The principle goal of medicine is to heal pathology when a better goal is to determine and eradicate the cause. Medicine does not address causation when it's unreasonable. Determining a cause takes time and guesswork, and there's no money in it. If you can slap a cream on it or prescribe a pill for it, then you're done. Problem solved, money earned.
When was the last time you saw a major preventative care enterprise other than a gym or a health food store? People don't spend money on disease until they have one. And when they do, they spend a lot.
The difference between what we should be doing about disease and what we actually do is economics.
You can frame mass shootings the same way. The first wave of soundbites always call for gun reform, arguing that mass shootings can't happen without guns. If guns are clearly a symptom of mass shootings, then let's inoculate that symptom, just like a doctor would a rash. Outlaw guns and BOOM: problem solved, right?
Wiser souls look deeper by asking, if guns are a symptom, then what is the cause?
It's mental health, they say. Guns are not a symptom of mass shootings. Mass shootings are a symptom of mental pathology. The recent Fort Hood shooter, Ivan Lopez, was undergoing psychiatric treatment for depression and anxiety. These wiser souls point out that it is mental health funding that we should talk about, not just guns.
But we can go even deeper by asking the most obvious question of all: what causes mental pathology? To call for mental health funding without asking this question is like putting a bandage on an important problem without ever knowing why we got hurt in the first place. It's alleviating a symptom, not resolving its cause.
True causes of disease, mental and physical, are incredibly important. So why not pose the question? Especially when the staggering truth is that we can answer it.
The most important framework for resolving the causes of disease is the discord hypothesis, the mismatch between human evolution and modern society. This analysis requires understanding what is natural in evolutionary terms, and how the structure of civilization vies with that.
Suddenly, mass shootings become one more disease of civilization. After all, does it make evolutionary sense to blow away the vitally important people in your small group that you rely on to survive? No, it does not. In fact, the opposite is true, which is why humans naturally bond and seek peace, pleasure, and happiness.
Important questions arise from this new understanding, all seen clearly in the light of evolution. How does institutionalized violence vie with human nature? Why is depression and anxiety, absent in the ancestral environment and in foraging societies today, common in modern populations? How does social disconnection harm psychological health? How can social connection prevent it? What are the links between physical and mental health?
The questions go on and on, and they are smarter for simply looking at the true cause.
