There are two very good articles about our changing cultural conditions which are helping to breed mentally deranged school shooting mass murderers like de Jesus Cruz. Both come at the problem from different angles, but provide equally compelling explanations in my view, so I’ve included each in this post.
The first is a Quora post by Jon Davis, a Marine Corps weapons instructor. His basic thesis is that school shooters are the inevitable detritus of a “victimhood culture”.
People hate generalizations, but here you have a fairly undeniable one. School shootings regularly are perpetrated by almost exclusively males, either boys or young men, who have had severe socialization problems. I’m not even aware of a single female shooter in the lot. Following Columbine, schools began implementing “anti-bullying” campaigns, attempting to target everyday violence and general mean behavior among kids. Did that solve anything? Anything at all?
[…]
The problem with being at the bottom is that there are many barriers to prevent you from exiting it, but few to climb back up. There simply aren’t many ways to overcome your oppressors. Fighting my bully was how I did it. This was how I was able to right my situation.
Does it sound extreme? Well, not so much if you were born before the 1980’s. And if you were born after, it probably sounds barbaric. After three years as a teacher, I saw a culture that acts very foreign from my own. Almost no one gets into fights. At first, I thought this was a good thing, but then I started seeing what was missing. The boys are almost completely incapable of competing academically besides the very few with parents who are very motivated, mostly teachers themselves. They lack motivation and a sense of purpose or meaning. Obviously there is more going on then a lack of the schoolyard tumble, but that seemed to be part of it. I found that many longed for the presence of an authoritative male figure. With two Iraq deployments under my belt, I fit the mold. I was surprised the authoritarian routine worked. Everyone said it wouldn’t, but it was all I knew, and it was like they craved it. But the darker thing I noticed was that it seemed very hard for my personal success story to work today. Those who started off losers stayed losers, forever. There was no climbing the hierarchy as I had. As I said before, it is not good to be at the bottom, especially for long.
I pieced together that this had a great deal to do with the anti-bullying policies put in place since I graduated. Again, I thought it was fine to avoid problems and keep the peace so that students could learn. But they weren’t learning. At best, it felt like they were being herded. What’s worse, “bullying”, at least the far more pervasive and much more common forms of bullying I experienced, the non-violent kind was just as present. Ironically, bullies now used the system to bully others.
[…]
According to a 2015 study Microaggression and Moral Cultures, this is textbook victimhood culture. Victimhood culture is when a culture evolves to handle slights against them through responding to each of them, not directly, but leverage third party intervention. These third parties could be parents, school authority, police, voters, or political donors. What makes victimhood cultures dangerous was that it incentivized “victims” to catalog and broadcast every conceivable slight against them, no matter how trivial or unintentional the insult. They need to build cases and this encouraged to exaggerating or falsify harm they received to create a case against the accused satisfactory enough to warrant some desired or demanded action. That said, I sympathize with schools. To stand up to a mob and say, “You don’t have all the facts,” is hard. So I understand why schools gravitated in this direction.
But victimhood culture does something else to the character of its members. It causes them to value victimhood as a form of virtue itself. That means that those within such cultures seek to gain the short term benefits of being perceived as a victim, such as pity or advocacy, but at the cost of long term appreciation from the culture, as classic (and more healthy) character traits, such as self-reliance and self-respect are ignored and allowed to atrophy.
This matters to those concerned about the development of boys. The reason that victimhood culture is dangerous is because it short-circuits natural boyhood development by specifically contradicting with the nature of boys. Boys align themselves in the same way as anyone else, through dominance hierarchies. The adolescent male dominance hierarchy is one which is attempting to collectively define what being a man should look like, and it socializes its members to this archetypal masculinity identity.
Bolded emphasis mine. Male dominance is the yang to female submissiveness. And male dominance hierarchies are a natural and healthy self-organizing behavior among young and old men. Hierarchies keep the peace and enable male cooperation for the greater good. Women and male shitlibs of womanly disposition don’t understand this inherent property of manhood because the former don’t compete to establish useful hierarchies and the latter are always on the bottom of male hierarchies and so seek to destroy them and the need for them.
