On Friday afternoon last week, there was nothing particularly significant happening in Taipei. There was no election, no protest, no collective mobilization. It was the end of the workday, people were beginning their commute or browsing shops before heading home. Perhaps it was precisely because of this calm that the violence of the evening felt all the more brutal. It did not emerge out of anything extraordinary, but tore through the fabric of everyday life.
Soon after the incident, the public learned the suspect’s name, age, his route and the timeline of the attack. Just as fast, the forum of public opinion held up the simplest explanation available: This was the act of a “lone wolf,” a “monster,” an outlier who had no place or relation with the rest of us. This framing allows fear to be compartmentalized, concern to be explained away and lets people make sense of the world once again.
There is a risk to explaining the attack in this way.
From Taipei to Tokyo, across movie theaters and train cars, there has been a series of random violent attacks in the past few years, which have repeatedly revealed the same systemic problem. Their perpetrators rarely act out of some unforeseeable breakdown. They are usually people who have long lost substantial social connections, and find themselves trapped on the margins of institutions — perhaps cut off from work, with fraying social relations and without avenues through which to seek help. Various warning signals appear scattered across a disjointed system and are handled in isolation rather than assessed in their entirety.
Taiwan’s institutions are highly adept at dividing responsibility. The police are responsible for public order, social services handle individual cases, and the healthcare system diagnoses and treats. Although no single system appears to have failed, taken together, they allow high-risk people to go unchecked until tragedy occurs. It is only in the wake of violence that we see the failings of this fragmented system as a whole.
What happens after the violence is just as unsettling: the amplification, management and exploitation of fear, particularly online.
Before the bleeding had stopped or the facts of the incident had even been established, social media were flooded with highly emotional and polarized narratives. Unease was transformed into hatred; anxieties channeled into political conspiracy theories or ethnic tensions. Taiwan is no stranger to this kind of manipulation. The central strategy of the information and cognitive warfare playing out across the Taiwan Strait is to amplify social divisions, sow mistrust and allow society to run itself down amid panic.
As graphic images are circulated and unverified motives are spread as fact, any voice calling for calm is accused of shielding those at fault from accountability. This is not a simple case of a lack of unity in the forum of public opinion — it is symptomatic of a collective state of mind easily influenced by outside forces. As fear rises, rationality retreats and as opposition deepens, society grows more fragile.
Calls to hold back from sharing disturbing images are not about wanting people to forget, but about preventing secondary harm. The concern is not just over mental health, but social security as well. Every choice not to repost, not to sensationalize, not to label, help break the cycles through which fear is weaponized.
Taiwanese should seek accountability and examine institutional failures in the wake of this attack. However, if all our discussions fail to rise above anger or calls for a witch hunt, they are ultimately fruitless. What should really be interrogated is why the risks were not identified in advance, why seeking help is so difficult, and why society’s patience with vulnerability is so short.
Finally, Taiwanese must remember that the real enemy is never just a single person. More dangerous are the forces that hope to see us panic, fracture and turn against one another. If all that comes of this tragedy is a willingness to assign evil to a single person, we are only making another crisis all the more likely.
Liu Che-ting is a writer.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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