Tuesday, April 24, 2007 Malilong: Cho Seung-Hui By Frank Malilong The Other Side
TOMES will, without doubt, be written about Cho Seung-Hui, the pervert who mowed down 32 victims at Virginia Tech. Theories will be offered as to why he committed mass murder. Already, stories are coming out about the lonely life that he lived. He will not be wanting in sympathy, that’s for sure.
It is probably true that society is partly to blame for turning Cho into a ruthless killing machine. In 1977, American writer James Lopiparo observed how behavioral scientists “have been wrestling with the causes and effects of violence” and predicted that they will be doing so forever.
He cited Freud, who believed that “man is instinctually aggressive and that within all of us there is a drive leading us to destroy ourselves or, if the aggression is directed outward, to destroy others.”
On the other hand, while Konrad Lorenz, who is renowned for his studies of animal behavior, “feels that human aggressiveness is biologically caused”, it becomes “a destructive force through the shaping and molding of society.”
“The frightening implication about Lorenz’s theory,” Lopiraro wrote, “is that this aggressive energy needs no special stimulus to set it off (although humans find no difficulty encountering triggering stimuli), and so its dangerous quality is further enhanced by its unpredictability.”
But if, as the behaviorists like Lorenz assert, aggression is caused by the circumstances of living in our society, how come only very few, although their number is growing, actually express aggression through physical violence?
There must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in this world who feel misunderstood, abandoned, oppressed and desperately lonely. How nearer are they to squeezing the trigger than all the others?
And what could society have done to help Cho? Ought his teachers have personally handcuffed him at the first hint of madness and brought him to a psychiatric institution for treatment and rehabilitation? Are his classmates to blame for not giving him extra tender loving care?
Where, by the way, were his father and mother? Isn’t the rearing of children the primary responsibility of parents? Or is it society’s fault that they’re so poor they have no time to look after their children?
So society is to blame, too. But even as we say our mea culpa, we should not forget who aimed the gun at his helpless victims and squeezed the trigger not once but many times with deliberate intent to cause carnage.
The worst thing that could happen is for Cho to be portrayed and remembered as victim, instead of killer. Then the 32 victims shall have suffered a second and more painful death.
