MIM Notes #227       February 1, 2001

Murder in Massachusetts demonstrates failure of psychology

by MC17

On December 26 an employee of a Massachusetts software company 
went on a shooting spree in his office and killed seven people. 
The murders left the Amerikan public searching for an explanation. 
In what Amerikans like to think of as the most democratic and 
advanced society in the world, people can not understand how a 
white middle-class man could go on a shooting rampage in white 
middle-class Amerika. 

The bourgeois media has gone scrambling after as many bogus 
psychological explanations as it can find. Pictures of the killer, 
who had long hair and looked disheveled, were printed in 
newspapers and flashed on TV screens, conveniently portraying a 
man who does not appear to be an average normal looking Amerikan. 
As if long hair is enough to explain the killing spree, newspapers 
quoted acquaintances describing his appearance: ''I was a little 
bit taken aback by the way he looked.''(1)

The killer, Michael McDermott, was apparently a relatively normal 
white Amerikan man, down to the large amount of debt he had 
amassed and the treatment he was receiving for depression. His 
life provided little fuel for the psychological profiling frenzy 
but the media did not give up easily. Speculative stories about 
his enjoyment of science fiction, amount of time spent on the 
internet, and love of pizza all tried to suggest that McDermott is 
not a typical Amerikan man. 

The Boston Globe ran a story interviewing two "industrial 
psychologists" from the University of Tennessee who claimed they 
had developed a questionnaire which could be used by employers to 
interview potential employees to determine if they posed any 
potential threat. The psychological test lays out situations and 
asks the test taker to choose between two reactions. One such 
situation quoted in the Globe: "Twenty years ago, American car 
makers lost business to Japanese car makers because consumers felt 
that Japanese cars were better built." The possible reactions were 
that u.s. carmakers built low-quality cars so they could make more 
money selling replacement parts and that Japanese carmakers knew 
more about building high-quality cars. The choice that indicates 
potentially dangerous aggression is that u.s. carmakers built low-
quality cars. (If speaking the truth means being labeled 
aggressive, well, call us aggressive...)

Discussing why this psychological test works, one of the 
psychologists explained "These people have a cognitive 
preparedness to aggression. They've got these structures in place 
to justify aggressive behavior. They don't think they are crazy. 
They just think they're right."(2) Evidently, if we're to believe 
these psychologists, anybody with a strong opinion about the auto 
industry (let alone the crimes of Amerikan imperialism or 
patriarchy) has a tendency to anti-social violence like 
McDermott's.

It is not acceptable to Amerika that a typical Amerikan man could 
one day go on a shooting spree because this calls into question 
the entire social system which might cause such an action. If 
McDermott is a normal Amerikan, what's to stop so many other 
normal Amerikans from doing the same thing. And, if McDermott is a 
normal Amerikan, this calls into question Amerikan society and its 
culture of violence that might lead to this kind of killing spree.

It is far more attractive to build up white Amerika's false fear 
of oppressed-nation criminals, and white Amerika is eager to 
believe the lie that the oppressed nations are more pre-disposed 
to crime than whites. These bogus fears are used to justify the 
mass imprisonment of the oppressed nations -- Amerika locks up 
Blacks at a higher rate than Apartheid South Africa ever did -- 
and win elections.

The reaction to the shootings in Massachusetts is a good example 
of why MIM says that psychology should be abolished. It is a 
pseudo-science that attributes humyn behavior to non-existent 
mental "traits" instead of to material circumstances and 
conditions. It is very important to bourgeois culture that cases 
of murder like this one be explainable by some inherent individual 
flaw so that people can go on believing that Amerikan society is 
great. But MIM blames the violent imperialist society for the 
violence that it has created. McDermott was a product of society. 
He learned violence from the imperialists themselves who practice 
and finance murder around the world to maintain economic and 
political control. It should be no surprise that McDermott took 
this example to heart when his life seemed to lack this control.

As Malcolm X said about the assassination of President Kennedy, it 
was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." In his 
autobiography he explains "I said that the hate in white men had 
not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that 
hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this 
country's Chief of State."(3)

MIM understands violence in the same societal context that Malcolm 
X described it. Individual acts of violence have to be evaluated 
as a part of the system as a whole. MIM has a materialist 
understanding of crime which includes the mass murders committed 
in other countries by the u.s. military and it's lackeys as the 
most brutal and violent crime. This, as well as acts of violence 
within the u.s., are a part of a political and social system which 
needs violence as a tool of social control. Sadly, brutal rampages 
by people like McDermott are not exceptional; MIM sees them as 
inevitable as long as imperialism exists.



Notes:

1. The Boston Globe, Dec 30, 2000.

2. The Boston Globe, Dec 27, 2000.

3. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Grove Press Inc, New York. 
p.301.