Vulnerability

I thought the Radio Lab podcast was really interesting, and I was really struck by the story the young woman told about her mother's brain aneurism. The discussion later led to ideas about human beings' possession, or lack thereof, of an immaterial soul, and that we are not closed off, or walled up, but rather porous creatures, who are shaped by other people and by our surroundings. In reference to the narrative about the mother who had the brain aneurism--while this young woman's point was that her mother's injury to her body caused her to sort of lose her old self, I started to think about what else causes this. I think it's especially relevant when talking about the breakup of Yugoslavia, for example, and the search for identity--what makes people act the way they do? Can we attribute violence, war, or extreme nationalism to human beings acting out of the ordinary? In other words, can we lose ourselves to extraordinariness in extraordinary circumstances as some authors and theorists have proposed?