EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY FORUM ARCHIVE
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Columbine: Bloody Rocky Mountain Flower
James Brody · 4/27/99 at 5:08 pm ET
Events such as last week's killings in a Colorado high school have happened before and seem to be part of our nature, shared by other species; CNN last night showed pictures of our helicopters arriving at Aviano for raids in Kosovo while the electronic text at the bottom still gave news about Columbine. There is no difference. We are all potential killers but we vary in our targets, methods, and the circumstances that we do so. We need to identify, understand, and respect those circumstances while breaking apart their synchrony. My position is that there is no new mystery or action that led 2 adolescents to kill 12 peers and a teacher. I provide my own view of the "causes" that drew those same 2 adolescents into plans for killing 500 people and crashing a plane into NYC, a month after 4 of them in trench coats tried to purchase a machine gun. My thoughts are written from an evolutionary stance and will irritate some of you; however, I love humanity as well as nature and would be lacking in conscience to hide from debate on these vital matters. BAND-AIDS Temporarily hire security officers and keep them in public schools of more than 1000 students. Search lockers. Check students for weapons. Disperse loiterers just as is done in shopping malls. Adopt school uniforms and dress policies. STEPS FOR THE LONGER TERM Disperse large public schools --- The private schools movement will be successful so long as each of them stays relatively small and excludes the nonresponders. Public schools and state institutions can do neither and should be dispersed. Our sorry experience with large state institutions was that adding staff simply built niches for staff --- meetings, records, notes, promotions and performance reviews --- but did NOT increase client/staff interaction whether you hired aides or psychologists. Clients continued to bite, beat, and sometimes rape other clients. I suggest that we LIMIT PUBLIC SCHOOL ENROLLMENT TO 300 STUDENTS at any one site, have free choice enrollment at any school that has an opening, let each school have a program specialty, and duplicate programs that fill to capacity. Incidentally, the ceiling of 300 is not arbitrary. There is reasonable evidence that our minds are evolved to handle about 150 active social contacts and we organize our Rolodexes, hospital, and military structures in chunks that approximate that number. We should use it explicitly as a benchmark for our public schools just as parents instinctively do when choosing a private school. Interesting, that when school is no longer "free," a different set of more relevant standards come to play and our current mess with public education becomes self-correcting! Alternative educational careers --- our "children" at age 13 are many ways adult in regard to motor skills for hunting, killing, and caring for each other. However, their social judgment may be limited until age 35! Wise cultures pull children into adult supervision and duties, with adult consequences, far sooner than we do. Adolescents need options and will create their own if we don't make space for them doing useful things that are consistent with their talents. Generally, if people are in settings that support their talents or are allowed to construct such settings, we care for them, improve them, and learn from them. Sitting at desks for 12 years is NOT such a niche for many children and adolescents; making all of them do so is superstitious and costly. Parent Training --- Our public schools and churches are empty during summers and evenings; use them as sites to train parents in groups of 20, offer a course for 5 evenings that correspond to the child's developmental age. Cover child development, teaching, and discipline but reduce emphasis on the traditional "feel good" homilies that don't equip parents to deal with the little raptors they sometimes hatch. For example, the "child's room" is really the "parents'" room and the child uses it until moving on. Responsibilities come before rewards. There are NO entitlements. Doing otherwise simply feeds grandiosity and not cooperation. Giving a 10 year old choices in large decisions is lunatic; you are NOT "teaching him to reason" but encouraging him to argue. Being conciliatory with some children does not teach mercy but magnifies selfishness. PRELUDES TO RAIDS 1) The chimp raid on Columbine High School was exactly that, a "chimp raid" as defined by Richard Wrangham in "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence." Wrangham distinguishes raids from "battles": a raid is premeditated, conducted by a small group and against a specific target under surprise conditions and with little risk to the perpetrators. Raids and not wars and battles, according to Wrangham, are the leading scenario for chimps killing each other and for humans' killing other humans and are a