Existence is full of mysteries. Things that are, things that occur, things that puzzle us for which there appears to be no reasonable explanation. From the macro-mysteries of the origins of the universe to the minds and souls of human beings, great minds attempt to puzzle out answers to vexing questions but the responses and the understanding still elude us. Perhaps these eternal questions will never be solved, because they have no answer; they just are.

The vast presence of the universe and our minuscule presence within our own immense galaxy, merely one of countless others in a space whose volume cannot begin to be known aside, there is the conundrum of human thought and passion.

What makes us the way we are? Clearly genetic endowment is hugely responsible, but also our early experiences of social and familial exposure, and for everyone, we are reminded, the experience and the inheritance is different. We are all imbued by the natural science that developed us out of nothingness encouraging gases, bio-chemicals and minerals to coalesce into a serendipitous mixture that would introduce biological life and eventually sensate creatures to our particular biosphere, but as numerous as we are, we are though intrinsically broadly alike, individually particularly ourselves.

We make our way through the years of our lives in our own inimitable ways. And we wonder at the anomalies between and among us, those who are social beings who would never dream, let alone be capable of doing harm to others among whom are those who spend their lives attempting to ameliorate the harm that others impose upon the luckless.

How to explain the existence of hate? Hatred independent of mental illness in particular. That despairingly venomous blame directed toward others culminating in a ferocious hatred so intense that doing the greatest of harm to those upon whom it is directed results in one human organism destroying another? On a large scale we have occurrences throughout history where tribal antagonisms result in massive, deadly assaults upon another group with the intention of exterminating them.

Genocide in the 20th Century took on its full dimensions during the years of the Second World War, and the destructive impact of the Holocaust.

Focusing on a more discrete level of human dysfunction is the event that took place last week in Toronto where a young man not known to have any degree of mental illness, a 27-year-old facing a bright future, on the cusp of marriage -- admittedly a young man with a propensity to criminality, thought to have been 'cured' of criminal theft, embarking upon a new life -- garroted his mother, and killed two of his brothers through the use of a bolt shot from a cross-bow.

Dysfunctional familiar relations resulting in one member of an otherwise entirely 'normal' family of their own free will succumbing to rejecting all the values that the others act upon, to embark on his own journey into the bleakness of rejection and antipathy toward  his own.

If my own experience is anything to go by, I recognize that these things happen, that human beings are particularly susceptible to emotional dissonances lacking the internal resources to recognize and pull themselves away from such malfunctions. These mental/emotional disturbances build over time and if and when the individual carrying these burdens is also fully immersed in a sense of misanthropy the combination can be deadly, creating a full spectrum of rejection of all it means to be human, capable of compassion for others and a willingness to live in peace among others in society.