Today, I find myself thinking about the pilot who appears - if investigators have it right - to have intentionally crashed a commercial airliner into the alps, killing 150 people, including himself. There’s obviously a lot of questions to be answered here, not the least of which is “if you’re going to commit suicide, why take 149 other people with you?”. An excellent question. But what the whole sad incident makes me personally think about is the increasing isolation of people in our modern society. I’ve written about this before, for example when that guy snapped and killed a bunch of people last year, leaving behind notes about how women had mistreated him. It’s not, of course, surprising that people should get depressed. Since the dawn of time, there’s been a dark side to humankind that gets anxious and sad and feels worthless. And being alone and isolated are also not a completely modern phenomenon. Odysseus was forced to travel the world alone with only his dark thoughts. Captain Ahab traveled the seas bent on revenge. But what is new is the depths of the Death of a Salesman problem. Stripped of our connections to other people, it becomes so easy to get out of balance. When I was in Early Childhood Education training, I remember one of my teachers referring to the parent of a teenager as their “external frontal lobe”. I was struck by that thought. As humans, we emerge from the womb less than fully formed. Specifically, the brain is not complete (because otherwise we wouldn’t fit through the hips). So parents are, in many ways, the external frontal lobe for their children. But what I think is interesting about this is that I’m not sure it’s limited to children. We, as humans, are inherently social creatures. The people around us - our community - are, in many ways, a vital piece of our control system, of our decision making process - our “frontal lobe”. When we don’t have that, our internal control systems have no check and balance.
One of the interesting things about the co-pilot case, to me, is that apparently nobody saw this coming. Despite the fact that the man appeared to have had a family that cared about him (and perhaps he even lived with sometimes), a girlfriend, coworkers, etc - and despite the fact that he was apparently suffering from at least two separate ailments, one that was affecting his vision and another his mental state - nobody was able to put two and two together. We are not talking here about some Ted Kaczynski loner off in the woods; this guy had a job, an apartment, neighbors, people who remembered him. And yet, somehow, he apparently felt he had nobody to turn to. I wish this was a novel phenomenon, an isolated incident, but this is something we all understand is happening to us as a species; despite all the new ways to communicate, we seem to understand less and less about the people around us with each passing day. I have, personally, experienced what it’s like to feel incredibly down, or frustrated, and not feel like really have anyone to turn to. I’ve been incredibly alone, even in the middle of a big city.
This is not to suggest that I, in any way, condone flying a plane into the Alps. There is something cowardly about suicide, but there is something truly reprehensible about taking 149 other people with you. What I’m suggesting, though, is that unless we figure out a way to turn back towards caring more about the people around us, this may not be the last time.