THE MURDER WAVE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 302, 16 August 1932, Page 3

THE MURDER WAVE

SANE PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTIONS OF CRIME. MODERN WEAKNESSES. The present succession of murders *in New South Wales— including six lives taken in Sydney itself — should cause every thinking -man to seek reasons, writes Stanley Kingsbury in the Sydney Sunday Sun. Is th'e phenomenon connected with , th'e lowering of national standards an ugly offshoot of these uncertain times ? If we analyse some recent tragedies it is possible to make a rough division. Three were primarily brutal, one was cold-blooded and diaholically skilful, and* another was apparently the cracking of an overwrought brain. In four of the five it is possible that a form of mental suggestion or contagion was at work — in the same way that a suicide from Sydney Bridge sets a fashion, that the after use of a dangerous narcotic is apt to produce a crop of similar cases, that an attempt at train-wrecking calls forth copyists. For instance, the Cooma shooting tragedy had at least two forerunners. When the mental excitation of paraded tragedy is felt by a crude type of brain or by a mind already almost unhinged by worry, the danger from suggestion is positive and real. Of course, we cannot dismiss the problem merely by placing upon it the label, "suggestion." Do we mean thereby the visual suggestion oifered by headlines, photographs, and \dvid word pictures? Or are we probing a little deeper, seeking a solution in the mysterious subconscious mind, which may be at once general and individual ? Damned at Birth. Unqiiestionably a social system is at fault which permits hopelessly diseased or imbeciled r'arents in this State to bring children into the world — young Australians who are damned from birth, from the cradle to the gallows. After twenty years I can still stand in a cold corridor at the foot of a prison scaffold and hear again that despairing indictment by a man about to die: — "I was born in the gutter and brought up in it. Every man's hand has been against me. I have never had a chance. And now that I am about to be hanged because of it, you aslc me to pray for forgiveness. No! If there is a God He should ask me to forgive Him!" But it was not God's fault. It was your fault and my fault, and the fault of a rotten indefensible code. And again it is the fault of our educational system which turns out unthinking Franlcensteins. We eram the minds of boys and girls with bits of prepared knowledge, as a butcher crams a sausage machine. ■ The inevitable result is a community p'erfectly trained to respond to mass suggestion but perfectly incapable, as a community, of intelligent thinking. Only the other day I read the comments of an expert upon the results of our Leaving Certificate examination, the open door to our University. Summed up, he found that there had been good teaching, conscientious study, but far too many ready-made and stereotyped answers. Many students app'arently could not understand how to define patriotism. In other words, they had not learned to think intelligently. Which' explains nine-tenths of the trouble in this State.