Re: “How do you cultivate this (i.e. respect) in someone born without empathy or awareness?”
Good question, but the big elephant in the room which many psychologists/psychobabblers, TV pundits, and Liberals/Marxists refuse to see is that a person can be “EVIL”.
It can be an innate, a birth mental defect in the brain that causes a person to be or become (with age), a sociopath or psychopath. Not their fault as they have no ability to either know right from wrong or to prevent themselves from doing harm to people/animals.
Others become psychopaths through ideological indoctrination, of which the Nazis and Communists were the masters. I might add that back during the time of the Inquisition, for example, religious zealots, in the name of God, performed horrible torture/killings and became psychopaths themselves.
If you study or read about the Cambodian children who were kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge and made to kill their own parents, you will begin to understand one process wherein a normal individual becomes a psychopathic killer. Communism (and Nazism, and Tojoism) kills the learned concepts of good, decent, proper, “normal”, respectful, i.e. “morality.”
So too does Liberalism in its extremis, which you can see so readily in the output of garbage from Hollywood, the criminal Rap singers, the drug culture, etc.
Psychopaths are both born and created. The devolution of American culture (religious, educational, moral, scientific (i.e. the rise of voodoo science like the Communist “Lysenkoism”), and “selective morality” are gateways to leading “normal” people to deviancy (sociopath and psychopathic mindsets).
Religion, for all its problems, has created some universal moral codes which were meant to develop, in people, a way to being a decent person and practicing decency towards others.
Modern Liberalism, added by the extremes of Fascism, Racial Superiority (Fascism and Japanese Imperialism), and Communism, learned that you must destroy this “decency” and create the “new modern man”, a person devoid of personal decency. Instead “decency” is decided and imposed by the “state”, and anyone who opposes this totalitarian mode of governance must be destroyed “as an enemy of the people.”
If you indoctrinate a child at an early age to kill “the enemy” (whoever the state says it is), they will become state-trained killers. Just look at the barbarism of the North Koreans towards their own people, American soldiers, So. Koreans, etc.
Russia/Red China and Kim Il Song created a nation of psychopaths and prisoners, yet the Obama regime thinks it can deal with them on a rational basis. I’m not sure who’s crazier in this case, Obama/Hillary/Rice or the No. Koreans.
The same applies to trying to rationally dealing with harden gangbangers, drug dealers/traffickers, stone-killers/icemen/hitmen, or Ed Schulz. You can try but you can never succeed because they live in a different mental world than we do, devoid of our Judaeo-Christian ethnic and morals.
Some moderate Moslems also live decent lives and don’t hurt anyone, but what do you think of the PLO terrorists who slaughtered many Israeli young school children at Maalot in 1974, and elsewhere? And what was the mindset of the Moslem in France who killed three Moroccan soldiers, a Rabbi and his children in the name of Allah?
Was this mass murderer any different in mindset than Adam Lanza was when he shot little children in the face? This French Moslem slit the throat of a little Jewish girl by holding her hair and pulling her head back, and this kind of killing in normal in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Algeria, esp. as committed by Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Did Major Hassan exhibit “morality” when he gunned down fellow American soldiers in the name of “Allah”? I don’t know whether he was always a psychopath or became one over time through self-religious indoctrination (aided by Al-Alaki), but the end result was the same, the slaughter of the innocents.
EVIL exists in this world, yet the Liberals too often refuse to acknowledge its’ existence in people, thus denying themselves the ability to deal with it in its most terrible forms.
I blame the Quakers for a lot of this “respect” for the deviants of society. They believe that even bad people can be saved. How do you save a Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, the Atlanta child killer (Williams?), Ted Bundy, the Zodiac killers, and Lanza?
Sometimes you can’t and you must face the reality that the evil ones must be destroyed, killed, so that they never pose a threat to another human, ever.
Too many Liberals, including psychologists, refuse to accept this reality and make excuses for that which cannot be excused, only somewhat understood.
PS: Many of my relatives died by execution, gas chambers, or other means of the Nazi killing machine during WW2 at Lemberg, Belzec and Auschwitz concentration camps. There was no rational reason why this had to happen but a whole nation was captivated, mesmerized and indoctrinated by a madman named Hitler (or Stalin, Lenin,Trotsky) or Che Guevera, Pol Pot, Kim Il Song and the greatest mass murderer in history, Mao Tse-tung, White House advisor to Obama, Anita Dunn’s favorite philosopher.
Some people are born evil like Lanza, but they often kill themselves. Others like Dunn and Van Jones learn it at our schools and universities, then get jobs at the White House.
In the end, the innocent are still dead while some of the “mental” killers find successful careers in destroying America and all that is good in it.
Unfortunately, you’re right — there are truly evil people in the world, and toward evil one shows no mercy. (As a proud Jew myself, I feel like quoting the Talmud to liberals: those who are kind to the cruel become cruel to the kind.)
Lanza apparently was into videogames, which says not only a lot about our culture, as you said, but his state of mind: he broke off with reality and immersed himself in a fantasy world of power.
And yet.
From what I know so far, much of what Lanza did seem premeditated:
1) He picked a school that had easy access (they knew his mother)
2) He shot his mother quite deliberately, which indicated a lot of issues with her.
3) He shot himself when he knew the jig was up (police found a lot of ammo on him, which suggested that had they not shown up, he would have killed more, showing he was aware of consequences)
4) He apparently tried to destroy his hard drive, which indicates that he wanted to hide something.
Had he suddenly snapped, run around raving, or thought the kids were Martians, it might be excused as schizophrenic behavior. (Though certainly not condoned.) But this seems cold-blooded.
(BTW, he looked strange — crazy eyes. So did the guys in Arizona & Colorado.)
Well said.
Wow. Excellent post.