Read The Anatomy of Violence for Free Online Page B

wanted something to read today and decided to pick up your book. I’ve always been fascinated by violence, and these days we’re hearing a lot more about the brain and biology. So here I am now.”
    Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? You can choose. You have free will. I was not standing beside you with a gun to your head coercing you to buy it, was I? Surely this has to be full-bodied proof of free will? No, it’s not.
    You did not choose to read this book. Your brain made you do it. You likely had “risk factors” for buying this book, whether you are conscious of them or not. You may have been a victim of crime. You may have yourself bordered on committing a crime—and always wonderedwhere the line between offenders and good citizens lay. Alternatively you were born good, giving you the fascination for the bad seed that you are not. You may have been exposed to domestic violence and abuse. If you are a woman, we know you are more attracted to books on crime than men—likely because you have a greater fear of being a victim. These factors produce a causal chain of events that predisposed you to read this book. You saw the bold title and colorful cover. In milliseconds it triggered a chain of past emotional memories and associations that made you pick up the book and start reading its contents.
    You want so desperately to believe that you determine things in your life, yet that belief has no true substance. It floats like a ghost in a mind machine forged by ancient evolutionary forces. You were as helpless in deciding to buy this book as I was in writing it.
    Even if you decide to put this book down right now to prove me wrong, it wasn’t you that chose to close it. It was your Bolshie brain that was programmed to be oppositional and defiant when challenged. Free will is sadly an illusion—a mirage. I wish it were not, because I too find this perspective unsettling. But there we have it.
    Here’s another example. We know thatalcoholism is a disease state that has a substantial genetic component. If we sit an alcoholic and a nonalcoholic in front of a glass of beer and tell them not to drink it—then yes, in some sense they do indeed “choose” to drink it or not. But in a probabilistic sense we also know that the alcoholic is going to be less able to resist drinking from the glass. In this situation, the alcoholic’s freedom of will has been constrained in large part by genetic, biological, and, to be sure, environmental forces beyond his control. Offenders like Donta Page are no different.
    Okay, you say, so Page has a whole bunch of risk factors for violence. Sure, he got a rough deal in life. But he’s still as responsible as anyone. If an individual possesses characteristics that make him disproportionately more likely to commit violence, then he has to takeresponsibility for those predisposing factors. Just as an alcoholic knows he has a drinking problem and must seek out treatment, so the person at risk for violence needs to recognize those risk factors and take preventive steps to ensure that he doesn’t harm others. He has a choice, and he needs to act. He is responsible.
    This makes good practical sense, but there is a problem with this argument. Responsibility and self-reflection are not disembodied, ethereal processes but are instead rooted firmly in the brain. Functionalimaging research has shown that the medial prefrontal cortex is centrally involved in the ability to engage inself-reflection. 17 And it is this very area of the brain that has been repeatedly found to be structurally andfunctionally impaired in antisocial, violent, and psychopathic offenders. Similarly, patients who have damage to the medial prefrontal cortex are known to become irresponsible, to lack self-discipline, and to reflect less on the consequences of their actions. The very mechanisms that subserve the ability to take responsibility for one’s actions were impaired in Donta Page. If you take a look at Figure 10.1 in the