The
recent mass shooting at a movie theater here in Colorado is a classic
example of evil. The death of potentially hundreds of people was
coldly planned for months. The randomness of the targets suggests
that they were but objects in the murderer's mind, with no value as
fellow human beings.
Objectification
of people, which I've traced as a key enabler of evil, is also at the
root of the vast plundering done by people seeking perpetually
increasing power for themselves or those they work for. The
difference is scale: the theater killer exercised the ultimate
power, the power of life and death, over a much smaller number than
many leaders of organizations (such as businesses, governments, and
religious institutions) have the potential to affect.
Predictably,
a lot of attention has been directed toward the issue of
accessibility to guns. Guns are relevant only because they are
extremely efficient multipliers of power that don't by design ensure
that their users are capable, or willing, to exercise a proportional
amount of responsibility. Cultural tools, such as education and
enforceable laws of behavior need to be in place to fill that gap,
and clearly they weren't.
We
are left more vulnerable to these kinds of events as cultural tools
are disabled, removed, or rendered incapable of being improved or
replaced with better ones. Similarly, we are at increasing risk of
being harmed when the designs of our tools are left to the whims of
people who either can't or won't anticipate and mitigate the tools'
potential negative impacts on people and their environments. Without
some outside force (such as an all-powerful – and preferably
benevolent – deity, for which there is no evidence of existence) to
protect us from ourselves, we must rely on each other to instill and
exercise responsibility so we can keep the risk of harm to a minimum.
There
are some of us who will harm people for reasons that can't be
anticipated or offset. They must be deprived of the power to do so,
by isolation or other means. To the extent that a society is willing
and capable of doing so, it will survive, but it must constantly try
to build up its ability to anticipate and mitigate such threats while
enabling people to achieve maximum happiness. If we abandon this
challenge, we do so at our great peril.
