‘Vy you? Vy anybody?’

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. passed away recently. (Or, as he might have put it: he is now defunct. So it goes.) His most famous work, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” part science fiction novel and part WWII memoir, is based on his experiences around the firebombing of Dresden (among other things). When the firebombing occurred, Vonnegut was a prisoner of war, and being held in the basement of a slaughterhouse.

There’s a moment in the book when an American POW is speaking to one of the guards. The American says to him, “Why me?” and the guard replies, “Vy you? Vy anybody?”

When a tragedy strikes, or someone snaps and commits an act of inarguable evil like last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech, why is the first question we ask—why someone could do such a thing, why these people were affected and not those, why such a thing could happen in our midst.

It’s a good question to ask, though many times it lacks a clear answer. In this case, though, the answer is clear: someone’s mind malfunctioned, and he was able to get to some guns faster than the mental health system could adequately get to him.

Vonnegut knew a thing or two about mental illness. He credited his mother’s suicide to “some bad chemicals in her brain” that made her eat Drano and die. His son Mark had some bad chemicals in his brain, too—but instead of eating Drano, he wrote a best-seller about dealing with depression. Vonnegut also wrestled with depression, and attempted suicide himself.

In another of his bestsellers, “Breakfast of Champions,” Midwestern Pontiac dealer Dwayne Hoover also has that bad-chemicals-in-the-brain problem. He goes on a rampage, during which he injures several people, including biting off part of a finger of a visiting science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout.

“Good thing for me he didn’t have any guns,” Trout might have said.

But sometimes it’s not just bad chemicals. Sometimes it’s bad ideas. Dwayne Hoover’s rampage, for example, is triggered by some ideas in one of Trout’s books. And sometimes it’s neither bad chemicals nor bad ideas—sometimes it’s just a bad situation.

Researchers at Stanford University, led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, did a famous experiment a generation ago. They took some perfectly normal people, people with nary a bad chemical in their entire skulls, and put them into a ready-made bad situation, to see what would happen. They made some of the perfectly normal people into pretend prison guards for a few days. Other perfectly normal people got to be the pretend prisoners.

Guess what? In almost no time at all the “guards,” who had been given complete control over the “prisoners,” started to mistreat them so badly that the experiment was halted several days ahead of schedule. Zimbardo has a new book out about that experiment and its implications. The book is called “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.” (The book has a website, lucifereffect.com )

Based on his experience with the prison guard experiment, Zimbardo suggests that the Abu Ghraib scandal was no surprise at all. Put some youngsters into a basement dungeon without supervision and with tacit permission to dehumanize their charges, and there you are: instant monsters.

And lest anyone start feeling morally smug or superior about it, Zimbardo’s point is this: the same thing could happen to just about anyone.

If the Virginia Tech rampage had happened before the book had come out, he’d probably have said something similar about that, too. No surprise at all. “Vy you? Vy anybody?”

The good news is this kind of thing is still relatively rare. The bad news is that there are more bad chemicals, and more bad ideas, and more bad situations being cooked up out there all the time. But finally, the good news is that we do know how to see some of these things coming, and we do know a lot about how to fix some of them. So like Vonnegut in Dresden, we can come out of the bunker, out from under the slaughterhouse, and start cleaning up.

- Skip Mendler