The sight of too much aggression: causes indifference, so after a while the person sees the death of another person as a broken object.
"If I can hurt others with impunity in a video game, why can't I do it in real life?" – clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Emőke Bagdy reacted to the wave of school violence in recent weeks. The professor also talked about her psychological and educational series Lélekutakon, which will be launched on hirado.hu, about the dangers of consumerism, the anti-life nature of the virtual world, and the nature of school and family abuse.
In recent weeks, a twelve-year-old girl stabbed her classmate in the heart from behind, shortly after that, four ten- to twelve-year-old girls kicked a ten-year-old boy so hard that he had to undergo life-saving surgery, and last week, an eight-year-old child tried to stab his classmates in the neck with scissors and a pencil.
The specialist outlined why the number of violent school abuses and crimes has increased so much in the past period:
"There is a serious change of attitude taking place in our culture, in the world of adults, which naturally affects and appears among young people as well. We live in a consumer culture, and consumerism is more dangerous than any other ism because it spans political systems and becomes a world phenomenon. The point is that economic capital increases through consumption, so the goal is to persuade the consumer to consume even more! Through the pressure of the consumer society, culture and the world of values materialize, i.e. from the higher human dimension, everything is transferred to a material dimension. There is a kind of feeding through advertising, they want to make us buy everything, eat it, and when something becomes old and wears out, then we simply throw it away. This change in attitude completely infected human thinking, including the question of human identity. Instead of higher human values, material values came to the fore. In other words, a person is worth as much as his money, house, and car," Emőke Bagdy began his explanation, then continued:
"Consumer culture has degraded to the point that it actually measures a person. From there, treating the other person as an object is only one step away. This kind of objective approach is also transferred to our human relations and relationships: we use people, use them up, take advantage of them and throw them away".
According to the specialist, in addition to consumerism, digital culture also plays an extraordinary role in the development of distorted attitudes, depersonalization and the appearance of violent crimes at school. Digitalization has completely disrupted the direct communication between people, with the "interference" of digital devices. In addition, during adolescence, children experience a process of separation and detachment from parents and authority figures.
"Unfortunately, this means that parents are not in a position to use reason, will, and parental authority to protect young people from the virtual world offered on the tray by the Internet and communities. During this period, a serious mental disorder can occur in adolescents, when the real and virtual worlds are completely mixed up in them, and the virtual world becomes reality.
The sense of reality disappears, the control function disappears, which also raises further ethical questions.
After all, if I can hurt others with impunity in a video game, why can't I do it in real life? If the regulatory function, the barrier, does not develop in the brain, then these young people can do something that is against the law, anti-human, anti-life".
Emőke Bagdy pointed out: our children are exposed to enormous danger. The earlier we allow the use of digital devices, the greater the chance of "mental infection", which delays the process of personality development and completely distorts it.
"Normally, a preschooler between the ages of three and six gradually learns to separate imagination from reality. However, if most of the stimuli that reach the child come from the virtual world and not from direct, human relationships and natural experiences, then this process slows down and often does not crystallize until the age of six or eight. However, a six- to eight-year-old child should already have the ability to control reality in case of normal development. Not to mention that, compared to the old days, biological puberty, i.e. the period of physical maturation, begins much earlier, from the age of ten, and mental and spiritual development slows down much later, which also creates a contradictory situation. This immaturity is attacked by the mass of fairy tales, films and video games, which constantly convey aggression".
Aggression research has proven that the sight of too much aggression: causes indifference, so after a while the person sees the death of another person as a broken object
- emphasized the expert, who said that the children who attacked their peers with a premeditated intention acted in their final desperation, helplessness, and heightened stress, and the majority of them were either abused at home, in the family, or were victims of school violence.
"That is, it is very rare that someone commits such a crime without any history. Usually these kids want to kill someone else so they don't kill themselves. There is no one they can turn to, they are alone with their problems, they are torn apart by rage, anger, tension and despair," emphasized Emőke Bagdy, pointing out that when collective violence occurs, there is a "leader" who is the most aggressive, the and others follow him as a herd effect. The main columnist is probably abused at home, and he takes his powerless rage into the school community, where he does to others the same things that are done to him at home. It is a typical phenomenon that the weaker ones organize themselves around the main leader, on the one hand because they hope for protection, and on the other hand because they are also full of anger due to the constant feeling of weakness and their disadvantages. In essence, this is how the group of attackers is formed.
The entire interview can be read on the Híradó.hu portal
Cover photo: Bagdy Emőke
Source: Facebook/Bagdy Emőke
