What's wrong with our society? An answer... maybe...

In "What motivates mass murderers?", WWW 19/5/18, I said that I didn't understand what's wrong with Western society -- American society in particular -- that we produce a shockingly large number of psychotics who, for some reason or for no reason, go out and kill shockingly large numbers of innocent people. What's wrong with those people, I asked [rather indirectly. Ed.]. What motivates them? I just don't understand...

Thinking about it some more, I remembered an exchange with Agent 9, who educated me on the distinction between antinomianism (from the Greek: ἀντί, "against" + νόμος, "law"): any view which rejects laws or legalism and is against moral, religious, or social norms) and anomie: a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.

I don't know if Nikolas Cruz and Dimitrios Pagourtzis are antinomians or not. I rather think not, as having a thought-out and thought-through view of anything implies having given the idea (whatever it is) some thought. But I do think both young men may have been affected by the anomie which has been prevalent in our society ever since the hippy-dippy 60s.

Anomie is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. The concept was described by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his 1897 book Suicide. (Early reports from Santa Fe suggest that Mr Pagourtzis wanted to commit suicide, chickening out and surrendering to the cops after he had killed ten people.)

Durkheim describes anomie as "derangement" -- craziness -- and "an insatiable will". Anomie, he wrote, arises from a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from the lack of a social ethic, which produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

Compare those words with this passage from Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks (Simon & Schuster, 2000), sent to me yesterday by Agent 3:

In 1995 [actually 1994. Ed.] George Gilder wrote, "Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery."

In 1996, Robert Bork's bestseller Slouching Towards Gomorrah argued that the forces of the sixties have spread cultural rot across mainstream America. In 1999 William Bennett argued, "Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos."

Aha! Lots of further reading there, and I think we may be close to an answer to my headline question. I have long maintained that the year in which the wheels started to come off our society can be pinpointed, based on empirical evidence, as 1964 -- 1965 at the latest. I'm off to the library to find whatever I can written by George Gilder, once described by Time as "male chauvinist pig of the year". Sounds like my kind of guy!

What motivates mass murderers?

Even leaving aside the almost daily attacks by Islamic jihadis, mass murders have been much in the news lately.

A couple of days ago, a Canadian aviation "expert" said he was "100% certain" that the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 -- still undiscovered somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean -- was an extreme case of murder-suicide, perpetrated by the plane's pilot. Last month, 10 people were killed and 16 wounded by a young Toronto man who for some reason decided to drive a rented man down the sidewalk of a busy main street.

And in the USA, there are "school shootings", not in the ghettos of Los Angeles, Chicago, or Detroit, but in white(ish) locales in states like Florida (Parkland) and Texas (Santa Fe). The massacre at Columbine happened just over 19 years ago. Since then, there have been hundreds, hundreds of similar "incidents".

Why do people kill dozens, scores or even hundreds of innocent people? What is their motivation for mass murder? These are questions I ask myself every time something like this happens. It seems to me that only two reasons are possible. Someone who would commit such an atrocity must either be:

A - a fanatical follower of the Religion of Peace (read: Islam) or some other extremist religious and/or political group; or

B - someone whose cheese has slipped off his cracker (read: a psychotic individual).

In "Toronto killer of 10 'seemed a little off'... that's all", the perpetrator of the recent massacre in Canada's Proudly Diverse City is described as "kind of a loner, kept to himself, and 'seemed a little off'." Later it emerged that he identified himself as an "incel" -- "involuntarily celibate" -- someone who couldn't score with women and so decided to take his frustration out on the world.

The Santa Fe TX high school student who allegedly opened fire on his classmates on yesterday has been described as "a quiet and unassuming teenager who enjoys sports and showed few if any warning signs of violent behaviour." He was a member of a dance group at a local Greek Orthodox church and an avid videogame player, known among his classmates mostly for playing on the school's junior varsity football team. A teammate told a Houston TV station, "He stuck to himself. He had a few friends but never really talked to many people. For him to do something like this, it's crazy."

Exactly! But how did those young men -- they are always young men -- become "crazy"? And how are we supposed to protect ourselves and our communities against the crazy behaviour that kills?

To guard against Islamic terrorists, the authorities tell us "If you see something, say something!" But that doesn't work in the case of people like Deimitrios Pagourtzis, the Sante Fe High School killer. The only odd thing that people noticed about him was that he liked to wear a trench coat, even in the Texas heat. What are you gonna do, call 9-1-1 and tell them "my classmate keeps coming to school in a trenchcoat!"?

For that very reason, stricter gun controls won't work, unless America can be turned into some kind of liberal Utopia in which no-one, absolutely no-one has a gun, which seems highly unlikely, to put it mildly. And if that were so, what is to stop a crazy man [or woman! Ed.] from finding another weapon... like a rental van. If you have a good answer to my question, something that doesn't involve locking up every oddball and eccentric in the land, please tell the world... quick!!!