Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The media has lately been full of news about the most recent violent outrages committed by young killers. Yet again we are treated to interviews with friends and neighbors relating how they find it hard to believe the perpetrators were capable of such acts. Yet again we're told by those claiming to be experts that such appalling crimes couldn't be the results of the free will of the youthful killers, and must be the result of other causes. We're told that we must look beyond those who have traditionally been held accountable for acts of premeditated murder, and seek others who can be held accountable.

The media has repeatedly claimed to be mystified by how such monsters can be created within a society we want to believe has achieved a measure of civility. But while claiming a desire to understand what drove these children to such crimes, what passes for analysis in the popular media has been far more obsessed with avoiding uncomfortable truths than identifying real causes. Too often societies have turned on themselves in their desperation to avoid facing the real causes of their fears. In every case, the resulting witch hunts have caused far more harm to innocent individuals and the fabric of society than did the original cause of the hysteria. Most often, in the end the real victims end up being those individuals and principles that could have provided the best real solution.

The efforts by our government and popular media to enhance and manipulate the natural emotional revulsion of the public toward those who seek to murder children have pushed popular opinion dangerously close to irrationality. We're increasingly told that our most precious freedoms and natural human behaviors are the real cause of the tragedies - that the vicious monsters who committed the murders were in reality themselves victims of our rights and freedoms. And as a result of this manufactured hysteria, far too many citizens appear willing to surrender the most precious freedoms of all of us in the blind hope that such misguided sacrifices will somehow prevent future tragedies.

But were any of the popular targets of aggressive demonization in the popular media actual factors in the actions of the young killers? Did the availability of firearms, violent movies and video games, information on the Internet, and the bullying of jocks force the killers to commit their bloody deeds? Or are they simply scapegoats being used to hide the real underlying faults in our society, and advance the agendas of those making the accusations?

Our social system has until recently been based on the principle that an individual was directly and solely responsible for how he chose to live his life regardless of any external influences. There have always been and always will be dangers in the world that can entrap the unwary. Until the last couple of decades, it was recognized that it was the responsibility of the individual to deal with the pleasures and pitfalls of the world in a responsible manner. Each individual made his own choices and was personally accountable for his own actions.

An unhappy childhood or other misfortune was never before considered a valid justification for the violation of the rights of innocent third parties. A cattle rustler was hanged for his crime of rustling regardless of whether he'd been born to privilege or poverty. In holding the rustler accountable for his actions, it didn't matter in the slightest whether he'd lived a life of pleasure and comfort, or one of privation and misery. If he intentionally violated the rights of others by stealing their property, he lost the right to exist within the social contract he had willfully decided to violate. If he instead decided to abide by the social contract and respect the rights of his neighbors, he received respect in return. Simple as that.

It will never be possible to legislate an entirely safe world - and if it were, I doubt many of us want to live there. The only viable approach has always been for children to be taught how to live in a dangerous world without becoming consumed by it. This task has traditionally fallen first of all on parents, and only secondarily on society in the form of schools, authority structures, and peer groups.

Over the last couple of decades the responsibility for raising children has been increasingly shifted from parents to the public schools and juvenile justice system. In the process, responsibility and accountability for the proper education of children in the ways of the world has been disclaimed by all involved. Parents no longer have the right to control or even teach their children, while those busily manipulating the public schools have their own agendas and don't want to be bothered with such mundane matters.

As a result we are creating monsters lacking even the most basic understanding of the world around them. Deprived of traditional parental guidance, their minds twisted and distorted by the aggressive hostility to traditional values, emotional manipulation, and liberal political indoctrination that pass for education today, these monsters in the making are left with only the antisocial fantasies of violent movies and video games to provide a framework within which to define their world view. The fault isn't in the movies or video games, but rather in those who failed to provide these young minds with a more appropriate framework. It is solely the failures of those charged with preparing children to make responsible choices, and to carefully supervise children until they are adults and ready to live in an adult world and make their own rational decisions, that have created the monsters whose senseless violence fills the news these days.

The problem has never been the availability of firearms, the violent fantasies of fiction writers, the sexual obsessions of the sleazy side of society, etc. - these have always been with us. What has changed is the way our children are being taught to deal with these adult aspects of the real world. Only changes in the way children are parented will solve the problem of youthful mass murderers. Only by restoring the right and obligation of parents to properly raise their children to be fully functional citizens can we put an end to the carnage. Only when parents are both able and obligated to properly parent their children will our society again begin producing new citizens capable of handling the freedoms and responsibilities that are the fundamental rights of freemen. Everything else being demanded in the hysteria of the moment will only make the problem worse, and cost society far more than the advocates are willing to admit.

Times of tragedy and crisis, when rampant emotions override rationality, have always been the most dangerous times for freedom and liberty. Mass hysteria rapidly turns to mass insanity, infecting otherwise reasonable people with a willingness to embrace the most terrible travesties in their artificially enhanced desperation. It is at times like this that people can be manipulated into abandoning the very foundations of the social and political systems that have served them well for centuries. Historically this path has led to witch burnings, inquisitions, wars, the falls of republics and rise of tyrants, and ultimately, dark ages.

Solutions born of mass insanity have consistently cost society far more than the imagined threats that were used to justify each decent into misguided violence and mindless attacks on the accused innocents. If we truly value the unprecedented level of peace and prosperity that our liberty and personal freedoms have brought us, we will resist the incessant calls to mass insanity by those seeking any excuse to attack those principles that are most precious to us. We must resist the emotionally manipulative calls to do that which in more reasoned times we would not even consider. We must learn to recognize the agents of evil and hysteria for what they truly are, and treat them accordingly - not allow them to infect us with their socially destructive insanity.