Please do not over react or react badly to so many of us

[Joe Chi Minh]

35. Very, very good point.

In this case, it strikes me that mental illness could by no means cover the degree of malice evinced by the perpetrator, the co-pilot, in this instance. Far from it.

Yet it seems to be that journalists can't rush swiftly enough to blame such malice on mental illness. I suppose it is at least a logical consequence of the relativism that holds sway over our lives today. Relativism is the belief that there is no divine arbiter of right and wrong. And since there is no divine arbiter of right and wrong, why, we must just make up our own morality, the thinking goes; no right or wrong, as such. To think otherwise is just unscientific, and extremely foolish. All our thoughts and decisions are just the product of inanimate matter, chunks of meat that we are: a bunch of molecules racing around. Some call it dirt-worship. To me, they are prophetic self-described 'meat-heads'.

I remember a program on British TV about a man with paranoid schizophrenia. He was so concerned at the thoughts that he might kill someone, that he kept asking (unsuccessfully) to be returned, at least for treatment, to the mental institution he'd been in.

He went to a department store and ran the blade of a knife across one of the female assistants' throats - the blunt edge. Now, I suspect that it was no accident that he used the blunt edge - it's not rocket science to use the sharp edge, but more importantly he had stated that he was torn. He did not want to harm anyone, but fought against voices and the impulse to kill someone.

Yet the reporter, surely highly educated, as they tend to be in the TV and journalism business, trying to dramatize it further, was confusing his schizophrenia with psychopathy, which is completely different. Apart from being total devoid of conscience - perhaps partly because of it - psychopaths tend to be extremely well-adjusted, and are masters at learning how normal individuals react in different situations.

They are so well adjusted seemingly in every way, and most people so loathe to believe ill of them, that there is a relatively very high percentage of psychopaths among CEOs of large corporations. Their white-collar violence is immeasurably more subtle and diffuse than the violence of the street-level physical killer. Of course, sometimes a a person might combine paranoid schizophrenia and psychopathy, but there was no reason to believe it in that instance.