Our Culture is Turning Us into a Bunch of Hyper-Aggressive, Homicidal Maniacs
By: Jessica Wildfire
Tags: Politics, Violence, Society, News, Government

My mother-in-law cried when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. Like me, she’s a teacher. She asked me to pray with her.

I did.

Four years later, she voted for Donald Trump.

She’s voted republican since she was 18. She does it because she thinks anyone who holds a bible and talks about Jesus is a better person than someone who doesn’t. That includes politicians like Lauren Boebert, who constantly demonizes any attempt at gun regulation as an assault on human rights. Meanwhile, she does stuff like this:

In America, shootings happen every week now.

They happen at churches and schools. They happen at movie theaters and grocery stores. They happen at nightclubs and spas.

Pretty soon, mass shootings are going to become a part of our new normal in a way we’ve only dreaded. They’ve been going up in frequency and severity for decades. Lately, we can’t even finish debating one mass shooting before another one happens. The killers all give different slightly motives and reasoning, but at the center of it lies a simple truth:

They’re angry.

And they have easy access to guns...

Anger is driving mass violence.

We’ve had two mass shootings back-to-back. In both cases, they were carried out by men who were 21 years old.

Yes, both of them were 21.

Think about that, then look at the charts below. It shows some pretty clear trends. First, younger people experience a lot more stress, anger, and worry now. Our overall state of anxiety and anger is going up:

It’s no secret that we’re angrier than we were ten years ago, and much angrier than we were twenty years ago. You can thank politicians and the main stream media. You can also thank CEOs. They’ve colluded with each other to create a society full of chaos and noise. They manufacture scarcity, along with deplorable work and living conditions. They create technologies and cultural norms that isolate us from each other.

And we let them…

Mass shooters now aren’t just angry at one person or a single institution. They’re angry at everyone. They didn’t get the life they wanted, or the one they were promised. They don’t see a happy, prosperous future for themselves. They hold everyone accountable for it.

They seek retribution.

The idea of punishing society for its sins goes back a long time, but it’s getting worse. We’re producing severely angry individuals at a pace hardly seen before in human history. Instead of pretending to be shocked every time it happens, or engage in another fruitless debate about gun regulation, maybe we can look at what’s actually going on.

Tell me it’s really a great shock that in a society constantly stressed and angry, with assault weapons widely available, even encouraged, that all of this pent up negative emotion erupts in incidents where someone actually does the very thing that movies and video games continually celebrate. When you put all the pieces together, you see it.

Mass shootings aren’t the product of sick minds.

They’re the inevitable result of a sick culture. And if we’re ever going to reduce the number of shootings, that’s how we have to view it — as a collective problem requiring a range of solutions.

The questions are simple:

Why are so many people so angry all the time? Why are they looking for strangers to punish?

There’s a recipe to produce mass shooters.

Last week I read a story about junior analysts at Goldman Sachs, one of the wealthiest banks in the world.

These analysts thought they were waltzing into their dream job. After all, the title sounds impressive. But a survey of those analysts found how quickly they turn into broken, miserable robots forced to work 90 hours a week for a salary that’s barely worth the sacrifice.

These analysts said things like, “My body physically hurts all the time,” and “I’m in a very dark place right now.”

These people are at the top of society, living the dream.

Imagine how everyone else feels:

Over the last twenty years, America has become the most overworked country in the world. As the chart points out, we’re making almost half as much as we should be, while working twice as much.

Look around at all the minimum wage jobs, and you’ll see the same thing. To afford anything now, you split 70 hours a week or more between different gigs. This isn’t remotely close to what anyone promised the nation’s youth. So, yeah, of course they feel screwed. Add some emotional instability and toxic politics, maybe some alienation, then stir.

Now you’ve got a mass shooter.

Millions of Americans live in a state of constant low-grade anger. It’s little wonder why. We face jaw-dropping amounts of stress. We’re expected to deal with it ourselves. We’re told to hustle one minute, then meditate the next. We’re trained to see all of our problems as our own fault, with solutions always buried in the next diet, or the next Ted Talk. We’re brainwashed to accept the world around us as given, and that there’s nothing we can do to change it. Instead of better pay or healthcare, we’re given self-help books and candles that smell like waterfalls.

Well, not given.

We have to buy those.

The motive for mass shootings lies in cultural norms.

One of my students said something profound a few years ago, the last time we were talking about the mass shooting problem: “It’s our sick brand of capitalism,” he said. “Look at all the mixed signals people get all day, every day. It’s driving us crazy.”

He had a point.

I’m not sure about you, but I’m getting tired of law enforcement and media pundits giving bullshit reasons for mass shootings. We listen to confessions and read manifestos of the criminals. We take them at face value, instead of reading between the lines. We freak out when shootings like the Las Vegas massacre happen, because the killer had no explicit motive.

I’ve got a theory about motives.

Look at this chart:

Maybe it’s just me, but it appears that becoming a more consumer-driven, neo-liberal culture correlates roughly with the dramatic rise in mass shootings over the last several decades. Look, I know that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it’s worth thinking about. Maybe living in a culture that constantly places more value on productivity and material wealth than human life has something to do with the rise in crimes that show an outright disregard for the lives of others.

Maybe the way billionaires and mass shooters think aren’t so different after all. They’re just different forms of expression for the same nihilistic attitudes. The heads of Goldman Sachs don’t care about their junior analysts. The heads of Amazon and Tesla are more than willing to let people die for profit, until it becomes a public relations crisis. Most of our politicians don’t care about their constituents enough to pass a modest raise in the minimum wage. Some of them continue to promote conspiracy theories, knowing they’ll get more people killed. If that’s not enough, they allow people to freeze to death in their homes, then blame them for it.

This is the dominant cultural logic. No wonder it drives some people to commit acts of mass violence. They’re doing what they see on television and social media every day.

Monkey see.

Monkey do.

Survival is looking like a form of privilege.

So, the shooters are 21 years old.

Normally, you’d ask why. You wouldn’t think they’ve spent enough time in the world to become jaded and corrupted enough to do something like this. And yet, it’s not that hard to understand how someone in the year 2021 can loose all sense of hope and meaning.

Life is looking bleak for an increasing number of people. Thanks to the spread of unregulated greed and “winner take all” attitudes, most of us expect a life full of endless toil and debt. We expect any wealth we accrue to get soaked up by a broken healthcare system, and to leave almost nothing behind for our families when we clock out.

Millennials are on track to be one of the poorest generations on record. Gen Z knows they’ll be spending most of their lives cleaning up a climate mess and solving a century’s worth of political problems, including a resurgence of fascism. With pollution suffocating our cities and turning skies blood orange, survival itself is starting to look like a form of privilege. So yeah, it’s not totally shocking that a handful of people would lose their shit and decide to start their own personal armageddon.

If you ask me, the real insanity is what happens when politicians send their thoughts and prayers, and sheltered suburbanites wring their hands while putting on a spectacle asking why it keeps happening.

They should all shut up.

We know why.

There’s a bunch of angry people out there who feel completely abandoned by a culture and economy that increasingly values things over people. Entire industries are built around profiting from collective anger and isolation, and we make it super easy for everyone to buy guns.

That’s why.