Becoming Evil

I'd like to share with you a story of pure evil. The events described herein are not ancient history but occurred just half a century ago, and are equally as horrible as any mass murder in more recent memory. It is in fact a timeless story that shows how humans don't become evil nor choose to be, but how evil becomes human.

_{Image by Yuri_B - source: Pixabay}

Let me start with this impossible to solve thought experiment: if you could go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler when he was a baby, would that be the moral thing to do? You know he'll grow up to be one of history's biggest monsters and there's a good chance 6 million Jews wouldn't have been brutally murdered if you could just gather the willpower to kill this one, still innocent baby. Don't even try to answer this; I just want to illustrate how difficult, vague and how very personal the answers to these moral dilemmas really are.

This is the story of a young man who lived an unremarkable life. He was born into a Roman Catholic family with an authoritarian father. As a boy he was known to be a polite child who seldom lost his temper, and very intelligent too with an IQ of 139. His father was a self-made man, according to himself, and was an avid gun collector. This young man grew up to be a US Marine who earned his sharpshooter's badge in 1960 at age 19:

He achieved 215 of 250 possible points on marksmanship tests, doing well when shooting rapidly over long distances as well as at moving targets. After completing his assignment, Whitman applied to a U.S. Navy and Marine Corps scholarship program, intending to complete college and become a commissioned officer.
_{source: Wikipedia}

In 1962 he got married and his in laws described him as a handsome young man who was both intelligent, and aspirational. The two lovebirds had everything going for them it seemed. But only 4 years later everything collapsed. On the day before he became infamous as the "Texas Tower Sniper", July 31, 1966, he went to the store to buy a pair of binoculars, a knife and some spam before resuming his daily routine. Charles Whitman loved his mother and his young wife very much, but on August 1 he took the knife and first stabbed his mother in the heart, then drove home and stabbed his wife three times in the same place.

He then went on to the University of Texas with several firearms and started shooting at people. He shot three people inside the university tower, climbed up to the 28th floor observation deck where he shot at random people for 96 minutes, killing 11 more people and wounding 31. He was finally shot down by an Austin police officer, something Charles Whitman counted on as became clear later when his suicide note was found.

_{Charles Whitman was killed by police officers to stop his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower. - source: Wikimedia Commons}

Charles expected to die that day; we know this because he explicitly asks for an autopsy to be performed on his body after his death. You see, he could not explain his violent behavior and he knew he was a danger to everyone around him:

"I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks."
_{source: Wikipedia}

He asked for the autopsy "to determine if there had been a discernible biological contributory cause for his actions and for his continuing and increasingly intense headaches." If it wasn't for him requesting that autopsy, we would never have known about the tumor he had developed in his brain, a tumor that pressed against his amygdala, the part of the brain that's associated with emotions, fight-or-flight responses and behavioral control. What Charles did was evil, without a shadow of a doubt, but was HE evil? If we consider the simple fact that he did not choose the wiring of his brain, nor the damage done to that wiring by the tumor, is it not legitimate to say that Charles was simply unfortunate? Unfortunate to have an authoritarian, physically abusive, gun collecting father, unlucky to have had his particular childhood and so on. And also unlucky to have that tumor.

The thing is, that in this case we have a clear indication of physical damage; the autopsy and the tumor are what made this case famous. When a brain is so clearly damaged, most of us won't have a problem with just admitting that there's no sense in talking about good or evil. Also we can understand that if we put the exact same tumor in a different brain, the effects might be completely different, or if we put it in the same brain, but in a different location, Charles might have become blind instead of a monster. When did Adolf Hitler become the monster we all know? He wasn't born evil and as a baby he didn't plan on wearing that ridiculous moustache later in life.

_{Image by Karl97 - source: Deviant Art}

All this is not to say that we should stop protecting society from these individuals. In the end it doesn't matter if Charles and Adolf were evil or unfortunate; the world is a better place without them regardless, and in Charles' case he knew that himself. I'm sharing this because morality and culture are continuously developing and adopting new knowledge; in the Dark Ages someone like Charles Whitman would have been burned at the stake, maybe after a failed attempt at exorcism. I'm telling this story because it should shed new light on some basic but deep questions about personal responsibility; am I responsible for who I am? Are you? What does this say about our basic assumptions regarding the "meritocracy?"

This is also no free pass into fatalism or nihilism; for all the questions about free will this may pose, free will is necessary for us to function as a society at all. It's a necessary illusion because we have to have a sense of agency, a basic belief that we are at least in part capable of determining our own fate, the captains of our own ship. This is also what makes discussing and thinking about this so difficult, and why I started with an impossible moral dilemma. It is important though to take all this into consideration, to incorporate this into our personal world view. I hope you agree, and if you do, or if you don't, consider how free you were when deciding to agree or disagree; was it a choice, or the logical consequence of the total sum of your experiences?

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