Why Criminals Act with Good Intentions

Owing to the happenings in the English county of Cumbria where, for those of you reading this who do not live in the UK and aren’t abreast of the tragic drama that took place there recently to the date of this post, a guy, who obviously felt he had no escape from various financial and other [inter]personal troubles, killed 12 people amongst whom were his twin brother, family solicitor, and a few work colleagues, and injured at least 12 more in a shooting spree which he completed by pointing the gun at himself, I felt inspired to write this to explain one basic [NLP] principle that many people don’t understand and always look at me like I’m crazy when I say it to them.

The principle is that this guy had a positive intention behind doing all this tragedy!  Now reading this you may restate that I must be nuts!  How can shooting 12 of his closest people AND injuring at least 12 more [some of whom were complete strangers] possibly enact a positive intention?

The answer is very simple: there’s no such thing as negative intention.   Our brain cannot process negatives.  Don’t think of your next door neighbor!  OK.  So what did you do?  You thought of the darned neighbor in order not to think of him/her!  That’s how our brain cannot process negatives.

So how is this connected with the Cumbria criminal?  Well, this guy had loads of financial and [inter]personal issues which he must have felt pretty cornered by and thus saw no escape but that of ending his life and the lives of all those other people.  So by doing what he did he was satisfying some positive intentions for himself – ones which only he knew what they were.  Revenge is one of them.  If you enact revenge, you’re satisfying some positive intention within yourself.  Yes, everyone else around you will see you as a nasty piece of work, but that won’t change the fact that you’re satisfying a positive intention for yourself.  In this vein, every crime, murder, rape, captivation, torture, theft, or whatever nastiness a human being is capable of, is a behavior which satisfies some positive intention for the individual doing the behavior.

Many rapists’ positive intention is power and control.  Many thieves’ positive intention is abundance, getting something they want while saving the effort of working for it, many torturers and captivators’ positive intention is also power, control, and respect, and many murderers’ positive intention is escape from reality, life, pain, misery, etc.

So now you may find it easier to view the next stupid thing your [or your neighbor's?] child may do with some compassion.  Once you know that kids don’t play truant, smoke, and abuse alcohol, sex, or drugs for nothing, you will be much more effective by going straight to finding out what the positive intentions are behind those behaviors that everybody else just doesn’t understand.

Reporters and journalists certainly haven’t got a clue about gearing their questions and articles towards acknowledging and finding out these positive intentions.   Their job is to sell bad news [because bad news sells better than good news] and sell it fast!  Plus, the pressure of moralistic stances of the older generations such as that the young generation must not be led to believe that doing acts of crime and nastiness is okay because it satisfies the perpetrators’ positive intentions presents another barrier to people’s understanding of why acts of crime happen.

Well, harsh as it may sound, sometimes the older generations would be better off to give way, because what used to be valid in their time may not be valid in today’s society.  And if we communicate the principle of positive intentions behind every human behavior to the youth clearly, we will be able to have it both ways!