prominent feature of every human culture now and through recorded human history. A high school acquaintance had her throat slashed and her unborn child slain nearly 30 years ago as the outcome from a raid; I believe her destroyer wanted to kill all of us symbolically while making himself famous. Correspondingly, Wrangham has some slides of an ambushed male chimp whose larynx and testicles were ripped free and tossed aside. Human males do similar things and so do human females but usually more symbolically than the males. "Oh, he's a loser, you don't want to be seen with him." or "I kicked him in the balls." Girls giggle or tell stories and boys kick --- both of them act strategically and with loss to the target in regard to social standing and finding partners to have children. Thus, boys and girls deliver the same premeditated consequence but one sex chooses fast, painful results and the other chooses more delayed techniques that are accomplished with gossip and shunning. In either case, "I'm killing you AND I'm killing your baby." The strikes in Denver may have been not only towards classmates but also against the parents of those killed. 2) The traits that lead to killing are, in smaller intensities, major assets. Geoff Miller (1998, 1999) discusses "fitness" in terms of liveliness, higher intelligence and vocabulary, greater symmetry, and greater attractiveness to the opposite sex. These traits can appear early (sometimes by age 3) and are often seen in kids whose parents have a similar nature. They include unusually intense interest in building alliances, monitoring resources (knowing who can stay out late, who can use the phone or auto), commandeering resources (badgering mom or dad for use of the telephone or the family auto), early (some of them by 3rd grade) sexual interest and activity, and lessened need for sleep. Children and adults with these traits are usually moving, whether in sports or hanging on street corners. If they are talented in addition to being stubborn, we eventually call them boss, General, Prime Minister, President, or Wealthy Parent. If their talents are inconsistent with their niche, then we call them misfits, no good, or prisoner. The problem with "fitness" is that germs, genes, mom's womb, hormonal tuning, and accidents do not produce ideal outcomes. Thus, it is possible to have great determination and Will to Power but be socially inept. (It is also possible to have the determination and good word flow but be unusually vulnerable to seasonal changes or to social or economic reversals. We label such people as "manic" or "bipolar disorder." Unfortunately for the social learning advocates and for most social interventions, UNDER AVERAGE CONDITIONS, the outcomes for such traits appear to be heavily biased by genetic foundations. Abusive kids have abusive parents even if they never saw each other and it has nothing to do with being bullied.) Dennis Cantwell and others noticed the relationship between language deficits and increased risk of antisocial behavior. Suppose you have a great lust for women and influence but miss the word flow and physical assets that make them accessible? Suppose that you have the word flow but your ambition exceeds normal expectations to the degree that you are considered bizarre. Or suppose that you view yourself as so "special" that your outcomes do not come up to your expectations? We can label you "dysthymic" because you are miserable for years but we also need to consider you "manic" because of your grandiosity, that you are impervious to consequences, that the world is unfair because it sees you as bizarre rather than gifted. Our society has affirmatively but unwittingly addressed this problem by creating large schools where 1000-3000 hominids of mating age are pooled into one building. The kinds of traits to the extremes that I describe are part of our make up but their intensity and their sensitivity of reactions are fortunately less common. Merging large groups of students make it possible for the less frequent varieties to find partners equally as intense, labile, moody, and potentially destructive. "Friends" and alliances become possible and groups of the outliers hang in diners at night instead of doing homework. They put on combat uniforms of tattoos, pierced body parts, and postered shirts and jackets and flock in groups, enjoying the anxious glances and extra space that they get from more conservative, older people. They also get into tribal ceremonies and tribal music that are their own and that affirm their preexisting scorn for our more average culture and about life and values. Marilyn Manson and his audience are coevolved products; each defines the other. Ironically, in the old days when there were fewer of us and now in many simpler cultures, the Littleton killers would have been slain by the socially dominant or would have been driven out to find a different place. Kids still run away from home even though we moderns oddly create the chance to leave town psychologically by making a large