A part of this is that schoolyard fights are common, even normal form of social interaction for boys. In many ways, they are necessary to create an ordered hierarchy, establish norms, set ideals, and importantly, provide a vehicle for boys to climb the hierarchy. So that I am not taken out of context, schoolyard fighting is in no way the same as the violence that is the subject of this question. They are categorically different. The fighting among boys was not intended to cause permanent physical injury or death. It is a simple non-lethal duel by two unarmed combatants until one of them gives up. The fighting provided a means for all boys to attain respect across the local microculture, even those at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, so long as they proved to the collective that they were willing to take their lumps.
Victimhood culture disrupts this process and is contrary to honor cultures. Both are reactionary when slighted, but honor cultures seek to handle matters personally without intervention of third-party authority. With victimhood culture, third-party intervention is the goal. In this way, one playing by the rules of a victimhood culture can undermine the entire adolescent male dominance hierarchy, disrupting its ability to socialize males, preventing the establishment of positive male ideals, and removing a means for the boys at the bottom to rise to a healthy middle.
Victimhood culture is the outgrowth of a feminizing (and feministing) nation. As our institutions have caved to the deluge of the Great Menstruation, boys have been severed from their innate biological predispositions, with no outlet of expressing their inborn male-ness. The result has been a massive retreat of boys from school and of men from public life, and a terrible overrun of our institutions by women, particularly women who harbor deep wells of spiteful man-hatred.
The last element is important for the subject of school shooters. Without the normal processes of restitution, such as fighting, boys at the bottom of the school’s dominance hierarchy may have no means to gain respect in their local community, relegating them to the bottom of a very brutal hierarchy for a very long time during many of their formative years. In this way, the banned behavior of schoolyard “violence” may actually be what immunizes boys from murderousness later in life.
[…]
I’d argue that system of discipline we have in place short-circuits this all important process of childhood adolescent development. To prevent “bullying” we have prevented this necessary outlet for boyhood socialization and replaced it with one where real bullying, the manipulation of those in power or who know how to game the system, continues to take place.
aka credentialism and status striving suckuppery.
Without the outlet, the means to settle the score, the tyrants have no means of being humbled, as the only power they respect is prevented from reaching them. By that, I mean a truly self-righteous boy. But worse, those who are their victims have literally no means of recourse… unless of course they want to tattle and increase their suffering tenfold in the days to come.
Great insight. The protection of the feminized State protects the tyrants from their deserved humblings at the hands of boys who are proud to be boys and not some twisted tranny genderfluid simulacrum of a male-thing. We’ve created a real monster in our zeal to defeat an imaginary monster.
I say this is worse because we believe we have protected the boy who is being bullied by preventing only one form of conflict – physical violence. Because we have conflated a schoolyard tussle with a school shooting, we’ve made all forms of violence evil. I’ll say this to make it clear, there is a need for the Marines to kill people. There is a need for the justice system to sometimes take a life in defense of others. Sometimes, violence is necessary, but in making the idea of violence taboo — “there’s never a reason for violence” — we’ve short-circuited that all important understanding of the world where we teach kids what kinds of violence are acceptable, what kind is not, and what kind is necessary.
This aligns with Jon Haidt’s moral foundations research which uncovered that liberals stress fairness and harm in their moral calculations, while conservatives place equal emphasis on all six moral dimensions (fairness, harm, liberty, authority, purity, and loyalty). What this means is that shitlibs are constricted in their world views, seeing all violence as against their notions of harm-based morality, instead of having the more nuanced moral view of conservatives who better understand that some violence is necessary to preserve societal health.
By removing the most observable conflict method, we removed from him the ability to rectify his own situation through that ancient of means, and I’ll add, the means most common and most widely respected among boys. At the same time, we interfered in socialization through friends and peers, a form of solidifying social norms which the data is clear on, is far more powerful than teachers and schools. And worst of all, we never taught him about violence, so he’s teaching himself.
