Making Sense of the Senseless…

Nathan started an interesting thread over at the Convocation of Combat Arts. In it he cites a horrific murder spree. I later added the recent Marine puppy-tossing story to the mix.

Nathan:

I guess I’m kind of glad that I still have the capacity to be shocked.

Now I don’t know the Marine’s background, psychological history, etc., and I’m not making excuses for what he did, if he did it. What I do know is that from having worked in two prisons I know that your environment can start to affect you in a bad way. It happens to both inmates and the people who have to work in such an environment. All you need is to put someone with questionable morals, pre-existing psychological problems, or a tendency for violence into a place full of evil and you can quite literally create a better beast.

So if you are still shocked by events like these be happy because you still have your humanity.

I still have memories of several incidents that were telling me I needed to get out of prison while I still had a piece of my humanity. Here’s one: I was assigned to roving patrol. This meant you had the freedom to “rove” wherever. It also meant you were a first responder when an incident broke out.

So one day I am making my way into the segregation unit. This particular unit housed the so-called “worst of the worst”. It also had it’s own mini-yard because you could not mix these inmates with the general population. Now on the second floor of this unit there was a U-shaped walkway that overlooked the yard. It was encased with glass so if you were standing on one side you could see anyone who happened to be on the other side of the walkway.

I had just entered the unit and sauntered over to the window. Looking down into the recreation yard I see two inmates beating the hell out of each other. I look up and standing at the other window watching is one of the unit caseworkers. This guy had at least 10 years in the system and was one of those people who was going through the motions emotionally.

Well the thing is both he and I had radios. Yet here we both were watching the same fight and neither of us was giving a tinker’s damn, nor were we calling it in. The thing is when staff break up fights staff often gets hurt. After having both seen dozens of fights (in his case probably hundreds), after having seen good staff getting hurt, and after having been in those fights yourself, well, it’s very easy not to not care or turn a “blind eye”. Think about it: Good people protecting rapists, murders, and child molesters from other rapists, murders, and child molesters. Yet it’s the state’s responsibility to ensure that those evil people are protected.

Anyhow, our eyes eventually met and I could see by his look that emotionally he had checked out long ago. However, after a few seconds, he picked up his radio and called it in. Once we got enough staff on the scene I joined in the fun of breaking up another fight. To this day I don’t know how long he watched that fight go on before I got there. Nor do I know how long he would have let it continue had I not walked up on the scene.

(This answers the occasional question I get of of why I changed careers and chose to work in education.)

Years later I had the concept of Yin Yang explained to me and it happens to be one of my favorite metaphors for explaining good and evil.

Ironically, it’s depicted as black and white yet the last thing it represents is black and white thinking.

People often see things in extremes, with no middle ground — good or bad, perfect versus useless, success or failure, right against wrong, moral versus immoral, and so on. By doing this, they miss the reality that things rarely are one way or the other but usually somewhere in-between. In other words, there are shades of grey. Another name for this distortion is all-or-nothing thinking. It involves self-talk like:

• ‘If it’s not perfect, then it’s useless.’
• ‘If you don’t love me, then you must hate me.’
• ‘Either I succeed, or I’m a total failure.’
• ‘If I mess up this part, I may as well give up the whole thing.’

If I’ve learned anything, outside of certain historical, scientific, or mathematical facts, very few things in life are completely certain, completely true, or completely good. More often they fall into that fuzzy grey area that often cause folks who are not used to thinking in these terms, a lot of discomfort.

That link I posted talks about the marine who is alleged to have tossed a puppy off a cliff. It also talks about other marines who have expressed outrage over the event and even tells of a group of soldiers who, for many months now, have been running an operation to save animals hurt in the Iraq war. So, don’t fall victim to black and white thinking and label all soldiers as killers of animals, or soulless people who kill without conscience.

By now your wondering how Ying Yang applies to all this? Here’s the metaphor, as taught to me: Look at the above symbol. The large black area represents all that is evil while the large white area represents all that is good. Notice the little black and white dots? The little white dot in the sea of evil means that even in the most horrifically bad place, good can still happen. Kinda like prison workers who risk their lives to save evil people from evil people. Now the little black dot in the sea of white means that evil can still happen in the holiest of places. Kinda like a priest who molests a child in a church.

This is why leaders, bosses, parents, authorities, law makers, etc., set themselves up for failure when they think they can make someone be totally good, totally perfect, etc. That having been noted, each situation should have acceptable standards and if someone is not meeting that standard then corrective action needs to be taken. For example, this means that a boss should allow for imperfections in an employee but at some point when the employee crosses a certain line, corrective action needs to be taken. Or, if that marine is found guilty of violating military rules concerning the alleged puppy-toss, again, corrective action should be took.

“Take action before things get out of hand. The tallest tree begins as a tiny sprout”. ~Tao Te Ching

Anyhow, I’ll close with a video that explains Ying Yang. The lady speaks in Chinese but there are subtitles that you can read. At about 1:30 she talks about my good and evil metaphor.

from bpatterson67.vodpod. posted with vodpod

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(Note: Martial Views also has some interesting thoughts on the problem of violence.)

~BCP