Arrogance, Not Depression or Weakness, is at the Root of Murder

I wrote on this subject in a previous blog post a few months ago, with regard to suicide. The essence of the criticism I had applies to any violent, attention-seeking, self-absorbed behavior. Consider this in reading the following.
 
First up, an excerpt from a booklet I came across that talks all about ego and pride:

“Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the world. What is the reason for most of the crime and violence in the world? Why are people abused? Why are people cruel? Why do people do the bad things they do? Traditionally, the answer was hubris – the Greek word meaning pride or too high a view of yourself. Traditionally, that was the reason given for why people misbehave.”

….

Daniel Greenfield, the prolific Manhattanite Orthodox Jewish political braniac writing at Sultan Knish, had a lot of the same to say, in harsher tones with more examples. It is well worth checking out his entire article.

"Evil wants absolute power over others. If it can't rule, it will destroy. If it can't control everyone, then it will enforce absolute control over a few victims by taking their lives. The narcissistic mass murderer is striving to eliminate everyone who is not made in his image. He is a frustrated little godling who wants to be worshiped. He rejects the presence of the rest of the human race because they are different than him. His preferred forms of worship are conformity and death. Evil is not limited to the occasional spree killer. In the last century Hitler and Stalin oversaw cults of personality built on this same model under which millions died. Stalin's Communism and Hitler's National Socialism were messy and contradictory ideologies. They ultimately existed so that one man could exercise his power fantasies and destroy as much of the world as he could."

Daniel Greenfield, Evil is the Motive of Evil, SultanKnish.blogspot.com (May 2014) http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/05/evil-is-motive-of-evil.html

Timothy Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, 10Publishing (2012)

 

In short, my view as expressed in "Text Treatise: Suicide's Real Victims"  is not peculiar to me. There are others saying the same thing, in more convincing ways perhaps, depending on what sort of approach a person is more prepared to listen to. The bottom line is that there are no excuses for murder, and the modern cause of trying to find "reasons" and deal with those as if their removal or reform would fix the problem utterly miss the point and that is that it is the heart of the individual that needs to change, not their outside circumstances. You can never control the stimuli, so that pursuit is a fool's errand. It's far easier to change one mind than it is to change the millions of things that can be dredged up as excuses for that mind's actions.

 

But there is only one way to really change a mind. And only God can do it.

 

~ Rak Chazak