Now, look at many of the cases of school shooters. I see disturbing similarities to my own story. What was different, was that I figured out how to move up a few notches, so that no matter how bad it got, I was never the guy on the bottom. It needs to be understood that the difference between the least popular kid and the next to least popular is enormous. For mathematicians (many of whom probably understand this personally) the pattern follows somewhat of a pareto distribution. The kid at the bottom doesn’t just have it worse than the kids above him in the dominance hierarchies, he has it exponentially worse. They start off on the wrong foot, then stress causes them to make mistakes which causes them to fall further. Continued stress causes their grades to slip, which causes problems with parents and future outlook. Stress amplifies. Eventually emotional regulation becomes a problem and eventually, even their immune system is weakened. Logically, these children are more likely to need medication to cope or adapt normally to the world, either in the form of antidepressants or through self-aid, in the form of illegal drug use. The former may help or it may only exacerbate their problems, while the latter will surely only provide short term relief at the expense of long term suffering. Maybe other things are factors. Perhaps divorce of the parents, or someone with cancer, or a recent death is part of the story. All of these make it harder and as unfair as that may be, make it easier to fall down the dominance hierarchy. Maybe they seek help by playing up their victimhood status for a while, and maybe it will help for the short term. Pity can feel very good for a little while. However, if they do it wrong, they risk revulsion because neediness is repulsive. There is a point where you can become so bad off, that even asking for help makes others resent you more. These people are in complete collapse.
Neediness is repulsive to women too. So the young boy who fails to learn this lesson on the playground will grow up and fail the same lesson in the dating market. He will be rejected by women later in life as assuredly as he was rejected by male peers early in his life
Put all this together, and I think we have a much better understanding of what makes a school shooter. They aren’t just bullied kids. Everyone faces some degree of meanness from time time, but they are kids who absolutely cannot escape the bottom rungs of the adolescent social structure. Over a period of years they absorb abuse by other kids using them to climb their own dominance structures. They never develop strategies to deal with this, but instead, attempt and fail at other strategies which exacerbate their position, such as retreating into isolation or seeking to accentuate their own victimhood to the revulsion of everyone else around them, even adults.
[…]
Then the final evolution is to embrace that hatred for the world, hatred for themselves, and sense of meaninglessness to the point of suicide. Many simply stop at that tragedy, but some take it even further, wanting to take as much with them before they go. Maybe they’ll use a gun, maybe arson, maybe a bomb, but those few will stop at nothing to express their resentment of Creation.
[…]
And as much as schools are trying to resist this message, it’s becoming clearer with every instance of young men and boys massacring their peers, that all the ad-hoc programs cooked up by our “Anti-Bullying Committees” aren’t helping. At best, they are patronizing programs intended to communicate a child’s uniqueness and individual value, diluted by the fact it is exactly like the message given to all the other kids. Like the message of the Syndrome in the Incredibles, “When everyone’s special… no one will be.” At the same time, these programs seem to do little more than categorize many of the behaviors necessary to escape the bottom of the social hierarchy are the same as the violence it evolved to replace. Throwing these behaviors out has left a hole in how we socialize boys, not just in preventing them from committing massacres, but in how we they define their own identities and how they become healthy men in society.
Flattening male hierarchy creates psychologically flattened men untethered from society.
One more thing I’d add: Cruz was an omega male with girl problems.
Cruz had been suspended from the school from fighting his ex girlfriend’s new boyfriend and was depressed and having girl problems at the time of the shooting.
Victimhood culture also prevents young men from learning how better to appeal to women and to understand what makes women tick, and the result is that a single rejection can send an omega or beta over the edge.
Btw, I think social media and the instant access to one’s loserdom provided by internet search engines only magnifies the social isolation felt by the bottom-rung young men in society. Before the Eye in the Skynet and Faceborg broadcast everyone’s social standing across the globe it was likely easier for losers to manage the burden of their low social status. Now, everyone sees it, all day every day, and this must contribute to feelings of hopelessness and rage in outcasts like Cruz.
One more thing: we should be looking out for Crooked Face people like Cruz because these are the sorts of LSMV omega males who have likely inherited a heavy genetic mutational load that predisposes them to low self-control and psychopathy.
******
The second post is by Agnostic, whose thesis is that rootlessness — characterized by geographic regions that are full of recent transplants — is a major factor in the creation of mass shooters.
A striking fact about the deadliest mass shootings is their geographic distribution, lying mostly in areas that are heavily colonized by transplants, rather than in places with deep historical roots and communities.
