LAST weekend will certainly go down as one of the most tragic ones in recent

times with the senseless loss of five lives. Two brothers were killed in Linden and two sisters were found dead in Berbice, and a teenager was killed in yet another fatal accident at La Grange.
In the Linden incident, a row over monetary matters reportedly led to the deaths of the two brothers. In Berbice, the two women went to cut coconut branches when apparently they were kidnapped and murdered. In addition, their cousin who accompanied them ingested a poisonous substance and is hospitalised.
It remains anyone’s guess whether he would survive or not.
All of this comes on the heels of the gruesome death of a mother and her two young sons at Anna Catherina just over a week ago.
Something is radically wrong in our society when we continuously have such gruesome killings and we need to get down to the underlying causes and factors urgently, because we cannot afford to be losing lives in such a senseless manner. Apart from the actual deaths, the emotional stress and trauma of the loved ones left behind are enormous.
Even without any research, it is certain that anger, aggression and poor inter-human relationships are major factors in the tragedies. Our moral values and attitudes have certainly deteriorated. And this begs the question of whether our parents, teachers, etc, are doing enough to instill and inculcate the correct moral values and attitudes in our society.
Another question that arises is whether we have become too immersed in materialistic pursuits and, therefore, have lost touch or sight of the moral compass.
Whatever is the cause(s) of this unfortunate and frightening trend towards the increasing use of violence in settling differences, it is certainly the time for our sociologists and researchers to urgently delve and probe into this situation and make recommendations on how to deal with a malaise that is apparently becoming cancerous.
Anger is a completely normal, usually healthy, human emotion. But when it gets out of control and turns destructive, it can lead to severe problems—problems at work, in your personal relationships, and in the overall quality of your life. And it can make you feel as though you are at the mercy of an unpredictable and powerful emotion.
The brilliant French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, taught that aggression results as a psychological defense against threats of fragmentation. That is, as infants, we are just a jumble of diverse biological processes over which we have no authority, and our first task in life is to develop a coherent identity which “pulls together” this fragmented confusion. This identity may give the appearance of a unified personality, but it really is just a psychological illusion that hides our essential human vulnerability and weakness. And so, when anything or anyone threatens us with the truth of our essential fragmentation, the quickest, easiest, and most common defense available—to hide the truth of our weakness and to give the illusion that we possess some sort of power—is aggression.
In Western psychology, acceptance of every person’s unique emotional experiences is commonplace, but many non-Western cultures place a high value on social conformity. As a way to ensure a child’s survival in such a culture, families teach children that all expressions of anger are forbidden and shameful.
To accomplish this, parents, along with the rest of the culture in general, tend to suppress all recognition of individual emotions in their children. As long as the children stay within their culture they can function, but if they migrate to a Western culture, then emotional conflicts can cause profound psychological confusion.
There will be many theories, and they are important in helping to find solutions to societal problems, but more importantly, we need to grapple with the problem in a timely manner and reverse the current frightening trend.