Monday this week marked the 16th anniversary of the terrorist attack on Littleton, Colorado at Columbine High School. I watched Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine that day, purely by coincidence. There were a couple of things that struck me about the film. One of them was the way in which people talked about the attack, the way in which the "how could this have happened to us?" became a narrative about good, innocent people just trying to live decently in a world that can be gripped by a nigh inexplicable violence. Michael Moore's project was to explain that seemingly incomprehensible violence through a fear-driven culture. But there was one place Michael Moore, fashioning himself as a "man of the people", could not have gone. How is it that in a land where everyone is "good people," bad things continue to happen? Could it really be possible that we are all good people?
Well, hold on. Not everyone is good people. Somewhere, lurking in our communities, there are the psychopaths and the deviants. They--especially the psychopaths--are so adept at parroting our values back to us that they can live completely undetected in our societies until they decide on their moment to strike. We're the good people, and they, the others, are the evil psychopaths.
If only it were so simple. We all have a capacity for cruelty, and we all have the capacity to empathize with others, even with psychopaths. In the context of studying maximum security prisons, Professor Lorna A. Rhodes interviewed guards about the fear of "contamination" they experience when interacting with inmates labelled as psychopaths. There is an assumed predictability to psychopathic behavior because it is characterized as ruthlessly rational. But if it is so easy for us to inhabit the mind of a psychopath, and if contamination is such a threat to the extent that the line between psychopath and investigator can be made indistinguishable, then is there really such a stable boundary between the good "us" and the evil "them"?
Well, hold on. Not everyone is good people. Somewhere, lurking in our communities, there are the psychopaths and the deviants. They--especially the psychopaths--are so adept at parroting our values back to us that they can live completely undetected in our societies until they decide on their moment to strike. We're the good people, and they, the others, are the evil psychopaths.
If only it were so simple. We all have a capacity for cruelty, and we all have the capacity to empathize with others, even with psychopaths. In the context of studying maximum security prisons, Professor Lorna A. Rhodes interviewed guards about the fear of "contamination" they experience when interacting with inmates labelled as psychopaths. There is an assumed predictability to psychopathic behavior because it is characterized as ruthlessly rational. But if it is so easy for us to inhabit the mind of a psychopath, and if contamination is such a threat to the extent that the line between psychopath and investigator can be made indistinguishable, then is there really such a stable boundary between the good "us" and the evil "them"?