Mick Hartley

There's a certain kind of popular psychology – and I think we can blame Freud here – according to which the worst explanation for human behaviour will generally be the correct one, and what we all really really want to do is to indulge in acts of the most unspeakable barbarity. Here in the Times, for instance, is Brian Masters:

It is natural that we should be shocked at the random slaughter of inoffensive strangers by the Tokyo knifeman Tomohiro Kato, just as we were by the horrific destruction wrought by the disaffected student Seung Hui Cho at Virginia Technical College last year.

But we should also be troubled by the nature and source of this reaction. We profess to be shocked on behalf of the wretched victims. In fact, our dismay is far more personal and possibly a little less worthy. It is counterfeit for self-protection, a beautifully disguised evasion of a truth known in our soul, but denied by our watchful intelligence.

The truth is this – Kato is aberrant, but not inhuman; for predisposition to violence is an inherently human characteristic that we are reluctant to admit. The purpose of moral codes and norms of behaviour is to restrain and inhibit the natural human urge to lash out, sometimes for no other reason than to satisfy a profound nihilistic fury against the meaninglessness of life…

By expressing shock at people such as Kato, we deflect the more disturbing shock of recognition – that, in the wrong circumstances, each of us could have been him.

To which the obvious rejoinder is, well, speak for yourself.

What's annoying about this is that it leaves no room for a genuine expression of horror. Such a reaction can, apparently, only be hypocritical.  We only "profess" to be shocked – a mask for our real feelings. 

It's a particularly unpleasant form of psychobabble.