The notion that incidents such as the Springfield shooting are incomprehensible or inexplicable is deliberately encouraged in the media. Of course, a tragedy like this has its particular and unique characteristics, but what a critical analysis can do is identify the areas that should be investigated and offer an approach. Because a serious approach is first of all necessary. The answer to every problem, if one were to pay attention to the media and the bestseller list, lies in a quick fix. No headway will be made in grasping the essence of the Springfield tragedy and other similar ones, much less preventing them, unless they are viewed as the outcome of a complex interaction between social life and individual psychology.
Human beings are the products, in the broadest sense, of their social relations.
Instead the model advanced is that of the isolated individual who must make his way entirely unaided in the world, and whose value as a human being is determined by the degree of success he has selling his abilities in the marketplace. Within the latter ideological structure, any discussion of the backgrounds of individuals, or the pressures and tensions at work upon them, or the unfair and impossible binds in which they find themselves, is impermissible. Those who have made a killing on the stock market are not reticent about declaring the present state of the world the happiest of all possible states, and, that being the case, attributing mental disorder to defective genes or chemical imbalances, or Original Sin. A number of interrelated processes are at work making it likely that the Oregon tragedy will not be the last of its kind. Alienation in social relations has reached new heights.