Nicholas Salvador detained over woman's beheading
This case is terribly sad,
and at the same time it also presents us with an intriguing consideration of
the human mind and the nature of mental illness.
Nicholas Salvador beheaded
an elderly lady, believing her to be the human incarnation of a malevolent
demon figure. He has now been declared insane on grounds of suffering from
paranoid schizophrenia, and obviously we all agree he was mistaken about the
old lady's demon status. But if you think about it, the mistake is
predominantly in the projection of demonic forces, not in the morality of the
act.
That is to say, the reason
we recoil in horror at what happened is not because we think a malevolent demon
figure is benign and undeserving of death, it is because we are upset at her death and because we don't actually
think the old lady was demonic. If any of us thought we were face to face with
a demonic figure capable of wreaking havoc on men, women and children, we'd be
the first to call for its execution (a practice not uncommon in several
American States, lest we forget).
So while Nicholas
Salvador's mental illness led him to the tragic mistake of killing what he
thought was a malevolent demon, thinking he is actually killing a malevolent
demon does demonstrate that an element of cogent sanity is very much present in
his act - which, as I said at the start, presents us with an interesting consideration
of the nature of sanity and insanity.
