Why People Like To Kill People; Consequences


There are many reasons why people like to kill people: greed, anxiety, misperceptions, pain etc., are common. Here I shall focus on a particular reason. A 27 year old German co-pilot locked himself in the cockpit, and while the captain pounded on the door, flew himself and another 149 persons, including tens of babies and children, into a cliff at the base of a mountain that towered another 1,500 meters higher.

Insanely enough, the murderous maniac may have view it as an act of love. Dying among those mountains he knew well, and loved. The area may be the most famous in the world for glider pilots: enormous mountains with a warm sun create tremendous updraft. The valleys are full of airports. Wingsuit flying was invented there.

Typical Valley of Hautes Alpes & Provence. Most Are Wild

Typical Valley of Hautes Alpes & Provence. Most Are Wild

This is not the first time a plane is crashed deliberately by a pilot. At least a dozen cases are known, or suspected, in the last few decades. Some of these planes carried more than 200 people.

Conventional humanism has no answer.

I do. And the consequences are not just vast, but ominous. They plead for direct democracy.

Some will say: ’Why to care about insane maniacs crashing planes? Stuff happens.’

Well, you know, we are living on a spaceship. Spaceship Earth. And, potentially, a handful of self-glorifying and glorified maniacs are in the cockpit. Think about it. I will show that, what looks like maniacal, and it is, such maniacal behavior is an all too normal part of human ethology.

We are all flying through space, we have forgotten it all too long.

Flying is the human metaphor.

Since Icarus, flying has been an obsession, and it is closely related, in the subconscious collective, with hubris going too far. “Air disasters” thus loom large.

But there is more. Human beings are technological, scientific beings. We can fly only because we have great mastery of technology. Science, technology are, to an ever greater extent a near-Faustian bargain; we get comfort, grow and multiply, and travel all over. In exchange, we destroy the biosphere.

A co-pilot of Egyptair succeeded to crash a jumbo jet into the ocean, while the captain was fighting next to him to pull up the plane, begging the “god is great” screaming insane maniac in the other seat to help him out.

Is it not our fate nowadays? Are we not all passengers on spaceship Earth, at the mercy of megalomaniacal, deluded maniacs in the cockpit?

So why all the murderous hatred from the maniacs?

Those who don’t believe in mass murderous insanity are invited to contemplate the lynching of a 27 year old Afghan woman. Allegedly for burning a book… Then she was burned herself, to a crisp. The accuser recognized later he made the book burning up. Oops. Back in New York, the Afghan president ironically pretended that Afghanistan would have a woman president before the USA. I guess it’s supposed to be all very funny.

For the lynching:

So why the hatred from the maniacs? Why so many maniacs?

Because human beings are all a bit prone to insanity, and murderous rage. No offense meant, just a crucial observation carried out. Yes, I am aware that woe is to be visited onto the one who calls attention to that scandal whose name is man.

And the craziness of man is not just a scandal: it demands to reorganize human society. A commenter on this site, Duviel, suggested that I played with fire. According to him, by being too critical with the present human society, I risked to turn the USA, or Europe, into Syria, Libya, or Afghanistan.

Thus he suggested that the collective mental state is so very fragile, than a few words would lead civilization to savagery. Why so fragile?

Human beings are born as babies who depend upon love for survival and creation of their minds. However, when full grown, human beings discover that the greatest danger to them is other men.

This has been like that for two million years, about 100,000 generations, plenty of time to anchor behavioral change genetically, and epigenetically.

So man is all about love, first, and then quite a bit about hatred to. How is the mix allocated? Well, one can just look at epigenetics: it is a control system that varies the activation, or des-activation of genes, according to circumstances.

A great progress in Evolution Theory in recent years is that one has demonstrated, theoretically, and experimentally, that genetic behavior, implementation and even inheritance depends, to sometimes a great extent, upon the environment. (Lamarck was right all along!)

One can only guess that it is the same for character and personalities themselves: they depend upon the environment. From full love to full hatred. In the case of fishes, the epigenetic transformation can change a female into a male, and then, maybe even a super-male.

What triggers this? A change in the environment. The absence of males.

It is the same in humans. For two million years, at least, having too many people around was a death sentence. For the species. So the species comes equipped with a meta-ecological control system; the WILL TO EXTERMINATION.

Nietzsche did not think of that one: he only spoke of the Will To Power.

De Sade, the “Divine Marquis” was sharper. De Sade, one of the engineers of the Revolution of 1789, found himself in a leadership position during the Revolution. He warned his colleagues not to try to expand the Revolution by force. He said it would backfire.

Why? Because De Sade knew well how the Dark Side of man worked: it is always looking for excuses to get rolling.

The WILL TO EXTERMINATION just finds excuses to get rolling.

In the case of this 27 year old pilot, whatever demons rambled in his head led him to deliberately lock that door, push the manual override to prevent its unlocking, remove the automatic pilot, set the Airbus on a descent, ignore all the calls from Air Traffic control, and other planes, the pounding on the door, and the ground proximity alarms. He suffered, and human ethology told him it was other people’s fault. They had to be exterminated.

