A narcissistic individual who lacked a properly functioning conscience

Dennis Prager writes in Jewish World Review,

It is far easier for an individual to do great evil than to do great good.

...If you really want to change the world for the better, work on making better people, not a better world.

...We've heard repeatedly that Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz was being treated for depression — as if that largely explains why he did what he did.

Yet, every one of us knows one or two depressed individuals, and it is inconceivable that they would commit mass murder. As a number of Lincoln biographers have noted, most recently Richard Brookhiser, the great president was probably depressed all his life. And he was a moral giant.

Lubitz murdered 149 people because he was a narcissistic individual who lacked a properly functioning conscience. The number of people walking around in the world with a broken moral compass is quite large. Not all of them are depressed. And I am not only referring to violent Islamists. The U.N. just voted to condemn one country in the world for mistreatment of women: Israel. Are all those U.N. ambassadors depressed?

...Lubitz not only killed all of these people. He thrust them into a state of terror the likes of which few humans ever experience. People with terminal illnesses know that they will soon die. But they have time to prepare for it. And, over that time, and given the illness, they eventually expect to die. There is, of course, great sadness, but there is no terror — certainly none in any way comparable to the terror on board the Germanwings flight. For at least five minutes, these people knew they were about to die. Out of nowhere. They had just boarded an airplane — one of modern society's most routine and safest activities. And suddenly they were about to die. Add to that the terrified screaming of everyone else, and you realize what an almost unique hell these people — many traveling with a child or a spouse — went through.

Then there are the people who were not on this flight who loved the people who were. These people — parents, grandparents, siblings, children and, never forget, friends — will suffer this loss in varying degrees until they die.

And then there are the pilots of the world. I flew the day after the crash. Though I fly, on average, every week, on that day, I looked at the pilots at the airport a bit differently. It was not an intellectual reaction. But I have no doubt just about every passenger did the same.

Finally, there are Lubitz's parents — arguably the most harmed people of all. Losing a child is the ultimate parental nightmare. But there is something much worse: when your child is a murderer. And even worse than that: a mass murderer.

As a parent, I can only imagine the pain of parents who lose a child. But nowhere in my imagination is there a place for a child who is a mass murderer.

Read more here.