Op-Ed Contributors

Are we barking up the wrong tree?

By Patrick Mattimore (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-02 07:48

In China, we have had several individuals who have enlarged the target of their frustrations. Obviously, there has been a copycat element because the means, details and targets of the executions are so similar.

But the fact that these disturbed men successfully targeted larger audiences than other similarly disturbed people around the world who have committed suicide or murdered a loved one is not a statement about a larger societal problem. We should not confuse the tragic outcome of the acts of a few men with a larger non-existent message.

Imagine, for example, a jumbo plane that crashes with only a pilot and co-pilot aboard, and one which is full of passengers. The latter event is obviously more tragic because of the number of human lives lost. But neither crash, by itself, reveals anything more deeply about the cause of the event. Certainly, in the case of the passenger-full plane, we might more quickly suspect sabotage. But in the event that a subsequent investigation of the two accidents suggests that both were the result of mechanical failures or pilot errors, we should not construct a larger lesson to be gleaned from the second crash.

Unfortunately, when we explain the acts of the people who attacked the schoolchildren as part of a larger societal problem, we have allowed the magnitude of the result to influence our analysis of the cause.

Societies should work to mitigate the suffering of people who are mentally ill and/or profoundly depressed. Societies must also act to protect us from those disturbed individuals and those with criminal intentions.

Sometimes, though, we just have to admit that we don't know what causes people to lash out in seemingly irrational ways, and while we might charge societies with finding ways to help mitigate those tragedies, we should not climb into rabbit holes to "prove" that it is our societies that are somehow causing them.

The author is a fellow at the Institute for Analytic Journalism and a former psychology teacher. He will be an adjunct professor in a Masters of Law program at Tsinghua University this summer.

(China Daily 06/02/2010 page9)