This tends to be a fractal phenomenon — at the regional level, they’re most likely in the Sun Belt, but even within such states, they’re from newly founded suburban enclaves (ironically intended to be “safe” unlike the dangerous old towns and cities nearby), and often the killer’s family and perhaps the killer himself are transplants (including immigrants or sons of immigrants).
Ann Coulter recently made this point: a lot of our relatively recent mass shooters have been the poison fruit of our open borders policy.
Rootless places attract people guided by a laissez-faire approach to behavior, who don’t mind throwing away the constraints of living in a place where traditions are strong, family ties are extensive, and even strangers know each other. Perhaps that’s the exact reason they’re fleeing a rooted place — so they can just live their own lives without being bound to others.
As a place comes to be colonized more and more by such people, normlessness becomes the norm. Do whatever, say whatever, think whatever. Fuck the haters. If it feels good, do it. If you got it, flaunt it.
Shitlibs think the above describes a utopia, but it has a dark side.
The residents may think this low-lying level of anti-sociality is no big deal. They’re being true to their individual selves, and at worst it produces bratty and entitled children. Nothing devastating, certainly not worth going back to the rooted environment with all of its constraints on individual behavior.
But it’s precisely this code of “do whatever” that allows the small handful of truly warped individuals to carry out their warped fantasies. Typically these are revenge fantasies (rape or murder), as the social reject killer has no other ties to sustain him, and seeks to lash out at those who have rejected him. He has no extended family, no neighbors, no other communal links that would keep him calmed down despite being a loner at school.
Once he stews in those revenge fantasies long enough, what constraints are there to hold him back from carrying them out? He lives in a world of his own, with no palpable policing presence.
Social norms exist for a reason, even if liberaltardians don’t have the mental capacity to see those reasons beyond “Ugh, stop harshing my buttplug mellow, man!”. As we add more Diversity, we add more competing norms, and we take away more of the national cohesion that makes America a real country and not a bus depot for international frugalists and their buffer zone third world pets.
Although such cases may be rare, their impact is catastrophic when they do hit — there could be dozens of innocent people brutally murdered for no reason in a public spectacle. In addition to the immediate loss of life, there’s the permanent scar left on the area. It is exactly these rare-yet-catastrophic cases that social norms are supposed to protect against. They may feel annoying sometimes when you want to do your own thing, but they’re there for the greater good of preserving the community, like a form of insurance.
Liberals may be slightly better than conservatives on tests of abstraction, but I’ve normally found that conservatives are much better “big picture” thinkers than are liberals who are hidebound by their pinched individualistic morality to focus exclusively on short-term affronts to their lifestyles.
These kinds of spree murders have become more common as more people have dislocated themselves and their families in pursuit of higher career prospects. It’s generally not dirt-poor people reluctantly moving to the nearest city after the good jobs vanished in rural areas. It’s middle class people moving from Nowheresville to an up-and-coming “it” place. This is what makes the shootings so counter-intuitive to most observers — they happen in middle-class enclaves with good schools and promising children.
[…]
Only when we reverse this trend by staying put where our roots are, and accepting the duties and constraints that this places on our behavior, will these kinds of warped revenge fantasies no longer be thought of, let alone acted upon. The moral code will change from “do whatever” to “rein it in for the greater good”.
That will mean denying yourself the attempt to climb the status ladder by moving around all over the place — but by now that’s mostly a fool’s game anyway, all of the good spots having been taken and held onto for awhile. If a handful of people do this, it may not wreck society, but if enough people uproot themselves, then the entire society gets destabilized — behaviorally and morally.
Parents who put their kids through wrenching geographic dislocations to pursue their own status goals are committing a form of child abuse.
To put it bluntly, we do not have the right to “do whatever” as long as it doesn’t immediately harm others. Acting as though we did have that right leads to patterns of behavior that, after a sufficient percolating delay, cause far more destruction to ourselves and others than we imagined was possible.
Conservatives rely more on their gut instinct, which is why they tend to lose media-framed sophistic shitlib “debates”, but also why they are smarter about foreseeing the downstream effects of social policies favored by liberals.