public school for 1500 mating, quarreling hominids. Any "misfit" can likely find someone who matches him or her and can do so without jumping a freight or hiking over a mountain pass. The new culture still has to travel through hostile territory --- defined by jocks, metal heads, or druggies --- but shorter distances in the school halls every day. 3) Along these lines, the two males in Littleton very likely qualified for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an exaggeration of the basic traits that usually lead, in combination with special talents, to economic success. However, the intense anger, terrorist strategies, and grandiose plans to high jack a plane and crash into New York were far beyond the average range. The attempt to wear trench coat uniforms while buying a machine gun reveals the killers' grandiose outlooks. Medication works --- lithium, depakote, tegretol, risperidone --- in some amount for most of these cases and life is usually better, even from the standpoint of the person taking it. Unfortunately, the very traits --- racing thoughts, intense determination, lessened need for sleep, and a heightened sense of being immune from ordinary rules --- that make success or violence more likely are nearly always associated with an almost religious opposition to admitting a flaw and taking medicine. If WE are so RIGHT, then rules and constraints must be WRONG or UNFAIR. Generally wives, mothers, lawyers, accountants, and judges --- annoyed and exhausted with financial and behavioral excesses --- eventually trap grandiose bullies. Still, medication will be a tough sell even if the client is already abusive and violent and it will be tough to keep them taking it. 4) Large schools LOOK good! Administrators and parents like them because we like all BIG NEW things and for the same reasons that a sea gull will try to hatch a grapefruit while ignoring her own eggs. We all go, probably because of the ways our eyes and minds are wired, for the newer, the slightly larger, the more colorful whether in autos, homes, or school buildings. The kids have green hair, the principal gets a larger office. The same mechanisms direct kids, politicians, and school boards. Natural history tells us about the homeostatic costs that place limits on the size of giraffe necks and deer antlers. Homeostatic costs for human excess eventually include our moral structures but we don't notice the erosion until long after it has happened. "Nature" shapes nearly every creature in the virtues of reciprocity: "Be nice until your contact as been nasty twice. Then be nasty until they are nice again." This strategy of "generous tit for tat" wins in computer games and appears in our rules for social exchanges. Our folk mores say, "once is a mistake, twice is a fool." Or, "Three strikes and you're out." HOWEVER THESE RULES WORK BEST WHEN THERE ARE RECURRING SOCIAL CONTACTS. More intermittent contacts between people in larger groups make lying harder to detect and retribution harder to deliver. "Cheater tactics" become the winning style. That is, if you will see a person only once and your neighbors won't find out, then take the pigeon for all that she has. Phone bank workers and car salesmen often use this tactic. So do our large school organizations. Despite formal ideals, teachers also have a greater investment in their relationships with each other than with any average student. Teachers invest in the troublesome and the gifted but 85% of the students can be anonymous for 4 years, given over to their peers for direction, encouragement, and sanctions. From the teacher's standpoint, there is always one more student to help, coach, or scold so there is no point investing massively in any single average one before passing them on. There is a corresponding strategy on the part of students. Again, wild creatures in new settings with great resources adopt a "use it up fast" tactic. We did it when settling the west, we do it with the opening of a new store or a sale. Likewise, children will often see parents as an infinite resource and parents will ratify that view. The absence of limits and the absence of consequences exaggerate grandiosity and selfishness no matter how mature the mind. 5) Consequences are nearly always effective but must be applied skillfully. Our culture depends on certain basic cooperation --- of taking turns, standing in lines, and not shooting each other. I know individuals who fought, lied, and destroyed property when in elementary and high school. They were heroes while in Special Forces or the SEALs. They were in trouble as soon as they returned to civilian life. The research is still out and may never be done. I suspect that the past 2 decades of permissive parenting styles aggravate tendencies towards grandiosity, a sense of immunity to consequences. Time out works for nearly every kid and most adolescents. By whatever method, children must know --- and by means other than lectures --- that their rights end at another's skin or property line. Moms should not rescue children from a competent teacher or vice principal or a teen from the police. Parents who sanction underage drinking parties in their home should be fined and jailed. 