This is not different from the Nazis’ main reasoning (I am not saying Nazism was in any sense conducive to this particular maniac’s behavior; there are hints that the mysterious disappearance of that Malaysian jumbo over the Indian airline was also a suicide: who set the Automatic Pilot to fly towards Antarctica?)

The Nazis (and most Germans, then) suffered, and they wanted to exterminate (the fact that the absence of Revolution in Germany was the cause of their suffering did not escape Hitler, and most Germans; they just went for the wrong type of Revolution).

Conclusion for today’s world:

We, the World, are led by very few people. 2,000 people or so, have unimaginable powers in their hands. Many of them are ignorant twerps, like this 27 year old dissimulating pilot (a doctor had ordered him to stop working; he tore up the order). Putin’s weird, mass criminal behavior is a case in point.

Nuclear weapons are an extreme danger. So much power in such small devices.

However, so are those leaders we have: so much power, in such small minds.

One has to take measures to reduce the powers of the few. It should be civilization mission number one.

Seven billion led by a few people, each of them harboring, deep inside, the fundamental human insanity of rage supreme, is not a sustainable proposition.

Too much power led by too little intelligence is flying us into a cliff.

Patrice Ayme’

 

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17 Responses to “Why People Like To Kill People; Consequences”

  1. gmax Says:

    WILL TO EXTERMINATION is the dirty secret of the human condition? Why not? That explains a lot.

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  2. Paul Handover Says:

    Your paragraph: “In the case of this 27 year old pilot, whatever demons rambled in his head led him to deliberately lock that door, push the manual override to prevent its unlocking, remove the automatic pilot, set the Airbus on a descent, ignore all the calls from Air Traffic control, and other planes, the pounding on the door, and the ground proximity alarms.” contains a number of assumptions.

    I think that until the flight recorder has been recovered and the facts of the aircraft’s behaviour established, for the sake of other pilots and the families of the bereaved, your essay is unreasonably too soon.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Paul:
      Where are the assumptions?
      Flight recorder was recovered within hours of the crash. All data from plane was normal (planes like that send data continuously). The behavior of the pilot was so abnormal, all traffic was pulled away and a supersonic Mirage scrambled to find out what was going on. It arrived just after the plane crashed.

      French Judge Bruce Robin, Marseilles, two days ago:
      “Au jour d’aujourd’hui, je ne peux que dire qu’il a volontairement permis la perte d’altitude de l’avion (…) Il n’avait aucune raison de le faire, il n’avait aucune raison d’empêcher son commandant de bord de revenir dans la cabine de pilotage. Il n’avait aucune raison de refuser de répondre au contrôleur aérien (…) il n’avait aucune raison de refuser de taper un code qui rendait l’avion prioritaire par rapport à l’ensemble des avions dans la zone, ça fait beaucoup”, a énuméré le magistrat.

      They have recording of breathing and sounds by the otherwise unresponsive pilot.

      Transponder data shows that the autopilot on Germanwings Flight 9525 was reprogrammed by someone in the cockpit to change the plane’s altitude from 38,000 feet to 100 feet, according to Flightradar24, a website that tracks aviation data.

      The plane’s cockpit audio recorder captured horrific sounds. The captain, somehow locked out of the cockpit, can be heard banging on the door, Robin said.

      And screaming can be heard on the audio recording for the final few minutes of the flight.

      German authorities also say “that we have to assume” that Flight 9525 “was deliberately activated for a crash,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. “This is hard to comprehend for most people. Nobody can imagine this.”

      The disaster is not being described as a “terrorist attack,” and the killing of 150 people would generally not be described as a “suicide” either, FRENCH MAGISTRATE Bruce Robin said. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr agreed: “If a person kills himself and also 149 other people, another word should be used — not suicide,” he said.

      Yes it is mass murder by a despicable, demented maniac.
      And, no, it is not too soon to say it. We have plenty of proof. By the way, we have 12 other mass murders by plane, not counting 9/11, in the last 25 years.

      The ability to distinguish between “assumptions” and certainties is fundamental.

      BTW, do you want the girlfriend testimony? According to “Bild”:

      An ex-girlfriend of the Germanwings pilot who crashed his plane in the French Alps, killing all 149 others on board, described him as “tormented” and able to hide secrets.

      Maria, 26 (not her real name), told Bild newspaper that when she heard about the crash she remembered that he had said he was going do something “that would change the system” and “make everyone remember” him.

      She added: “It didn’t make sense at the time but now it all does.”

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      • Paul Handover Says:

        Patrice, the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) has been recovered, the main flight recorder has not. There is confirmation from the Frenchman leading the enquiry that while the First Officer’s behaviour is the primary lead it is not the only one. Will forward the link later on this morning.

