Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

364 I HOW THE MIND WORKSdents in a dozen years) that a slang term for losing one's temper is "goingpostal." But running amok is not unique to America, to Western nations,or even to modern societies. Amok is a Malay word for the homicidalsprees occasionally undertaken by lonely Indochinese men who havesuffered a loss of love, a loss of money, or a loss of face. The syndromehas been described in a culture even more remote from the West: thestone-age foragers of Papua New Guinea.The amok man is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious tohis surroundings and unreachable by appeals or threats. But his rampageis preceded by lengthy brooding over failure, and is carefully planned as ameans of deliverance from an unbearable situation. The amok state ischillingly cognitive. It is triggered not by a stimulus, not by a tumor, notby a random spurt of brain chemicals, but by an idea. The idea is so standardthat the following summary of the amok mind-set, composed in1968 by a psychiatrist who had interviewed seven hospitalized amoks inPapua New Guinea, is an apt description of the thoughts of mass murdererscontinents and decades away:I am not an important or "big man." I possess only my personal sense ofdignity. My life has been reduced to nothing by an intolerable insult.Therefore, I have nothing to lose except my life, which is nothing, so Itrade my life for yours, as your life is favoured. The exchange is in myfavour, so I shall not only kill you, but I shall kill many of you, and at thesame time rehabilitate myself in the eyes of the group of which I am amember, even though I might be killed in the process.The amok syndrome is an extreme instance of the puzzle of thehuman emotions. Exotic at first glance, upon scrutiny they turn out to beuniversal; quintessentially irrational, they are tightly interwoven withabstract thought and have a cold logic of their own.UNIVERSAL PASSIONA familiar tactic for flaunting one's worldhness is to inform listeners thatsome culture lacks an emotion we have or has an emotion we lack.Allegedly the Utku-Inuit Eskimos have no word for anger and do not feelthe emotion. Tahitians supposedly do not recognize guilt, sadness, longing,or loneliness; they describe what we would call grief as fatigue, sicikness, or