Recent mass shootings in Highland Park, Illinois; Buffalo, New York; and Uvalde, Texas, have produced the same futile debates that always follow such tragedies. Conservatives blame mental illness, and liberals blame gun access.
But we cannot make progress if we do not examine the cultural roots that repeatedly produce these vengeful loners who murder innocent people to aggrandize themselves.
Young men commit most mass shootings, as well as the majority of violent crime. A United Nations study in 2000 found that 96% of homicides worldwide are committed by men. This is not an indictment of men as intrinsically “toxic.” Rather, it’s a sign of failed masculinity — failed development, failed culture. Most men are well-adjusted, competent providers, protectors and creators. A small minority of men become violent predators.
Mass shooters are not usually afflicted with genetic mental disorders like schizophrenia, but suffer instead from a more common problem called alienation. All human beings seek community of some sort. Homo sapiens evolved to be a socially dependent species — it was the key to our success. But as we individually develop from kids to adults we can sometimes fail to connect with others.
We can fail to form strong, healthy, social ties that feed our emotional and cognitive needs. High school is a cruel proving ground and gauntlet for young people to find or make their new “family” of peers. These connections are strongest when formed through face-to-face interaction. But some kids, through no fault of their own, do not succeed in finding their community. They become alienated.
There is nothing wrong with being alienated. Many of the great artists, philosophers and innovators were “outcasts.” Alienation can be a profound creative force. But just as there is good masculinity and toxic masculinity, there is good and toxic alienation. Some young men begin to nurse a deep resentment and a sense of aggrieved righteousness, giving over to revenge fantasies. What makes the difference?
Culture is crucial. “Culture” includes our elemental culture of family, then our local social environment, and then our abstract ideologies. Culture plays a primary role in our values, but also gives us tools for interpreting and managing our emotions. Mass shooters are not interpreting or managing their emotions in a healthy manner. This does not make them “insane” per se, but reveals an abnormality of development.
When testosterone-fueled competitive men (built by natural selection) find strong social bonds in the form of intimacy, they self-domesticate into reliable boyfriends, husbands and fathers. Culture can help or hinder this. Alternately, our cultures of creation and service (e.g., art, sport, religion, activism, etc.), can transform aggression into creativity.
But when a young man has been unlucky in social life and has no cultural ways to steel himself against misfortune, he can become vindictive. Family cultures create methods to interpret feelings of rejection and loneliness, helping young people accommodate pain into the larger life story of positive and negative feelings. But if we live in a blame-based culture — where others are always blamed for our grievances or misfortunes — then the taste for vengeance grows.
Everyone knows the feeling of resentment, but compare two cultural approaches to disappointment: a stoic approach, and a blame-based approach. The stoic culture asserts that “life isn’t fair.” Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But there is no enemy that’s preventing you from your happiness. This approach reduces envy and increases resilience. There is no one to blame, to obsess about, and no one to launch a campaign of violence against.
Compare this with the blame-based culture we live in currently. On this approach, life isn’t fair and the people who have things you want (e.g., intimacy, wealth, happiness) are the “privileged ones” causing your misery. On this view, you are “losing” or unhappy because “they” are “winning,” or they are happy. You are told in your blame-based households, news media, schools and online communities that you should never feel uncomfortable, or offended, and institutions should punish the successful or the popular until you have the same.
As Sigmund Freud characterized this bitter mindset, “If one cannot be the favorite oneself, at all events nobody else shall be the favorite.” Accordingly, the weaponized loner thinks those who do have happiness and success must be brought low or punished. In his twisted logic, they must be humiliated and destroyed, and by meting out this sick destruction he becomes famous — finally recognized as powerful.
We often seek to connect the mass shooter to our ideological enemies, saying he followed this or that politician and that’s what corrupted him. Actually, deeper emotional wounds of rejection, humiliation and isolation are the causes that lead young men to political radicalization. Ideologies can indeed be trouble, but emotional health (real self-esteem) can immunize young men from melodramatic dogmas.
The shooter adopts ideologies in a lazy way to make his personal tantrum seem principled. He adopts white supremacy, or homophobia, or anti-government patriotism, or whatever is at hand.
The more immediate causes of toxic alienation and violence include: online detachment from reality, negligent laissez-faire parenting, abusive childhoods, fragile egos with no cultural resources of resiliency and a lack of emotional regulation. These are difficult cultural problems, but they’re not impossible to ameliorate. Better intimacy at the family level and better creative outlets at the local level can bring young men back into the social world and reverse the dehumanizing process of toxic alienation.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Stephen Asma is professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago and author of 10 books, including “On Monsters” and “The Emotional Mind.”
