In the wake of great pain, tragedy, or inexplicable bad-action, we commonly seek some sense of comfort and understanding of the event by trying to empathize with the characters involved. After the tragic shooting in Newtown, CT, concerned parents across the country voiced support for Liza Long’s column I am Adam Lanza’s Mother, in which she shed a personal light on the perpetrator’s story by writing about her son’s mental illness.
After Harvard’s own (albeit infinitely less tragic) bomb scare this week, many students have jumped to similar sentiments in trying to rationalize and understand the actions of the student who claimed to have placed four shrapnel laden bombs in three academic facilities and one freshman dorm. The sentiment ricochets around campus – filling dorm room and dining hall conversations with comparisons to students’ own sense of desperation during finals and speculations about how hard the final that the perpetrator was trying to avoid really could have been. Some of those sentiments found voice in a recent HPR article: We’re All Eldo Kim.
But as critics quickly pointed out in the Adam Lanza case, comparing yourself to someone involved in a great tragedy is replete with problems. In looking for the answer in our own lives, we limit our diagnosis to the minuscule portion of another person’s experience that we can claim to understand through our own experience. “We’re All Eldo Kim” avoids much of this, but nonetheless represents a trivialization of the problems that may well be at stake. Far worse examples can undoubtedly be found in individual conversations.
There’s a simple solution. Stop comparing yourself to Eldo Kim. Recognize that we know very little about what drove him to send that email Monday morning and that he was likely experiencing a pain and confusion that you could little understand.
Do this both because it’s the more honest understanding of events and because recognizing the differences between your own—perfectly valid—experiences of stress, desperation, and isolation and those of Kim’s matters because doing otherwise trivializes the importance of his separate and deeply different experience.
First, the honesty of the narrative. The simple truth is that you and I know relatively little about what Kim experienced that led him to throw away his own future, diverted enormous emergency response resources from other concerns, and upset much of a student body still grappling with the aftermath of a daylong lockdown after the marathon bombings.
What does seem clear, however, is that there’s far more than a simple desire to achieve and get good grades at stake here. Feigning illness, contacting mental health services, or “sleeping in” all offer potential, if less than honest, outs. Even semi-reasoned calculation easily leads one to the conclusion that these choices create less future risk. Simply put, I fail to understand how we can fully understand Kim’s calculation without appealing to some deeper stress or pain.
There’s far more than epistemological humility at stake in this conversation, however. In implying that you can in some way understand or sympathize with Kim’s actions, you take away the importance of the deep difference between you and Kim. An extreme level of stress or self-absorption doesn’t get you to the deeply dangerous and self-damaging actions of Kim. Rather, Kim may well have been suffering from something that extends beyond the average Harvard student’s ability to directly experience or understand. Unnecessary speculation about the precise nature of the root cause should, of course, be avoided, but it seems a safe argument that this isn’t simply the natural extension of the academic pressures many Harvard students place on themselves.
And in this trivialization, we risk missing the true lessons of the whole ordeal. If Eldo Kim’s actions were simply the result of a similar frustration we’ve all felt, then the solution must be one related to that pain. Maybe it’s a change in our grading system, maybe a friendlier atmosphere with less emphasis on the perfect GPA. But for an action that requires as much miscalculation and frustration as the one in question? A bigger answer is almost certainly required.
But if we accept the possibility that something other than our own not-as-unique-as-we’d-like-to-think commitment to academic success was the root of Monday’s events, we open up a range of additional possible discussions. Specifically, discussing our communal failure to recognize the challenges of people who begin to feel something very different from the normal stress about grades, and spreading awareness of how to access mental health resources when feeling over-burdened.
Eldo Kim deserves your sympathy and empathy because of the particular aspects of his experience that drove him to do such a terrible thing. We don’t yet know what exactly was behind Kim’s dangerous actions, and many of us will probably never understand the type of mental duress that drives someone to that kind of action. In many ways, that’s the point. Coupling our righteous disgust at the actions themselves with empathy for the perpetrator requires us to recognize that those experiences may well be fundamentally different from our own. Eldo isn’t like most Harvard students—most of us would never come close to considering something this dangerous, thoughtless, or reckless. The empathy that this honesty asks of us is harder, but all the more valuable.