Day 514: Pistorius and Protection Paranoia

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/07/world/africa/oscar-pistorius-trial-fifth-day/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Pretoria, South Africa (CNN) -- When security guards arrived at the home of Oscar Pistorius on the night his girlfriend died, the first thing the track star told them was that everything was fine.

That's what Pieter Baba, a security guard supervisor, testified Friday in Pistorius' murder trial.

The athlete said everything was fine, but he was crying, Baba said, and he knew everything was not fine.

Baba and the other guards then witnessed Pistorius descending from the upstairs carrying Reeva Steenkamp to the lower level.

"I was so shocked, I couldn't think for a few moments," Baba testified.

Another witness who testified Friday, former Pistorius girlfriend Samantha Taylor, said their relationship ended when he cheated on her with Steenkamp.

Taylor also testified that Pistorius slept with a pistol on his bedside table or on the floor beside his prosthetic legs and once became so angry after a traffic stop that he shot a gun through the sunroof of a car.

Things like this seem to be happening more frequently. People becoming completely possessed by a fear or belief. If you become that obsessed with any concept that it drives you to extreme behaviour then you must know that there is a problem. The reality is that the problem is not only at an individual level but also (and maybe more so) at a collective level. We all contribute to the manifestations of extreme behaviours, mostly by passively accepting their existence without questioning how we could change. 

These stories pop up in the news regularly, but never in such a way that we start to question why it keeps happening. We don't get to a point where we say "you know what, there should be some kind of support for people who start manifesting extreme behaviour". Sure, we have psychology and drugs, but these things have proven to be woefully insufficient - proven by the very existence and proliferation of extreme behaviour. Only a small percentage of people actually overcome their obsessions (possessions) - this owing to either ineffective treatments or to the fact that many people do not seek help, mostly due to ego or financial constraints. 

There is no shame in recognizing that you are possessed by some concept or belief, nor in asking for assistance - you should only be ashamed if you do nothing about it when you realise what you have been doing and thinking. Unfortunately, the understanding of the human mind and behaviour is so limited that support to society on a large scale is severely stunted. The reason for this stems from the same source as someone's inaction toward their mental state: ego. Those people who purport to study human behaviour have a tendency of imposing their own opinions onto their research so that the results are biased. Have you ever noticed how there is some scientific study proving pretty much everything and each study contradicts the others? This is what subjective science looks like and it will obviously never show the truth.