I’m always skeptical of my own strong emotions. I’m even more skeptical of the strong emotions of others.
From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are trying to tell us something. But they’re rarely trying to tell us the convenient thing or the easy thing. The convenient and easy thing is usually to focus and project outward, to fix blame or responsibility on someone else or something else. “They” should do something, we tell ourselves.
By contrast it’s much more difficult to recognize that emotions reveal far more about ourselves than they do others. Personal progress only occurs when we harness the energy of strong emotions to do real, personal, introspective work.
With this in mind, I’ve been giving considerable thought to all the mass killings in the US over the past few decades, and in particular how to best respond to them. It’s tempting, and far too convenient, to just sit back an insist that “they” (meaning politicians, usually) do something about them. For some people, “doing something” means passing more restrictive gun laws. For others it means liberalizing those laws.
But what if neither of those things is likely to make much of a difference (other than to fill us with the pride of self-righteous indignation)? What if the (outward) focus on guns and politicians is actually distracting us from the (inward) focus needed to successfully identity and solve the problem?
There’s quite a bit of evidence, actually, those both sides of the gun debate have it wrong. Yes, it’s true that mental illness isn’t the cause of many mass shootings—as evidenced in part by the fact that women suffer mental illness at higher rates than men (or at least they are diagnosed more often), and yet more than 95% of all mass shooters are men. But, it’s also true that easy access to guns isn’t the cause of these shootings as evidenced in part by the fact that women (sane or otherwise) too have easy access to guns and yet don’t engage in mass murder.
From the above, it’s tempting to conclude that the problem isn’t mental illness or guns, it’s men, or more particularly testosterone. But men and testosterone are only part of the problem. Men exist everywhere in the world, and yet frequent, random mass shootings (other than by Muslim terrorists) are primarily a US problem. Furthermore, men have for centuries represented a relatively stable percentage of the US population, and they historically had more access to guns than they do now, and yet these shootings are a almost entirely a modern phenomenon.
So, if we really want to solve this problem, it seems that the energy spent arguing over guns and politicians might be better spent wrestling with some really tough and really uncomfortable questions. Questions like: What is it about modern US culture that is causing historically unprecedented numbers of men to engage in the random, indiscriminate killing of innocents? And might we learn something useful by figuring out what these men have in common?
These men do, in fact, usually have some important and telling things in common. First, they are almost invariably “gamma” males. (If you’re not familiar with that term, please look them up—the Urban dictionary has a good summary). It’s important for us to recognize that successful and established alpha and beta males (the one’s most frequently accused of “toxic masculinity”) aren’t the one’s engaging in these antisocial behaviors.
Second, like terrorists who also engage in the indiscriminate killing of innocents, these gamma males are emphatically trying to make some sort of STATEMENT. Whereas terrorists seek to make POLITICAL statements via violence, ordinary mass killers clearly use violence for purposes of SOCIAL commentary.
This recognition raises a question that we’re unlikely to sufficiently ponder so long as we’re always arguing about guns and politicians: Why do these gamma males feel a need to speak through violence rather than other ways?
The answer to that last question is pretty obvious to any observant person: Almost to person, these males (rightly or wrongly) believe that society has overlooked, ignored, marginalized, disenfranchised and disrespected them. In short, they believe that they won’t or can’t be heard EXCEPT through violence.
BINGO! These males resort to speaking via violence simply because they’ve not otherwise been heard. Now we’re getting somewhere! Testosterone + shunning = disaster.
So, here’s the trillion dollar question: What is it about the present (as opposed to the past) state of AMERICAN culture (as opposed to other cultures) that causes historically unprecedented numbers of American gamma males to feel so overlooked, ignored, marginalized, disenfranchised and disrespected that their voices can only be heard via random acts of violence?
I have some ideas that I may share at another time, but for now I’m interested in your’s. Please share.