They’re Not Mentally Ill… They’re Terrorists
October 4, 2006 by Laura | Trackback URI
Patterico’s latest Stashiu interview is facinating. Among other things, it directly refutes the concept that these men are crazy. They’re not any crazier than the rest of us, that is to say,
[t]he incidence of true mental illness was exactly the same as stateside correctional facilities, between 16 and 17 percent.
You don’t have to be mentally ill to be evil. They’re two entirely different concepts. Additionally, this post puts to bed the idea that these men are not intelligent or capable of planning. They are bright, well organized, and purposeful in their actions. There is a demonstrable connection between what they say and what they do.
Read it all.
I would be surprised if it were the case that they were mentally ill. After WW II, people started talking about the “ordinariness” of the men and women who perpetrated such atrocities in German. I don’t recall who said it, but this phenomena was called the “banality of evil.”
Evil is always most frightening when it arises out of the ordinary. It is the unexciting people, people just like you and I, who are capable of some of the darkest acts.
GK Chesterton’s detective character, Father Brown, was asked how he understood the criminal mind so well. Father Brown replied that he simply thought what it would be like if he had committed the crime. His questioner was astounded, sure that their was no way to even imagine that a man like Father Brown could commit such acts.
Father Brown replied, “I am not frightened of the evil that I can imagine. It is when I stop being able to imagine it, when I think that I am incapable of some evil act, that I will be most likely to fall victim to it”
That’s a great point. I was so intrigued by the concept of the “banality of evil” that I did a little Googling on it and found this book.
I guess it is more comfortable for us to think of evil as being extraordinary and foreign to our nature, when of course that’s about as far from the truth as you can get.