching himself in the shower.
But the article itself isn't just a hindsight is 20/20. It's entitled "If You Think Someone is Mentally Ill" and essentially argues that the mere threat of someone going off the rails should be enough to detain someone involuntarily due to mental illness. Is just being a person who makes other people uncomfortable enough to warrant a lose of rights?
But taking away the rights of people who make us uncomfortable is the American way!
Choire seems to me to be arguing something more problematically broad here, though: not simply that we should not circumscribe a person's rights until a professional says they suffer from an authentic mental illness (which seems reasonable to me) but that we can't trust our instincts that someone's behavior is something other than eccentric or weird until a doctor weighs in.
I had to google "bell hooks" to make sure people weren't referring to Bill Hicks in some weird inside-jokey way.
I bet Jared Loughner like Bill Hicks. All philosophical potheads do.
He might still be shown to be mentally ill, but you're completely right that him killing a bunch of people is not any indication of insanity. People want to talk away the rationality of evil actions, because they mistake rationality with correctness.
I use the Joker as my benchmark for craziness.
And there's also of course the way "crazy" flattens a volatile set of brain functions into a persistent part of your identity! My armchair assessment would be that dude was clearly going through a bad period and needed some treatment, and "why didn't he get it rather than being simply ejected from various institutions" seems like a valid question, maybe. But if it hadn't been let to get to a point where he engaged in these traumatic acts maybe he could've been perfectly fine. Or whatever!
I'm not sure about bin Laden, but I'd wager you could diagnose most of the low-level terrorist functionaries we catch with some form of mental illness. Certainly after we get done with them, in any case.
Well, you could diagnose a lot of people with some form of mental illness, but that doesn't necessarily make them a danger to others, or the cause of their danger.
It's actually kind of freaking me out all the different ways this thing is making me think of Foucault.
I mean, "strange questions" doesn't really cover what exactly he was talking about, e.g. taking mind control as a given, accusing everyone of illiteracy, etc.
There's also the part where "crazy" is a pretty meaningless word! There are actual diagnoses here.
something something This Week on Sunday something Dick Armey "blah blah spittle THROWING POP PSYCHOLOGY AROUND" something something.
The way I rant about the BCS when I've had a beer or two would probably qualify me as "crazy".
i mean, wouldn't it be nice if pop starlets weren't our metric for acceptable intellect? because it seems we could all benefit as a society to quit dumbing everything down and use our vacabulary – like you know, is this guy a sociopath (which it sounds like he is) or is he a psychopath (which would imply an involuntary loss of control)??????
and oh, how could maybe our society help these individuals cope if we recognized them as such, to reiterate so many comments above.
I think there's a real aspect of in-group/out-group to this. In-group? Mentally ill! Out-group? Terrorist!
We only think killing makes a person crazy when it's not logically connected to the killer's greater purpose or to some understandable emotion: Bin Laden's not crazy (arguably) because he uses murder in a calculated way to bring about a certain goal (again, arguably!). A guy who kills his wife's lover isn't crazy because, well, we get that – it's no fun when someone cheats on you. But this guy who shot Giffords, we look at what he did and all we can say is, "What the hell?"
Am I really the only one here who watched Loughner's YouTube channel and thought, "Wow, dude's crazy"?
I mean, I'll grant that being a murderer doesn't make one crazy — although something about a political assassination becoming such totally indiscriminate violence does seem to indicate a lack of self-control. Also, I agree that the "signs" discussed in the Time article are idiotic, and its thesis — that this would be a better world if more people were detained for seeming crazy — borders on evil.
But the dude's YouTube rants are a series of clearly nonsensical statements wedged into formal logical structure. The whole point of that structure is that it's so basic that it makes illogical statements like the ones he posted sound completely stupid. But this guy lacked the reasoning faculties to differentiate between the rhythm of a logical premise and its substance.
THAT SEEMS CRAZY TO ME, EVERYBODY. Not "oh my god detain him before he shoots someone" crazy, sure, but Time Cube crazy? Hell yes! I don't think that makes me a bad guy.
I'm with this guy.
The implication that mentally ill people ought to be locked up because this one asshole shot somebody is terrifying and will probably take hold among certain fear-addicted demographics.
This guy just seems impressionable and desperate to seem smart to me. Nothing in his rants is original or came from him. Even the grammar stuff (as that other blog pointed out) was something he read about on the internet: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/spring/full-colon-miller.
Yep, mentally ill people should be left where they rightfully belong: on the sidewalk next to my front door.