Why do you live your life each day and not slaughter dozens of helpless others? Shoot concert crowds? Machete a kindergarten class? Drive a truck into a parade? It may seem like a stupid question, but there’s a serious answer beyond: “Well I’m such a nice/well-adjusted/moral guy or girl.”
You see, I could make you into a mass shooter. With a small room and a metal door you can basically make anyone insane. Remove the sun. Withhold food or water. Or puddle the room with water. Make it too hot or too cold. Blare a siren for 48 hours. If you withstood a week of this – someone earnestly attempting to make you insane – you’d be a once-in-a-generation hero stronger than nearly every other human being on the planet. (This is all before we introduce drugs, which makes this probably more than twice as easy.)
I’m not a professional torturer or interrogator (or even an amateur one) but I know that anyone could be made insane in about a week or two. (This is not to suggest mass shooters come from specially designed prisons, or require some other intentional conspiracy.) I say this to illustrate the fact that – with purely environmental conditions – the human psyche can be entirely destroyed or bent. The human mind could be molded to fight, or to cower, or to do the chicken dance for any kind of trigger.
This process doesn’t have to be intentional. There are all sorts of people with mal-adapted responses to “normal” stimuli, people who are deathly afraid of cars, or dogs, or the color purple. And likewise, if you were to take someone adapted to a different environment and bring them to ours – say you took a prehistoric man to a modern day dog-park – they might exhibit what we would call a psychotic reaction, despite it being beneficial behavior in their environment.
Consider the possibility that our society might innately fail the human psyche in enough ways that it breaks certain people.
And the real fucked-up part is some people are just born psycho. Within everyone is a “spectrum” of sanity, as real as any autistic spectrum. You might not be insane and I might not be, but we aren’t perfectly equal either. One of us is closer, or one of us might have an easier set of conditions to get us there. Even if you were to get rid of those born mentally deranged (like we tried in the early 20th century), you’ll still have those sleeper-cells who are only a car-crash, or a football tackle, away from snapping (who might have an unobservable pre-condition or maybe no actual pre-condition at all).
Now we can admit that what separates you from a mentally-deranged mass shooter is some accidental head trauma or some time spent in an overseas prison — allbiet unlikely.
But is psychosis causing the majority of random violence that we see today? No, probably not. It may make someone more susceptible, but the massive increase in frequency suggests social causes over physical. “They’re just maladjusted then.” “See, skill issue.” “It’s those damn *insert ideology*-ists!”
You are then not a mass shooter because you were (1.)able to withstand environmental pressures (more likely you just were born into nice ones) and (2.)you have an ideological foundation providing a reason to NOT depart the Earth early and take as many innocent lives with you in resentment of life itself. But the default culture of the West is not helpful to either problem.
Children in the West are raised away from their mothers, made to sleep alone as infants, filled up with formula, put in front of screens and kept from playing outside, taken to “schools” that we all know are enforced daycare with leftist or (at best) center-left indoctrination. Our institutions are falling apart with corruption and incompetence, but to suggest the West has poor techniques for childhood development is met with “git gud,” or “wasn’t a problem for me, kek” by pseudo-Christian “right-wing” Twitterites – the current stewards of truth and social criticism in the wake of the grand Progressive idealist failure.
On top of our sub-par human environments, the second problem of center-left nihilism indoctrinates nearly 100% of our youth in the government monopolized education system. Even if this is not our ideology, this is OUR problem. It’s YOUR fault if you know better and choose to ignore it. You do not get to profess the greatness of traditionalism and paternal responsibility while you leave over ninety-percent of the country to rot and die.
Live and let die for me, mandatory participation for thee.
If I’m on a plane that crash lands into the ocean, and there’s an island six miles away that a strong male like myself can get to, is it moral and noble for me to swim there while the women and children die? No. That’s not well-adjusted, moral, or commendable. Not acknowledging flaws in western civilization is civilizational cowardice, no different from personal cowardice, and why the rightist intellectual movement will drop the ball again to leftism.
Our civilization breeds mass shooters because it provides no (ideological) reason not to be one. It teaches no meaning to life because that’s the knee-jerk reaction to the inbred Judaic myth falling flat on its face. “We have to go back to pre-industrial ignorance,” is not a solution to the meaning of life anymore than banning metal boxes with springs in them is a solution to gun-violence. To go back to the problem of physical environment, subject ourselves to prisons of the psyche. We’re isolated by design, not lifestyle choice. Take a walk through suburbia with cheery optimism and all you will meet there is a hot concrete sidewalk and delivery drivers. Walk city streets past the rotting, leper drug-addicts, and maybe take a knifepoint to the heart should you stop and talk to them.
If we want to treat the cause of mass shooters and not just the symptoms, we must remake the western way of life into a model that more closely aligns with humanity – and I don’t mean smoking plants and singing kumbaya. We must work together, raise the village together, toil, play, and keep our spears sharp together. Work must be allowed to resemble hunting with its rollercoaster of great feasts and great hunger – instead of farming, something that breeds grey-alien men, fine with meaningless toil and tiny rooms and not complaining about a piss-poor environment.
Find your cathedral in the computer code, or under the microscope, or in a bottle of Evian, but stop offering the band aid of Christian scripture to those smart enough not to fall for any of the other desert cults. Until you can prove without a doubt what humans are meant to be doing here, we must settle on a minimum-viable-product to guide us.
Rightism is kumbaya. “Don’t question your environment, and you will be fine.” Leftism is Kumbaya. “We can change the environment to be whatever we want.” How about we go for the optimal environment and optimal human health, or at least get out of the way for people who decide they want to live better?
And if you’re a 300k/year, “learn to code,” just-better, rw-twitter wifeguy, you’re still a pussy for drawing the line of your social responsibility to right where your family unit stops, or around your jiu-jitsu gym bros, or whatever the fuck else. Western civilization is common property and you’re letting people throw trash all over it.
You aren’t so much better than the mass shooter. You and I make up the village that raised them – or, more accurately, abandoned them. What are we doing to stop it? Writing about how they were “pitiful incels” or “leftist retards” isn’t doing anything useful, but it’s a net-negative — stopping the conversation before we can get to the real causes.
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