Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) notes that so much misunderstanding comes from refusing to recognize when someone is acting, fighting, or talking from a different level:
This is readily apparent at the confluence of my two worlds. On the one hand I deal every working day with people who believe it is stupid to accept a responsibility you can avoid; that people who feel that working for your livelihood is proof that you are stupid and should be exploited; that using force is natural and right and the only reason everyone doesn’t all the time is fear; that jail is a place to rest and take care of health problems.These are not exagerations, not even slight exagerations. And these are not the super-predators. These are the attitudes of the day-to-day low level criminals — the addicts and pushers, the guy holding the sign saying “Will work for food” (who will turn you down if you actually offer him a job. Try it.)
This mindset is so alien to the other half of the people I know (the “citizens”) that many refuse to believe that it exists. It makes them uncomfortable when someone they know to have good judgment and wide experience makes a statement like this because it strikes them as impossible or wrong. But the mindset isn’t that alien — it’s adapted to its environment and reinforced in its own subculture.
People get uncomfortable with anything that strays too far from their strata, and they’ll do incredible mental gymnastics to justify and explain behaviors as “bad decisions” because they are more comfortable thinking that there is a connection, that under the right circumstances even “I” could be driven to kill a child and this poor criminal just happened to hit those conditions. This is more comfortable than believing that there are people who will kill a child because her crying might annoy a boyfriend who supplies drugs. Or might just not think of it as an event at all.
So we sit in our air conditioned, genteel, polite world and refuse to believe that there are people who will deliver a savage beating while deliberately planning how they will defend it in court.