Reply to Why do I feel sympathetic towards the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

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[quote=Anonymous]I think people have touched on two different points that are both true. One is that there are psychopaths in the world -- people who are "wired wrong" from birth, who actually are operating under a different set of rules and motivations from most other human beings because they have no empathy. Bundy is a clear example. Eric Harris is (probably) another. I find it entirely possible, based on the reports we have so far, that Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have been one of these. But maybe not. Which brings me to  my second point. There are a lot of people who commit criminal acts who are not psychopaths. For these people, they started out normal and went down a wrong path, made bad decisions, some impulsively (the Jovan Belcher case comes to mind as an example of this). Or, they come to believe in an ideology so deeply that it causes them to lose empathy for the group that is the target of the ideology (many German citizens during the Holocaust participated in unspeakable crimes because the ideology they came to believe said that Jews were less than human and thus undeserving of empathy).

It is fine and normal to feel anger toward people who commit heinous acts that cost others their lives and limbs. But it behooves us as a society to move beyond pure rage and to seek understanding of why the non-psychopaths end up committing crimes -- not to grieve for them but to try to prevent future crimes. Understanding how ideology can undermine empathy -- and how to stop that from happening -- is particularly important.

That said, I do feel some sadness for this kid. I just can't imagine how on earth doing this could have been worth forfeiting his life. Did he really feel he had nothing to live for? It is just baffling.  Unlike Adam Lanza, who clearly didn't have anything to live for (in anyone's eyes, including, apparently, his). And yet, despite the fact that Newtown shook me to the core and I cried buckets for those kids and still think about those parents every day, I feel strangely sad for Lanza too. What, if anything, could have been done to prevent his spiral into darkness?

I'm sorry some of you feel too angry to be able to entertain these questions. But I refuse to be told what a "normal" response is to a tragedy or be called names because I'm not itching to kill the killers.

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