Study: Double killing on Mexico City subway

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.breitbart.tv/graphic-video-captures-deadly-shootings-at-mexico-city-subway-station/

[Dog Howie]

CD: I see something like this and I gotta say that I view it as something just so complex and something so... do i use the simple word . What took the shooters life to the point of this kind of desperation, was he mentally ill (like as in schizophrenic), was he an arrogant drug dealer, was he abused by the "system", what went wrong in his (our) world that produced a man who must have felt he had no choice but to murder like this. I'm not being a "bleeding heart" here.. but, doesn't it just bother you sometimes that the human race often acts not much above it's animal counterparts. And as violent as our past has been doesn't it seem like somehow we should/could become less so instead of becoming more so. I guess I'm in a "heady" mood at the moment.

[Crafty_Dog]

Woof Howie:

Such questions and reflections belong well in this thread.

I would offer for your consideration that animals tend NOT to do the sort of thing we see here.  Several years ago I read "The Manufacture of Evil" by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox who are a team of evolutionary pyschology/biology professor types.  Not their strongest piece of work ("Men in Groups" I thought outstanding) because I thought it would have been better served by being shorter, but the basic premise I thought quite intruguing:  that evil results from the stresses of man being placed in an environment other than the one in which he was evolved.   
   Konrad Lorenz explored similar notions (deeper IMHO, but then he was deeper than just about anyone) of the Darwinian implications of when the darwinian selection process no longer involves interspecies criteria (e.g. hunting, getting hunted) or environmental criteria (out running the forest fire, surviving droughts) but instead the only selection processes are intra-species (man vs. man) , , , but I digress.
   Anyway, seen through the particular filter of Fox and Tiger, it is no surprise that this incident would occur in what Lorenz would call "the Anonymous Horde" of a Mexico City subway.

[Dog Howie]

CD: Your point is well taken that, in a very true way, animals (most? all?) only agress for food...  or offensively they may kill to protect their young, but one thing they don't do is kill because they are pissed off at something unrelated or because they "get off" on it or have some pollitcal agenda. There is nothing evil about a lion killing an antelope. And this also ties into the concept that, in our current world, humans have been cut off from the "environment...one in which he evolved"... as, BTW, I personally have just been touching upon via DBMA fighting. At least in my life those experiences (my first few fights) have allowed me to touch upon the PROFOUND implications which extend WAY FAR beyond the "fight". CG, just FYI as you gather data and knowledge... I have personally experienced very unexpected creative and intellectual stimulation just from the very tiny limited exposure I have had to date which directly coorelate to DBMA activity. (hmmm... not well articulated but I'm hoping you get the drift). I have a nice "reading list" while recovering from this frustrating broke thumb... I just started "The Violence Within" by Paul Tournier whcih certainly relates to these considerations... I'll add "Men in Groups" to the list.

[Jonobos]

I think the evolutionary process is a fascinating one. Violence is part of that process and I don't think we can really understand it if we look at it inside the box of morality. Gravity hurts people that fall from great distances yet we don't consider it "evil." We share reasons with animals for doing harm to each other and most of those reasons we consider justified. Self defense, or defense of family. Defending territory and resources. We have developed the idea to think in the abstract so we also have political and religious reasons for violence. These are grey areas. We also have distinctly human emotions which are generally considered poor excuses for violence. Why is it that the "good" reasons for violence are the ones we share the most with the "lower" lifeforms?

Some thoughts.
Jon