I got a terrible hair cut today. The hairdresser looked like my high school PC teacher (which was frightening in itself) and she was so bad at her craft that I left the salon with the hairstyle of a 12 year old bogan child. However, a somewhat minor compensation for the fact that she destroyed my hair was that she shared some interesting insights into the twisted minds of men who commit murder suicides. You could say that I came home ugly but enlightened.
She has a friend who is a criminologist and has studied murder suicide cases in which fathers kill their children. Now when I saw these cases reported on TV I would always jump to the conclusion that the man felt emotionally disconnected from his children and, seeing them as the property of his wife, killed them in an act of revenge against her. Not so! Apparently the man loves his children immensely and believes himself to be such an important figure in their lives that they literally cannot live without him. He convinces himself that it is within their best interests to die rather than be removed from his custody and returned to their mother. He often kills the mother as well in order to spare her the pain of having to live without her children.
Anyway, this information has lead me to make two wildly unsubstantiated conclusions about the nature of evil;
1. 'Evil' and 'Selfishness' are almost interchangeable terms. Evil is selfishness that was taken too far. It is what happens when your sense of self worth becomes so inflated that you believe yourself to be at once central to the lives of others and intrinsically superior. Eg; the father who believes he is imperative to his child's livlihood, the teenage gun man who believes all his peers are privately making fun of him and plotting against him.
2. People who do evil things don't believe their actions are evil. Everyone - even a man who is prepared to kill his own children - lives in a universe in which they are the ultimate good guy.
What can I say, it messes with my mind.
Maree
1 comments:
That reminds me of this book I saw at the uni bookshop, but not because it seemed more focused on good people doing bad things and the idea that ... I'm not entirely sure what it was saying because I didn't end up buying it. I was going to but was tempted by Jane Eyre ad Mozart. I succumbed. Despite what you say about Jane Eyre I still liked it :P but anyway.
Your theory does make sense though and the criminologist's stuff sounds interesting. Seriously though, getting your hair cut by someone with murder-suicides on the mind probably isn't that great an idea lol. Not that you could possibly have known, but y'know!
I'm sure it doesn't look that bad, lol. Still. LOL. PC teachers. Haha, memories.
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