Alienation and depression. Suicidal ideation can create a general devaluation in other lives as well. That sort of mindset can create a justification in wasting your own life with a splash. The mental calculus is already fundamentally incomprehensible to most folks because of that.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Copycats are motivated by the same thing as the originals, I guess, and just see someone who did it "successfully". (My source is I made it the fuck up)
I've heard it convincingly argued mass shooters are people that a few decades ago would have become serial killers. This is just a new, easier way to kill a bunch of people and feel powerful.
Don't know if it's true but I saw this docu arguing that serial killers can have or typically have multiple personality disorder. It's like they have their innocent self which is unaware of the crazy one that protects them but it also acts out what they experienced growing up.
Or maybe they are just dicks but this is something that I can at least understand.
The existence of that one is controversial, even.
A touch of narcissistic psychopathy, lack of empathy.
It really depends. A lot of them are hurt in some way shape or form and in a desperate situation like qooqie mentions and get pushed back into a corner over and over until they violently lash out, and a lot of others have a genuine disdain for other people or a warped personality/prespective on something (like Elliot Rogers and his entitlement to a girlfriend/sex) and rather than try and quell it or get help, they let it fester until they eventuallty also lash out.
The end result is the same. Either they get inspired to do heinous actions because there's no other option in their head to stop whatever they precieve as a problem, or they look at someone else that did them before and think "they had the right idea" and emulate them.
Damaged. Fearful. Aggrieved. Lonely. Hateful. Broken.
almost all mass shooters are bullies, so the question can be why they are ~~assholes~~ like that?
Well, in a nation where bullying is glorified as a necessary rite of passage, why should it be surprising that so many bullied people end bullying others?
I can't speak for the suspects, but it's probably many different forms of psychology we're looking at, some of which I know (as long as they're going down) want to take society down with it (what many call a lose-lose-situation, probably the worst interpretation of the parable of the tigers and the strawberry) and some of which see their actions as forcing society forward (known as accelerationism).
I don’t think they think of them as heroes. I think they think of them as rockstars or artists.
Basically as a person gets more uncomfortable, lashing out in anger becomes more attractive. The instinct comes from evolution where a good subset of misery could actually be remedied with violence.
But it goes beyond instinct. Like I said it’s an art. And I mean activist art. Art meant to shock. Art meant to open eyes.
They see normal human society as a mechanism allowing people to ignore suffering. They see a world in which some people are treated like trash, consistently.
We humans have a very nasty instinct to pick someone to treat like shit. Unless a person is very careful, they’ll find themselves part of a group of people who unconsciously collude to label a particular person as “the problem”, and then heap cruelty on that person in the name of “heroically fighting the bad guys”.
The Villain is an archetype, and our society is lacking in villains, so people fill in the blank by picking the person who rubs them the wrong way, and they cast that person as The Villain.
The Villain is a mask with super glue on the inside that we stick onto certain people’s faces. We treat them like they’re a disease, or a parasite, or an inhuman invader.
Because The Villain is everyone’s enemy, The Villain lives in a world of nothing but enemies. He lives in enemy territory. Eventually, he carries out his side of the war.