Gun deaths and nihilism go hand-in-hand

Kids flee the Uvalde killer, a distressing sign of the times

The Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, USA, on December 14, 2012, left 28 people dead and two injured. After murdering his mother at their home, Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and six adults before taking his own life. 

Katherine Dee writes:

In February 2021, a clue about Lanza’s psyche emerged. It was an abandoned YouTube channel under the name CulturalPhilistine. The videos painted a picture not of a deranged killer or a sadist but a lucid young man with a rich, complicated intellectual life. In these videos, all of which featured a black screen and a scratchy voiceover, Lanza laid out his philosophy. The most unsettling thing is the cogency with which Lanza presented his views.

An analysis of those views shows Lanza appears to think of culture as a “delusion” and a “disease”. It seems he targeted schools because that is where, in his thinking, American culture—American values—is transmitted. A key person who analysed Lanza's videos believes he killed children because they represent the propagation of life. In brief: “In his worldview, death was salvation and enlightenment.” 

Dee finds such an outlook beyond "bone-chilling". But the worst of it is that such a mindset is typical among young American mass killers:

While Lanza was bookish beyond his years—he was only 20 when Sandy Hook happened—he was hardly alone in his alienation, in his rejection of the principle of life. A survey of shooters’ manifestos, blog posts, forum posts, and other bits and pieces of their online footprints suggests that they oppose life in its most literal sense. This includes not only “intellectual” mass shooters like Lanza but those who appear to be motivated by white supremacy and misogyny.   

Nor is this phenomenon limited to the United States—although it seems to be most prevalent here. Kimveer Gill, who killed one person and wounded 19 in 2006 before committing suicide in Montreal, believed that the whole of society needed to be eradicated. Pekka Eric Auvinen, who killed eight in a high school a little north of Helsinki, Finland, called for “the death of the entire human race”. Marc Lépine, also in Montreal, in 1989, shrouded his anti-life philosophy in anti-feminist rhetoric—anticipating, by a quarter-century, Elliot Rodger, who, in 2014, killed six people near the University of California-Santa Barbara. 

But everyone in a society that produces such nihilism is, according to Dee, implicated in the horrible outcomes:

We imagine that these killers have nothing to do with everyone else—that they are like a leper colony set apart from the rest of us, and every so often, one escapes and spreads his disease. We want to believe that because it makes us feel good. But the reality is that the smudge of nihilism’s fingerprints stains all things, everywhere.

It’s in the half-joking, half-serious proclamations of millennials who say they don’t want children because of the climate—because the world is beyond repair. It’s in the ubiquity of an even darker humor, the kind that was popularized by 4chan in the mid-2010s and captured the public imagination—the sort of things that can only be funny if life has lost any value. 

It’s in the commingling of our leisure and anesthesia—we drink to escape, we exercise until we can’t feel anything, we propel ourselves into fantasy lives with fandom. It’s even, paradoxically, in our insistence on living “in the moment.” Nothing matters, so we may as well be happy with where we are. The darker side of “YOLO” [You only live once] is how it forecloses on the possibility that our lives matter in any grander sense, that we can be a part of a tradition that started long before we were born and will extend for ages after we die. 

Now for Dee's sad and humbling conclusion:

As I interviewed people about Lanza, a common theme emerged. Yes, there was something obviously wrong with the material circumstances of America in the early 21st Century—an economy that seemed incapable of providing for the many, decaying institutions, the ubiquity of our screens. But there was something else. Something more abstract. It was that we now lived in a world where everything revolved around the individual. We had morphed from a universe of moral absolutes to broad social and communal forces to an all-consuming solipsism—a terrifying oneness, a “culture of narcissism”, as Christopher Lasch put it, where the self is central. [Solipsism is a a theory holding that the self can know nothing but what it does itself and that the self is the only existent thing.]

This narcissism is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary “true self” keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond. Our shared inability to commit to anything that might make life meaningful, like children or a partner or putting down roots in a single place. It pervades Western humor, which is dominated by a sense that the world is ending, so we may as well drink and smoke ourselves to death because nothing really matters.

In this world, the individual was everything and nothing, architect of the future and hapless cog in a vast and deafening black. In this place, one murdered wantonly with the knowledge that all of us were just accidental bits of flesh bookended by eternities, that we meant nothing, that the possibility of meaning was a ruse. 

Therefore—and the ramifications that Dee lays out are huge—Western society must take stock of what it has created by wilful neglect of what history provides by way of a healthy social and moral human environment:

The debate over more guns or fewer guns completely misses the horrifying heart of the matter: the world built by modern liberalism, which took for its telos the maximization of individual autonomy, and thus guaranteed total alienation, breeds the nihilism behind these shootings. Ultimately, these killers could not cope, the way the rest of us do every day, with the crushing weight of the existential angst that is the promise of liberalism. Even the more thoughtful takes on fatherlessness and mental illness are only still addressing the symptoms of the disease. Until we see this, the ground of the problem, we will be no closer to answers, let alone solutions for these 21st Century horrors.

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