Crimes of Passion
The murders of Arturo Gatti, possibly by his 23-year-old ex-stripper wife, and of Steve McNair by his 20-year-old lover, may reflect yet another sign that more Americans than we know —especially younger Americans — are losing their sense of self and, with it, their psychological and moral bearings.
Certainly, crimes of passion are nothing new. As has always been true, the killers of Gatti and McNair had to have had extreme life stories with major psychological fault lines reaching back, quite possibly, to childhood. But in both cases, the victims were famous men who may well have offered the women in their lives temporary and fragile shelter from deep, unresolved questions about whether they could exist independently or would crumble into nothingness without their connections to fame and fortune. It is often those who feel dead themselves who take the lives of others.
Some may think it’s too big a leap to draw any connection between a lack of respect for life and the artificial, Internet-based, technology-fueled existences that too many of today’s teens and twenty-somethings have lived, but I’m not so sure. I think that the kind of existential panic — the panic of having nothing real at one’s core — that can lead a young woman to murder her famous lover, rather than lose him, is a distant cousin of posting videos on YouTube of staged beatings and the deconstruction of real lives and relationships into profiles, IMs and tweets.
In a world that worships reality TV parents who turn their children into entertainment automatons and a psychologically disturbed pop star whose celebrity was initially forged through enslavement to his sadistic father, respect for one’s own life and that of others can start to erode. Gaining fame and saving face on Facebook is what matters, and the loss of image can feel like the loss of everything. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that cases of extreme violence are now just the same as they always were — outlying cases that are no predictor of anything about the rest of us.
But as a psychiatrist who has made it part of my life’s work to resist dismissing my instincts, I now sense something ominous about our culture reflected in the worst deeds of the most violent among us. I fear we are at risk for losing respect for one another and for human life. I fear our fragile God-given capacity for empathy is under siege. I fear that in obsessing over “Blanket” Jackson (and I feel a little disturbed by even writing his preposterous name), who was dangled over a railing by a father who may not have fathered him at all, we open the door to outlandish acts of dramatic violence that would make for decent psychological thrillers, but are now the stuff of what we call “real” life.
Tags: Amanda Rodrigues, Arturo Gatti, athlete, Blanket Jackson, boxing, celebrity, Dr. Keith Ablow, empathy, Facebook, fame, football, fortune, image, infidelity, Internet, Michael Jackson, murder, murder suicide, psychology, reality TV, Sahel Kazemi, sports, Steve McNair, twitter, Violence
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I hope you are wrong too but unfortunately many people are afraid to be alone, to know their own mind as you say. They surround themselves with all the varied audio and visual media we have now instead of taking advantage of quite moments to comtemplate life’s mysteries and their own thoughts about anything under the sun. Alot of people are into celebrity worship too much and can’t see or appreciate the wonderful people around them in their everyday life. At any given time, any one of the many people we know can support us in our times of need. We don’t need just one special someone to prop us up constantly. We need networks of support at times and we need to learn to stand alone sometimes too. I heard today in the news about some teenagers who have formed a group called “Do Hard Things” (or something like that). It has to do with taking on challenges, learning to grow up and not just slide thru adolesence and young adulthood. I wish them well.
Excellent post, Dr. Ablow, and Claire, I loved your response!
I (unfortunately) think that Dr. A may be correct about the erosion of empathy in today’s society.
I grew up watching “The Three Stooges”, “Tom and Jerry”, “The Roadrunner”, and other extremely violent (albeit comedic) shows and cartoons. The Brothers Grimm wrote some pretty gnarly tales even longer ago…
But the amount of real violence and disregard for others seems to have reached new levels in recent years. One theory might be that there are many more people in the world now, so the ratio might still be the same, but I kind of doubt that.
I am convinced that the “existential panic” of having nothing real inside (fuelled by the constant, and apparently welcome, onslaught of “reality” TV, and all the true-self-negating options on the internet–the staged YouTube beatings are particularly disturbing…) is indeed a huge part of this very sad lack of empathy in our society today.
We all do really need to get back to being authentic, and let the dramatic entertainment be what it used to be: dramatic entertainment.
You neglect to mention the role of easily available guns. As you state, “crimes of passion are nothing new.” We have to assume that there will always be unstable people wanting to commit an act of violence. I am a survivor of the 101 California Street multiple murders in San Francisco in 1993. That super unstable person’s delusional fantasies involved the use of the high-powered weapons he had seen in movies and in fact used. Of course there are always murder weapons. Kitchen knives are ubiquitous. But you can do a lot more damage a lot more quickly and easily with a gun. If you remove guns from the “nuts + guns” formula, lives will be saved.
“I fear our fragile God-given capacity for empathy is under siege” GOD GIVEN is the key.
“I fear we are at risk for losing respect for one another and for human life”
today’s society doesn’t respect human life.
I believe our society has reached its apex is now headed down to disaster.