But you can’t push for tough regulations on other people’s behavior without accepting more regulations on your own personal behavior. Pointing to potential “harm” done by the other person is no good, since your own laissez-faire behavior is corroding and destroying others, just not in as concentrated of a way. It’s long-term and diffuse, but no less offensive to social norms.
Narcissists are more likely to be represented among rootless transplants, (“why should I let anyone hold me back? I do it my way!”), so it’s not surprising that they have more of the attitude that their actions do no harm, it’s all the other guy’s fault.
And of course the ultimate form of regulation comes from feeling social pressure, whether from extended family, neighbors, peers you’ve known your whole lives, and so on.
A rootless nation substitutes one form of social pressure — family and neighbors — with another form that accommodates the atomized existence — pressure from fake news media, entertainment, social media, and BIGCORP. It’s a malignant trade-off in the long run.
Diversity™ of course exacerbates rootlessness and the problems that come from population churn. White people constantly fleeing encroaching Diversity can turn an entire nation into a rootless mob of psychologically frayed zombies doped up on SSRIs and opioids.
It’s not a shock to learn that almost all the school shooters were taking anti-anxiety drugs. Cause and effect are hard to disentangle — it probably goes both ways in a vicious feedback loop of degenerating evil: rootlessness brings on the anxiety which is prescribed BIGPHARMA drugs which with chronic use mentally destabilizes the user and makes him more susceptible to the problems arising from rootlessness and social isolation.
We’ve got a long way to go to make America great again. Trump was only the opening salvo.
Narcissist Nation
Posted in Comment Winners, Culture, Current Events, Goodbye America, Self-aggrandizement, Status Is King, The Id Monster, Ugly Truths on February 22, 2018| 150 Comments »
Via TheExcrutiationator, a great comment by Matt in VA regrettably hitched to a Rod Dreher post, making the point that we live in a nation increasingly populated by sociopathic narcissists who aren’t all that different than the murderous school shooters they exploit as a springboard to the start of their left-wing political activism careers with CNN.
The question left to be asked is, WHY is there runaway narcissism in America?
Why do we have a generation of bratlings bouncing like hypertards from one hashtag to the next for a quick fix of social media applause? Why are there limelight hogs like David Hogg who will effortlessly segue from a traumatic school shooting to reciting focus-group tested shitlib lines in front of CNN cameras? Is no one else utterly repulsed by the sight of attention whores slipping in their dying classmates’ blood to grab headlines and harangue Congressmen with political talking points put together by craven chaimstream media propagandists?
Is this cultural trend not SICK AS FUCK to anyone with a scintilla of common decency left in him?
My answer to the narcissism question: it’s the feminization, stupid. Narcissism is an inherently female trait (and homosexual male trait). Both sexes have their narcissists, but the condition is more prevalent and manifests more acutely in women, who are natural attention whores constitutionally aware that their bodies and faces are their primary means of capturing male interest. Furthermore, in a sexual market becoming more r-selected (cads over dads), narcissistic men have a leg up on the male competition.
As our culture and institutions feminize, and media agitprop pathologizes normal healthy masculinity, we get more womanly narcissists. YouGoGrrlism and gay poz are yielding a bounty of narcissists for whom other people are either obstacles or accomplices to the public recognition of their glowing self-conception.
The explosion of Americans with the Dark Triad suite of personality traits means more psycho narcissists mugging for cameras and wearing pussyhats as substitutes for good character. Narcissism is being genetically or socially selected for via open borders mass immigration, sexual choice, cultural propaganda, and social atomization. The latter condition is particularly fertile ground for narcissists to flower, because a complete lack of social controls that otherwise small communities bring to bear on individuals means there is a lot of upside to using narcissistic exploitation to get similar social benefits from strangers that one would normally get in a rooted community from family and neighbors. And given that rootless itinerants are less likely to stick around for long after their sociopathic, narcissistic exploitation has shattered the lives around them, there is less possibility for corrective punishment like social shaming to curb the narcissist’s excesses.
The David Hoggs of the world aren’t far removed from the de Jesus Cruzes of the world. That’s something which should worry us all, because narcissism has a bad habit of burning itself out in a pyre of self-centered immolation that scorches everything in its radius of contact.
Share this:
Like this:
Read Full Post »