The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Equality’ and the Murderous Losers

Posted on | May 30, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Equality’ and the Murderous Losers

Park MacDougald has a very interesting article inspired by this month’s mass shootings, and he begins thus:

Rampage shooters tend to be losers. The archetype of the modern school shooter, Eric Harris, frequently wrote in his diary about his feelings of alienation and resentment over his lack of social success. . . .
Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge. “If I cannot rise above them,” he wrote, “I will destroy them.” . . .

Now, I have written extensively about Elliot Rodger, and the crucial point is that the Creepy Little Weirdo seems to have imagined that he was “rejected” by girls that he never even talked to. You start examining so-called “incel” culture, and one of the things you realize is that the problem goes far beyond the fact that these guys can’t get a girlfriend. They don’t have any friends at all. They are introverts, afflicted by a deficit of social skills, and they have all sorts of weird ideas bouncing around inside their heads — including dangerous ideas which they never talk about to anyone in real life, instead seeking out like-minded weirdos on the Internet. Most of the commentary you see on these guys attempts to shoehorn them into some kind of political category. Liberal journalists always want these shooters to be some kind of “right-wing” phenomenon, and will stretch the available facts to fit that narrative, if at all possible.

Park McDougald avoids that predictable dead-end trip, and thereby manages to come up with valuable insights:

According to the sociologist Nathalie Paton, rampage shootings represent a perverse expression of some of our culture’s dominant values, including self-expression, autonomy, and authenticity. . . .
The shooters, Paton argues, highlight another contradiction in the dominant ideology. Everyone is supposed to be an individual, and all individuals are respected equally. Yet beneath this injunction and guarantee are all the typical modes of conformity and hierarchy we would expect of a human society. The beautiful, the talented, the athletic, the funny, and the interesting rise above the ugly, the clumsy, the anxious, the introverted, the boring, and the resentful.
These relative statuses, for the losers, are all the more painful for being nothing other than a reflection of who and what they actually are.

You can read the whole thing. The point is that the “dominant ideology” in our culture (i.e., liberalism) does seem to “guarantee” equality. Of course, no such thing as “equality” has ever existed in human history — we are, by our very nature, keenly attuned to social hierarchy — and so the losers receive no coherent explanation of their status as losers. The cultural narrative of the “dominant ideology” is essentially a lie, but anyone who contradicts the narrative is denounced as a Thought Criminal, a proponent of “hate,” as if lying to people were an act of love.

Thus we return full-circle to Elliot Rodger. His final video was a shocking irony: Here he is, sitting in the BMW his parents gave him, with the glorious scenery of sunny California behind him, declaring that his “suffering” was the justification for murdering random strangers.

People who are truly suffering — somewhere in the slums of Calcutta, perhaps — must be amazed that this rich kid thought of himself as a victim. But this is where the celebration of “equality” leads. Anyone who is unhappy or unpopular considers themselves to be oppressed somehow, and the imaginary unfairness of their predicament becomes a grievance that inspires them to do crazy and dangerous things. Some of them become murderers. And others become Democratic voters.

 Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime

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