Over the past few decades, higher human values of compassion and selflessness have been replaced by the Gods of greed, narcissism, and violence. Investment banks ruin the lives of millions of people as they rake in record profits and then pass on huge losses to those same people. Defense contractors lobby for wars that destroy countless lives. The healthcare industry fights tooth and nail to prevent legislation that will provide medical care to millions and the oil and coal companies destroy the environment in their insatiable desire for even more money. And in a testament to how much we've fallen from grace, a psychopathic corporate raider has the support of about 50% of the electorate and may become the next president.
Except for unusual cases such as major scandals or catastrophic accidents, it is difficult to see the degree to which greed and selfishness have come to dominate because their expression is usually subtle and in the form of business decisions made in board rooms.
But the latest manifestation of that narcissism, selfishness, and lack of empathy, however, came in the form of a young man dressed in black and wearing a gas mask opening fire on a crowd in a theatre, killing and wounding scores. Upon careful inspection, it will become clear that the same motivations and thought-processes that drove James Holmes to commit mass murder are in actuality not very different from what is driving many of the key players in our society today. As such, the tragic incident in Aurora, Colorado last Thursday is but merely a symptom of a much larger illness.
The Psychology of the Mass Shooter
The following was taken from a blog post entitled 'The Common Motive of a Mass Shooter Attacker: Immortality"on the Washington Post's website:
Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist who is chairman of The Forensic Panel, a practice in New York City, has worked on mass-shooting cases for many years and shared some general thoughts about these kinds of incidents:
“Mass shooting cases have the common motive of an attacker seeking immortality. Each of the attackers have different degrees of paranoia and resentment of the broader community. Some are so paranoid that they’re psychotic. Others are paranoid in a generally resentful way but have no significant psychiatric illness. But you have to hate everyone in order to kill anyone. The threshold that the mass shooter crosses is one in which he decides that his righteous indignation and entitlement to destroy is more important than the life of any random person that he might kill.”
“This is why mass shooting are invariably, invariably carried out by people who have had high self esteem. They are people who had high expectations of themselves. It’s not at all surprising to hear about these crimes in people who either valued their own intelligence or their own career prospects at one time.”
“They’re people who are unfailingly unable to form satisfying sexual attachments and their masculinity essentially gets replaced with their fascination for destruction.”
“The overwhelming majority of folks who do this are male because of how, in our culture, masculine identity is so closely tied to the capacity to destroy.”
The motivation underlying the killer's behavior is a desire for immortality -- a fundamentally narcissistic goal that he is selfishly willing to achieve at the expense of other people's lives.
Greed is Good: The Psychology of the Capitalist
The same can be said for the Uber-capitalist. He is willing to ravage everything is his path for the sake of power and wealth, hoping that in some way, he may attain the immortality of the Gods. In his case, however, he does not open fire in a crowded theatre; he lobbies legislatures so that environmental regulations that prevented him from drilling and destroying a natural habitat are repealed, he finds ways to sabotage and avoid laws that make it illegal for him to gamble with other people's retirement money and capitalizes off the profits or leaves them holding the bag if he bets wrong, and he deviously spreads lies about critical legislation that would actually make millions of people healthier and save them billions of dollars -- all because they will cut into his bottom line.
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| A killer in a $5,000 suit |
Not all power-hungry, selfish people are in a position to run an investment bank or an oil company. Some are only able to buy a few guns from the local Walmart and kill their neighbors in a movie theatre. But in a society that has glorified the pursuit of power and self-promotion they've got to make a name for themselves somehow.
So why should we be surprised when they do?
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