Unapologetically Moderate: My Search for the Rational Center in American Politics by Bill King

Author:Bill King [King, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781791678722
Google: XNARwAEACAAJ
Amazon: B07LDX46ZV
Goodreads: 43262004
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2014-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Madness Continues

Once again we are faced with mayhem, caused by a single individual with a weapon that is easily obtainable. Once again, family members mourn the loss of an innocent father, brother and son. Once again, the family and friends of the shooter are devastated and bewildered. And once again we attempt to understand the shooting in rational terms. Was he a member of an anti-government cult? Did he have a grudge against Transportation Security Administration workers?

No. There is no rational explanation for this type of behavior because it is irrational. It is the result not of some ideology but of a broken brain. The sooner we accept this obvious conclusion, the sooner we might find a solution for these incidents.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine. In his book Incognito he describes the case of a man with normal sexual behavior until he reached his mid-40s. His wife noticed that he began to develop an interest in child pornography, which ultimately became an obsession. At the same time, he began to have headaches.

His wife persuaded the man to go to the doctor, and after a series of tests, a brain tumor was discovered. After the tumor was removed, his behavior returned to normal.

A few months after the surgery, the man began to have pedophiliac thoughts again. He went back to the doctors, and they determined that the surgery had missed a piece of the tumor and that it had begun to grow back. A second surgery completely removed the tumor, and the man never suffered from pedophilia again.

Most of us who grew up in Texas also remember the case of Charles Whitman, the sniper atop the University of Texas at Austin tower who in 1966 killed 13 people and wounded 30 more. Whitman left a suicide note in which he said he had begun to have strange, uncontrollable thoughts of violence and asked that his brain be examined after his death to prevent future tragedies. An autopsy revealed a brain tumor.

Our entire existential experience is based on our belief that we are in control of our mind and that the picture it paints of the world around us is accurate.

To doubt this fundamental premise frightens us to the core because to do so means that some physical abnormality in our brain could cause us not to be in control of what we do, even to the extent of doing one of these terrible things ourselves.

We base our social interactions, including our justice system, on the belief that everyone has free will.

All we need to do, the conventional wisdom goes, is set up the proper incentives and disincentives for the behaviors we want to encourage and discourage.

For the vast majority of human beings—whose brains are working correctly—it is a formula that works. But for those whose free will has been hijacked by aberrant brain mechanics, it is a meaningless dynamic.

One of the reasons we are loath to start down the road of questioning our fundamental beliefs regarding culpability is that there is no clear place to stop.

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