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          Dear Paul: Nothing is 100% sure. Maybe I just don’t meditate right enough, and that’s why I can’t levitate. That was just an example. But 99.99999% is good enough for sure.
          The guy had an ORDER from a doctor to NOT go to work (it is not clear whether the doctor knew he was a pilot). He was also known to be subject to extreme psychiatric depression. He should never have been allowed next to a plane’s cockpit.

          The JUDGE leading the inquiry has to say whatever he says. When he announced initially that this Andreas Lubitz did it, it was obviously difficult for him to reveal the truth. He had his head in his hand a lot.

          The other flight recorder broke open, they are looking for the contents on a dangerous mountain slope where they have to use crampons and ropes.

          Anyway, it’s clear that the combination of a door that cannot be opened plus just one person in cockpit would lead, someday, to such an accident. Because of the WILL TO EXTERMINATION.

          And nukes are out there. Putin just ordered to put some in Crimea. Just to make sure he augments the war potential as much as possible (what else?)… OK, I am not 99% sure…

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          Yes, they have been checking terrorist links. French police is inquiring in Germany. Not just the Deutsche Polizei. True the French are checking absolutely everything. Going from 99.99999999% to 99.9999999999999999%.

          Instead of terrorism, they find “AMOK, AMOK, AMOK, AMOK” (I am quoting from German press). My point entirely.
          To hell with medical secrecy for those involved with potential mass homicide.
          PA

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      In my opinion, it’s not like mass murdering maniacs leading us into a cliff are anything real new. My point is that it is a rule, not something rare. Look at Hitler.

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    • gmax Says:

      All what Patrice said was true, according to the Times, and directly from the mouth of the judge (who seemed nearly as shocked as Merkel)

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  3. dominique deux Says:

    It is technically feasible now to steer a jet by committee. A dedicated app in the passengers’ smartphones, automatic implementation of the majority vote.
    They’ll never ever vote for doom.
    Democracy wins again, and smartphones become useful.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Jets I don’t know. But in principle, it would work, it is clear that they certainly would not work for doom. When the spacecraft is the Earth, this is exactly why I propose Direct Democracy. No voting for doom.
      In San Francisco, they are probably developing dozens of apps a day… Lots of young people that’s all they do and know… They also have a different psychology: they prefer to leave in town, and then commute TO the suburbs… That’s because they are gregarious.

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  4. Paul Handover Says:

    Let me add to my previous reply. (And I speak as someone very familiar with the world of commercial aviation.)

    The BBC this morning reported ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32098578 ):

    French investigator Jean-Pierre Michel also told the AFP news agency that the pilot’s personality was “a serious lead [in the investigation] but… can’t be the only one”.

    “We’re going to try to understand what in his life could have left him to carry out the act,” Mr Michel said, adding that investigators had not discovered any “particular element” so far.

    I have made my opinion clear. For the sake of the poor families, and especially the family of the First Officer, we must await the truth as determined from all the known facts. It has nothing whatsoever to do with 99.999 infinitum %. I will say no more on the subject.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Paul:
      I know you are a pilot, and I have appreciated the pics of your flying, and among mountains, on your site. So your tribe, the tribe of pilots, has been struck. However…

      I view calling a cat a cat progress in philosophy. I also try to ascertain more precisely what evil is. Evil has many faces. e

      That the co-pilot is culprit, evil, is beyond the pale. It is, so let’s be it. I don’t want to sound like a climate skeptic… And insist that 99.9999999999999999% is assuredly not 100%…

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  5. John Rogers Says:

    There’s no question about the danger of nuclear weapons.
    So giving the nuclear button of the biggest arsenal on earth (U.S.) to someone who exhibited signs of Alzheimer’s during his campaign for president (Reagan) says something about the primacy of the dark forces.
    Alzheimer’s is not something you suddenly come down with like a cold. And it manifests itself, growing worse.
    I happen to know a NY Times reporter who attempted to write about Reagan’s odd behavior (which they had personally observed) at several campaign events. Even then, there was obviously something off about him.
    However, the articles were spiked by the “newspaper of record”.
    I’m sure you’re not surprised.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear John:
      Thanks. We agree. I remember a famous TV talking head (Brockaw or Rather) saying live something like Reagan did not have his head with him anymore (as Reagan was leaving the presidency). The statement was excised carefully in repeat of the report.

      The NYT censorship is astounding. They removed some of their best commenters of recent years, who were too critical (and talked too much like me, as they read me, hahahaha).

      Putin is not fully rational, Merkel herself said at some point and added he made just plain weird remarks (she did not repeat these remarks as she obviously think Putin is complete nuts, and she is trying to doctor him back to health; that German Wings tragdy is going to make her even more cautious… with Vlad).
      PA

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Biggest arsenal is the USSR Putin’s Realm.

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  6. Crazed Secrecy Empowers Killer Pilots | Patrice Ayme's Thoughts Says:

    […] on transportation accidents, came up with its detailed analysis upon, and recommendation from, the crash of a German Wings A 320, which killed 150 people. The BEA’s work has bearing on general world technological, social and political problems of […]

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