It May Take Years
Jul. 24th, 2024 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ndrosenOne of the minor annoyances of modern life is being exposed to psychological blather that is taken much more seriously than it ought to be, and other twaddle preceded by the tag, “Experts say.” (This is not a condemnation of everything said by actual, competent psychologists.) A recent example was a front page article in Tuesday’s Washington Post, “Trump shooter remains difficult to categorize,” with the subheading, “Determining gunman’s motives may take years, experts say.”
If we don’t know now, we probably never will know. How will supposed experts, chewing over the same lack of evidence for years, determine the motives of the late Thomas Matthew Crooks? Possibly he thought that he was saving his country from fascism, possibly he wanted fame of some sort at almost any cost, possibly he hoped to impress a girl. Who can know? Even if he wrote or vlogged some kind of manifesto or diary that remains to be discovered, we will likely not know whether it is truthful, or what interior thoughts and feelings produced his words.
The rather lengthy story could have been trimmed by a good editor to, “We don’t know just what a dead man was thinking or feeling, and we probably never will. We, the two reporters, did not need to consult any experts to reach this conclusion.”
If we don’t know now, we probably never will know. How will supposed experts, chewing over the same lack of evidence for years, determine the motives of the late Thomas Matthew Crooks? Possibly he thought that he was saving his country from fascism, possibly he wanted fame of some sort at almost any cost, possibly he hoped to impress a girl. Who can know? Even if he wrote or vlogged some kind of manifesto or diary that remains to be discovered, we will likely not know whether it is truthful, or what interior thoughts and feelings produced his words.
The rather lengthy story could have been trimmed by a good editor to, “We don’t know just what a dead man was thinking or feeling, and we probably never will. We, the two reporters, did not need to consult any experts to reach this conclusion.”
