Image: Turac Novruzova - Getty Images
Brutality illustration
If you viewed the video showing the fatal maiming of Tyre Nichols by five police officers, or even read about what took place, you may be wondering how human beings sworn to “protect and serve” become sadistic monsters. In the wake of most police brutality inflicted on innocent or helpless individuals, our minds struggle to come up with an explanation. What is behind their violent rage? Why did they betray their oath?
Like nature, the mind abhors a vacuum, so when human behavior leaves us flummoxed, the search for answers escalates. We figure if we can find the cause, maybe we can find the fix. Toward this end, there are myriad voices offering their versions of cause and effect. Many mental health professionals will point the finger at underlying psychopathology, the “sick mind” explanation. They will toss out terms like “sociopath” and “psychopath,” labels we apply to those with certain personality disorders. It’s true folks of this ilk lack what most of us call a conscience. They are without the moral guardrails that keep behavior inside the lines of social and ethical acceptability. But not all sociopaths inflict physical violence on others. In fact, most don’t.
Other shrinks will take the neuroscience route, pointing to factors such as disordered brain chemistry or morphological anomalies in the brain. These folks may mention the possibility of hair-trigger emotional reactivity in the limbic brain (emotional center) brought about by chronic psychological stress or job burnout. But most folks with neurochemistry gone awry or structural damage to their brains do not physically attack others.
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Objectifying Others?
Next come the criminologists who reference the intense and persistent stressors experienced by police officers that, over time, erode emotional self-regulation and generate rage. As one sheriff deputy told me years ago, “After you witness the worst in people long enough, they all seem like turds.” This cynical devaluing of human beings leads to objectification, where people are viewed as things rather than persons. Objectifying others makes it easier to harm them, but again, the majority of police officers don’t go there.
The social psychologists have their say as well, pointing to socio-economic and cultural influences that erode civility, empathy and compassion. They might point to the tribal nature of police officers working on a team, such as the Scorpion unit involved in Nichol’s murder, and how “group think” can supersede heeding one’s own counsel and, instead, going along with the crowd. This sort of mob mentality is a well-documented psychosocial force, one underpinning race riots, lynchings, the genocide against Native American nations, gang rapes, and other horrors. Still, many exposed to group think reject it and follow their own values.
Then there are the spiritualists. Man’s inhumanity to man, as we sometimes call it, seems to defy rational explanation. How, for example, can one conjure an explanatory back story about those who abduct and murder innocent children? On larger scales, what about those who perpetrated the Holocaust or, closer to home, the murderers behind the long list of mass shootings erupting almost daily across our land? When violence and victimization dwarf our capacity to understand and explain, some fall back on the demonic, suggesting these miscreants are possessed by an evil spirit that uses them to ply its mischief. But why would one person be possessed and not another?
Like many of you, I’ve considered all these so-called explanations, and they still leave me mystified. Clearly, we humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty toward each other, our fellow creatures and against the Earth and life itself, prompting philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to assert, “Man is the cruelest animal.” That’s a fact, cold and hard. But causation remains a baffling mystery. Perhaps, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.” Is it simply a fixed element of our nature, the way our species is built, and no more complicated than that? Beats me. But when I consider all the “What caused it?” explanations, I find myself drawn to this observation by author Veronica Roth: “Human reason can excuse any evil; that is why it’s so important we don’t rely on it.”
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