6) Surfing the Net appears to give the same dopamine hits to some minds as would throwing a rock or pulling a trigger; certainly video games have been shown to do so. There are things to see, arguments and other contests to win, conspiracies to build, and women to meet. For example, KYW recently transmitted a factoid that the majority of college students use the net for information about weapons, pornography, and drugs. Things are not likely to be different for the 13 year olds who, in the old days, formed their own hierarchies and hunting groups. Odd or possibly inevitable, that a gift of our electronics is a reinstatement of our evolutionary heritage. There's another aspect to the Net. People who routinely are up late may be less stable, sometimes because they are a little manic and sometimes because they are sleep deprived. There is further research that isolation is strongly associated with depression, anxiety, psychosis, and suicide. No one has shown yet the effects of spending hours in an electronic world associating with words but without human affect, and spending the most time with displays of words that agree with your own thoughts. The outcome is likely to be two skewed individuals that help each other to become crazier even if they are on opposite sides of the globe. But, there are no data. I personally go to movies (comedies and love stories) and watch people in malls in order to stabilize myself --- will the people around me understand my thoughts and put them to work? A couple of hours of normal human contact seems to move my priorities back towards real events and not the electronic displays on home pages that compete with each other to punch every one of my evolved territorial, reproductive, or acquisitive buttons. I also go to bed at 11 PM! 7) Research on twins is strongly consistent with the idea that we build our own niches according to our own preferences but mom's lectures are not our compass. We appear to choose our friends, our music, and our outcomes from moment to moment, like a marble dropping through a vertical maze, each turn a momentary opportunity that "feels good" and reinforces our sense of free will. A "free society" allows each of us to pursue our "nature" and none of us want to give up that fun! However, we will sometimes have outcomes that temporarily or permanently scare us and may even kill some of us if we stand around and watch our peers do their natural thing. 8) Niches that support our success automatically raise our self esteem and let us experience the stereophonic thrills of happiness and competence. Success and competence usually lead naturally to confidence and friends. Multiple options need to exist for school and our assessments need to abandon the "we are all the same" myth; it hurts anyone who knows that he is not the same but feels that he is the only one that is different. Past lives and cultures let us migrate under such conditions and many of our kids still load their van and move the L.A. Trap the kid without outcomes that are productive for his or her very specific needs --- each of us IS unique and pursues unique agendas --- and you will have trouble every time! 9) Displays: Costumes, nose rings, colored hair are serious statements that repel people who, like me, are a bit timid or a bit older. The displays also attract others who have similar beliefs. All perfectly natural outcomes from perfectly natural strategies and executed by ducks as well as little hominids. Likewise for music, slogans, language habits --- all ways to put up barriers, to recruit allies, and to inflate your self view. Take them seriously, they are not a passing fad and the attitudes and moods they signal may be lifetime characteristics even if the carrier later appears to blend with everyone else. CONCLUSION There are currently too many of us and our lives too cluttered and our future resources --- food, and fuel --- too lean to let us to continue as we are. Even now, we don't allow for a smooth egress of the nonconformists and the mad who would have migrated --- a.k.a., dropping school --- to different settings in the past. Our futures could be symbolized by Wrangham's picture of a shiny pearl chimpanzee testicle with blue veins lying in African grass and by his photo of a throat torn open. Dispersal will cost some money but it could also maintain a peaceful diversity at no cost in educational quality. Copyright, James Brody 1999
Church or Synagogue --- parents should make 'em go! People that are spiritually driven will meet those needs on the internet even without a God, once they did it through religious fervor. While religious monopolies lead to wars, we don't have a religious monopoly but a patchwork of competing faiths. Bless diversity! Religion usually helps to stabilize things under these conditions.
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