I have been reading a lot of articles lately about modern young people. They tell me that Gen Z is composed of people who tend to self-isolate a lot and increasingly don’t want to become a part of any of the social groupings that a large percentage of people in more traditional settings had participated in.
Furthermore, many mass shooters come from Gen Z. They are people who have lost the capacity to feel the pain involved in experiencing the shootings in which they participate. Many of the mass shooters are numb young people who have lost the capacity to feel the pain they are about to create even before the shootings actually occur. And because these young shooters are actually numb to any prospective pain before the shootings start to occur, this state of mind makes it so much easier for them to carry out their horrendous actions.
And why are these young shooters numb. Because it is a way for them to protect themselves against all the sensory distortion that they experience while living in a modern technological society. The alternation of overstimulation and understimulation that is the result of living in a vacuum and tension-pocket field of experience. This is what happens when one lives in an environment that is so totally bereft of the flowing blendable continual organic stimulation that is so much a part of traditional natural living environments. Now at the same time that their numbness in moderation serves as a protection against sensory distortion in the external world, in excess, it can lead to entropic disintegration, the random distribution of atoms in a physical experiential vacuum and of thoughts in a psychological experiential vacuum. The entropic disintegration leads to people falling apart both physically and psychologically.
So, in reality, these mass shootings serve the purpose of helping people to feel momentarily alive, even if in the end it means they end up dying from a law-and-order response. And although young people have difficulty today creating a living environment full of the organic stimulation that they need, they can at least create a living environment where they control the configuration of sensory distortion that they feel. Many withdraw into their bedrooms where they immerse themselves into the tension pocket stimulation of video games. Also, they withdraw into the vacuum and tension-pocket environments of social media. As a base, there they experience the experiential vacuum of the computer screen. In addition, they experience the abrasive stimuli of cyber-bullying. They get involved in all sorts of hate groups. They get involved in collecting all kinds of pornography, including naked pictures of their classmates.
Unfortunately, for some young people, activities like video games and interactions on social media are simply not enough to help pull them out of their experiential numbness in order to feel alive. This is where the notion of mass shootings to pull these young people out of their numbness comes in.
An important thing to consider is these young people get off not so much on other people’s private internal pain but rather, on their public external visual hurt. Pain is an internal deeper experience and for one person to be able to experience another person’s actual pain while shooting him, it requires that the first person be able to experience something akin to empathy paradoxically which is totally out of the question here. Of course, people who are into sado-masochism like the Hamas terrorists have unfortunately an exquisite sensibility with regard to pain, but that is the subject of another article. Hurt is a more visible superficial experience and of course it is more readily available to observers in a public arena like that of the shooter. So, the hurt of others acts as the potential trigger to pull a potential mass shooter out of his numbness for some moments of shocking aliveness.
Now the defined discrete abrasive stimulation of killing one person is short-lived and no substitute for the flowing blendable continual organic stimuli to be found in a more traditional natural living environment. This is why using an assault rifle and obtaining the intermittent kicks of killing many people in a row explains why many young killers become mass murderers. The important thing to realize is that these mass murderers don’t really need a motive as we traditionally understand the word. Rather than a motive, what causes these killers to start shooting is a trigger, an abrasive stimulus, that upsets them, makes them angry and causes them to start planning to shoot people. The external abrasive stimulus triggers the internal series of abrasive stimuli which is what the killers use to pull themselves out of their numbness and feel at least intermittently alive.
So, the key is if we want to get rid of mass murder, we have to find a way of filling modern living environments with more organic stimuli and radically decreasing the abrasive stimuli of modern technological society. It may sound like a very difficult task, but until we do it, the headlines will continue to be filled with gruesome events.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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