Mentally Ill

When you walk a path around a small lake, you know where you will end up, so it cannot be considered an adventure to take a circular path that soon concludes at your starting point.

Thus to say someone who deliberately flies a plane into a mountain is mentally ill really says little more than the choice is contrary to fashion, which says nothing about the reason it was performed.

There are a thousand better ways to suicide that pose no harm to others, if one was concerned with harm caused to others. That the pilot wanted to take 149 others down with him was an act of revenge on society. Why he wanted revenge hasn't been disclosed, but the act wasn't about his sudden need to be obliterated or a material motivation to destroy the plane. He knew the plane was packed and he wanted to strike at its passengers, and society by proxy. You'll think about him every time you see a pilot exit the flight deck to visit the lavatory.

We dismiss his acts by calling him mentally ill, a designation now shared with the previously mentally deranged, a phrase disfavored in most countries because it has become impolite to be too honest. From political pressure, we merge dissimilar concepts in language, losing meaning and our ability to communicate clearly. This movement claims a motive of preventing people from being offended, but instead has provoked strange people claiming to suffer from triggering and microaggressions -- terrible acts for which lynch mobs of social justice warriors gather to judge ideas and words damaging to their ideology so they can gain power by restricting critical analysis and coherent ideas currently accessible from unrestricted sources.

Some will say they can't understand why someone would take 149 innocent people along with him to death. How polite and proper to disavow understanding! Perhaps they really can't understand -- and yet there was a discernible reason they could comprehend by considering the decision behind his act.

Quite simply: he assessed their worth and judged modern society. You might not agree, or even dislike his measurement and choice, and this too is just another assessment and judgment.

Call it a tantrum if that helps avoid considering his diagnosis. After years of clever taunts saying "start by killing yourself", he summarily answered with an act of steel conviction, perhaps imagining the passengers as the fools who offered cheap rhetoric instead of digging in to help solve pressing problems. In frustration with their denial and inadequacy, he offered his considered conclusion, promoted on news stations worldwide.

As Nietzsche advised, we won't understand much until moving beyond morality to assess facts as they are, rather than repeating popular slogans of fake sympathy and indulging in hysterical displays over what happened. That of course assumes you want to understand more than cry and proclaim hopeless confusion.

The pilot was young, able to participate in society, well enough trained to fly complex aircraft, including programming it to descend into a mountain and lock the other pilot out of the cockpit at an opportune moment. Though junior in status, he noticed the comfortable life and affluence of older pilots, and that his future was promised to have the same -- but decided it was not desirable.

Calling him crazy is an attempt to marginalize his decision to make it seem random and disconnected from a rational cause. It would indict society to say he did not consider a career as a pilot in this society to be a worthy aspiration. Earn a lot of money for the easy work of taking off and landing, marry a promiscuous girl who lures him into marriage so she can grow large with cupcakes and ice-cream, alternating between annoying and boring him while being useless to help around the house? He looked at the realistic avenues ahead and could not find any that were desirable, or even tolerable. He knew what opportunities his parents had -- those have been extinguished and replaced with degraded forms that fail at their necessary purpose.

It's fine to disagree with someone's decision, but disingenuous to pretend the chosen act doesn't convey an unmistakable message.