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Maybe the act really was that easy for him. But all of those people? They didn't harm him- he wouldn't have recognized any if them had he seen them even during the flight. I interact with suicidal people on a very regular basis and they are uniformly either fixated upon themselves and their troubles or deeply sorry. Homicidal ideation is not something that I encounter with any frequency. I have never met a patient who would just off a plan full of strangers, and I have met some bad folks. I worked in the TDC hospital for a long time. The offenders by and large weren't monsters, at least not the sort that would do something like this.

ELB wrote: ↑Mon Jun 17, 2019 2:22 pm I would guess that most suicidal people do not care about other people, but this generally results in them not really caring about how their death affects others. They justify it to themselves by “they’re better off without me,” but they are so focused on their own pain they cannot empathize with anyone else’s.

A suicidal sociopath, who already cares nothing for others, will think nothing of taking several hundred people with him.

That makes sense to a point, but then why go to the trouble of killing so many people? If you broaden the horizon to include other similar patterns of behavior like mass shooters, in every case the killer could've committed suicide in a more certain fashion had they chosen to kill only themselves. Zahaire would've been throw into a hellish Malaysian prison had he failed, while Paddock or the engineer in Virginia would've been thrown into prison lives that they were very poorly adapted to withstand. In all cases, suicide would've then become much harder. If the goal was, "I am in terrible pain and I want to end it all", then the machinations required to murder strangers were DIRECTLY OPPOSED to that goal even for people who didn't care at all who they had to hurt to kill themselves. The argument that their reasoning was blinded by pain doesn't hold water given the meticulous and successful planning that went into all of these attacks.

These are people who were able to broadly gain societal trust, and then chose to abuse it in horrible but very carefully thought out ways. Nikolas Cruz was a mentally broken human being whose "success" was chiefly due to being abetted by cowards in uniform (one could argue the same for someone like Adam Lanza, whose mother cared for him so deeply that she could not see how dangerous he had become), but these crimes seem quantifiably different. Nikolas Cruz and Adam Lanza are never given positions of authority because they are clearly unworthy, unpredictable, and dangerous. The mass murderers like Zahaire and Paddock didn't demonstrate those traits beforehand, or at least not to a degree that would set off alarms.

I'm not suggesting that we have an answer, only that the implications of the article are terrifying.

The article seems built to make the case that the command pilot went nuts and killed everyone aboard. Based upon what I assume is all of the available evidence that seems to be the most likely explanation.

That leaves the more frightening question of why this is an international incident rather than a lone suicide that we never hear about? Why kill 240 other strangers who had entrusted you with their lives in order to end your own misery? Suicide is awful but common, and we look back at suicides with heartache and compassion. Mass murder is evil and rare, and we look back upon mass murderers with hatred.

The most terrifying part of the article was the list of mass murder arline crashes, which couting MH370 comes to 4 since 1997.

It is almost as if the pilot and perhaps by extension all of these mass murderers didn't care about the world. Humans develop a "theory of mind" or the idea that other people are beings similar to but distinct from themselves at a very young age- it is a core part of development. It is as if these mass murders voluntarily retraced that path back toward the view that the world around one is merely an inert spectacle that exists only as it relates to the self. Narcissists are actually very different from that- their actions revolve around desperation for the admiration of and approval from others.

I worry that psychopaths and sociopaths are actually far more common than we give them credit for.