Wackos, Nutcases, And Serial Killers - Is This The Price Of Democracy?

Anand Shilotri lived in the village of Gorhe, Maharashtra, India and since the age of fourteen when he went amok, killed the neighbor's cow, scattered his chickens, and set fire to his house, he was chained in the basement of his home, a pukka two-story building built by his father, Malhotra Shilotri, landlord, banker, agribusinessman, and high-caste doyen of the village. Out of sight, out of mind was the elder Shilotri's meme, especially when he had a reputation to uphold. 

 

There was no question of counselling, psychiatric treatment, or community care in those days.  God had punished Malhotra for some sin of his past or his past's past, and he must suffer the consequences.  As much as he wanted to do away with the 'thing' in the basement, do away with howling and banging, and release the family from shame and misery, he could not.  A devout Hindu, Malhotra Shilotri believed in the divine and his wisdom. 

This sense of the divine exonerated him from any humane treatment of the young man.  If God had seen fit to deliver this abomination to him, then Malhotra had no duties other than to keep him alive until he was taken by the Almighty and sent to whatever celestial abode thought appropriate or reincarnated into a better being. 

No one in the village thought any less of Malhotra.  God forbid they should have a son like Anand, and if they had, he would be just as summarily chained and locked away from public view.  There was an important internal polity within the village - a common, universal intent to keep things on an even keel according to caste and religious prescription so as to ensure the spiritual evolution promised to everyone. 

The villagers of Gorhe remembered 'Buffalo Boy', a demented Kshatriya who stole away from his charpoy in the middle of the night to sleep with the animals in the shed.  He was given a good talking to by his parents and the village priest, but it did little good, and every morning the boy was found in the shed on the straw with the buffalos.  When the village headman found him eating fodder from the trough meant for the animals, he told the boy's father to lock him up and never again let him see the light of day. 

 

Now, of course from a modern Western perspective, such treatment of both the Shilotri son and Buffalo Boy would be unconscionable, there are many in America where for all intents and purposes it has more demented people than the whole world combined.  The streets of San Francisco alone are filled with the howling, demented, and totally deranged, many of whom have been released from state mental facilities in the belief that mainstreaming and community care represent a more humane, patient-centered approach to mental illness.

This of course is only a minor irritation.  Most of these former inmates are harmless enough and for the sake of humanitarianism, San Franciscans put up with public defecation, rag tents, and sexual exposure.  The real problem in America is hidden derangement.  The outwardly normal seeming, dutiful, honorably discharged churchgoing citizen who one day hears the voice of God telling him that the devil incarnate is abroad in the land and that he must do his existential duty to eradicate all those who harbor him.

It happens all the time. When the brain circuits go haywire and synapses spark and arc, these unhinged psycho-misfits pick up an AK-47 and go mad, whirling dervishes operating in some weird other world until in moment of glory, they put the barrel of the rifle in their mouths and pull the trigger. 

Then there are there are the martyrs, the true believers who feel that elimination of the infidel is in God's plan.  It only takes a cursory look at the Quran and to read of the apostasy of the infidel and the need for a purified, God-fearing Islamic caliphate.  Killing Jews, the arch-infidel, is only logical. 

Yet these acts, no matter how justified they might seem to the perpetrator, are expressions of madness - apocalyptic visions of divine justice and Allah's will and images of an Armageddon of fire and destruction are products of minds unhinged from spiritual intent.  When such apocalyptic fanatics are whipped into a frenzy by politicians and urged to random violence, the result is ISIS. 

The fiery anti-Semitic rhetoric of the pro-Palestinian Left in America is no different than that of ISIS, and infected, enraged, and mad with murderous passion someone takes a rifle and kills the infidel. 

Rational people, those with the hinges on emotional trap doors still in place, don't murder.  It takes something loose to make the leap from political commitment to murder. 

Yet this does not explain the seemingly perpetual random violence happening every day in America - a murder spree unmatched anywhere else in the world. 

For answers perhaps one needs to look at Gorhe, India and the story of the Shilotri family who at the first sign of anti-social behavior resorted to absolute, consequential, immediate action.  Not only should the deranged be removed from society, but all behavior suggestive of such insanity nipped in the bud.

The Fifties in America, by all accounts a civil decade, was a period of both universal ethos, discipline, and a demand for social centrism.  Aberrant behavior was censured, ridiculed, and outlawed.  The great movement of 'diversity', identity, and inclusivity was not even a second thought.  The moral, religious, and secular standards of proper social behavior mitigated if not removed anti-social individual expression. 

The American Left calls the Fifties 'the cipher generation', the decade of emptiness, falsity, fantasy, and control; but such standards of commonality and universal probity caught the unhinged before the trap door opened.  It was like one widespread net thrown over everyone to assure compliance. 

Any untoward, persistent disobedience meant reform school.  If social pressure and opprobrium were not enough, then incarceration followed. There was no hesitation to cast out 'the other' as societies have done since the first human settlements.  A moral, social, cultural homogeneity enabled peace, modest prosperity, and hope. 

Especially now in the age of surveillance, there are ways to pick up antisocial behavior in children.  Sentient recognition software has become so sophisticated that it can identify possible terrorist threats simply by reading posture, expression, and facial configuration.  Such software can be deployed in schools to monitor every student and identify warning signs.   The same can be deployed more widely. 

An Orwellian state? Perhaps, but in many ways America has become an almost ungovernable society. Tolerance for 'the other', a remarkable bye for anti-social and potentially violent behavior can only encourage it.  Worse, the culture of identity and victimhood virtually sanction reprisals against perceived oppression and discrimination. 

Once again when someone whose hinges on the trap door are starting to rattle hears that he is aggrieved and must action against his oppressors and picks up a weapon and starts shooting. 

The Left has disparaged family values - the centrality of intact nuclear families, faith, community, respect, honor, patriotism, and civic responsibility - as being somehow racist and anti-progressive.  These are white values, progressives claim, and cannot serve the interests of minorities.  Yet these values have been at the core of social integrity since the first great civilizations.  No society has survived without a central, universal moral ethos.  America has lost any semblance of this ethos. 

The problem of course is not guns, it is those who pull the trigger; and in America today there are too many factors which either tolerate or encourage mad, anti-social behavior for the violence to stop. Structural change is required, that is a fundamental, radical change in the conception of a good society.  It is not one broken, split, and divided by the promotion of race, gender, and ethnicity; one whose citizens are urged to take matters into their own hands, resist oppression, and act however violently. It is one which values commonality, universality, and commonality.  

So America will retain its position as the serial murder capital of the world until such institutional reform is enacted, that antisocial behavior, intimation, and suggestion are stopped before they become murderous.