The Futile Quest for "Why"

Why Demanding a Singular Motive for Acts of Extreme Violence is Absurd

Frequently, after a school shooting, The Onion publishes the headline, “‘No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens."¹ I find this a brilliant response. Admittedly, less brilliant is my response every time the media predictably starts reporting on a “motive”: “Why are people looking for a motive? The killer was crazy. Only a crazy person would do this. We can learn nothing from the incoherent ramblings of a violent, crazy person.”

My friends, because they are my friends, tend to let me ramble on and then turn away.

Michael Ostacher, a psychiatrist who has more wisdom (and standing) than me on these issues, submitted this piece.

Adam Cifu

Reading how people have attributed a clear motive to the awful murder of United Health Care’s CEO, Brian Thompson, reminds me of Carson McCullers’ brilliant 1940 novel, “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”. In the novel, the main character, John Singer, a deaf and mute man, unknowingly finds himself the muse for the other characters, who project onto him a reflection of their own wishes and desires. Singer is only concerned about his roommate (who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and later dies) and doesn’t even understand what these other people are saying to him. Neither can they understand Singer’s own wishes and desires. That is the tragedy of the book. We ought to stop attempting to understand the motives of people we do not know (including those of school shooters and serial killers) and whose desires we cannot ever fully understand.

We often want a simple, cogent answer or explanation for what is a mystery to us. We also want people to reflect and support our own world views. In the case of Luigi Mangione, many have found just that. There are so many levels on which this is a fool’s errand, an absurd pursuit of an unknowable truth. I’m not immune to this myself. When I first heard the shooter identified and read his writings, I was sure that he had become psychotic. He’d ghosted his family, traveled across the country, and expressed wishes and expectations that were grandiose (and frankly bizarre).

Really, I have no idea what motivated him. Ultimately, the motive cannot be known, even to the murderer himself.

Why might we assert this? The layers of complexity of human behavior are nearly infinite. Think of why you are in a relationship with someone, or chose a career, or engage in any behavior. I used to think that my wife married me because I made her laugh (I do, almost every day). This was until a wise and observant friend pointed out that it was the other way around, that I’d married her because she laughed at my jokes. Who wouldn’t want to be with someone who had the same sense of humor as them? My friend was, if only in part, right. Ultimately, I realized that not only did I not understand my wife’s motivations; I wasn’t even aware of my own.

We often want to find in other people common cause, or facile explanations for complex things, and it is only human to do so. That doesn’t, in any case, make it correct. It is especially absurd (usually unproductive and, in some cases, dangerous) to find in a killer any kind of motivation. We cannot even trust them when they tell us what they believe their motivations to be, as they do not likely quite know. I could share hypotheses about Mangione – he’s mentally ill, he suffers in pain, he’s had poor medical care, he wants to change the world, he wants to be seen as a hero, he is speaking truth to power about our broken (or, I would say, no) health care system in the U.S. – but none of these is fully true and none is fully explanatory.

What is true is that many people are unhappy with health care in the U.S. and with its direction. Fine. But don’t, as John Singer’s acquaintances falsely do, find in someone else the validation of your own wishes and desires. We cannot understand all that goes on in this world…

Michael Ostacher, MD, MPH is a psychiatrist, professor, mental health and addiction researcher, and EBM enthusiast who treats veterans.

Photo Credit: Avery Evans

1. Appallingly, The Onion had reason to post it again this week, after I had already scheduled this post to go up.