A friend of mine told a story about when he was in grade school, in a conversation about learning to play instruments, and music teaching in primary school. A girl in the same school had brought an accordion to music class, because her father played one and she thought it would be a nice way to learn and participate. And this wasn't some kind of toy accordion. It was the real deal, a full-on expensive instrument.
Because the accordion was so heavy and cumbersome to carry, she kept it stored in the music classroom.
You might guess where this is going. One day it turned out that someone had vandalized the instrument, poking holes all over it with a pen. Not only was she devastated, it was also a quite expensive instrument, so it wasn't a small deal. This caused a huge ruckus in the school, but the culprit was never found nor came forward.
The sad thing about these things is that while we find such things infuriating and sad, most of us don't find it surprising. Vandalism, destroying other people's property, even and especially expensive property that other people value and keep in high regard, is way too common in our human society. So common that, while it may infuriate and sadden us, it doesn't surprise us.
It got me thinking: Why do some kids do this? Why do some adults do this? What kind of psychological phenomenon is behind this? Shouldn't we be an empathetic species who understands the suffering of others? Why do some of us go their way to deliberately cause grief and suffering to others, for an extremely brief moment of evil joy, if even that? What's the psychology behind this?
In some cases some kids do this kind of thing out of ignorance and not thinking. After all, much of our learning and growing up is making mistakes and learning from them. Many people hurt other people when they were kids, without thinking too much about it, came to realize how horrible it actually is, and learned from the mistake and never did it again (sometimes it might have taken repeated mistakes before finally learning, but most people get there eventually). I suppose that's part of growing up. Sometimes we don't just make mistakes that hurts us, sometimes we make mistakes that hurts others.
But then there are of course those kids who never learn. They bully and hurt other people for whatever inner psychological reasons they have, and never really stop, and may carry the attitude even to adulthood.
Anyway, while that would be a discussion worthy of an entire book, the point of this blog post is me bemoaning the fact of how sad it is that it's so common that we don't find it surprising. It's so common as to be expected. What psychology lies behind this?
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