… [The latest mass murderer] seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed…
Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.
If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves…
[Let me pause here and say yes. Lots of people are rummaging in this guy’s writings/statements for this hatred/that cause; but since the man was manifestly, classically, paradigmatically insane, this is a waste of time. His was a literally fractured psyche. One can learn things – most of them already known – about psychosis from him, but that’s kind of it.]
“The kind of person that we’re seeing today,” Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, told me, “is not promoting a cause.”
He added that they were propelled by a general, wide-ranging fury…
[W]hy [have] so many Americans … become so susceptible to the void?
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To the void, and to the rage that the sense of the void generates.
One can feel free-floating nihilism without the destructive rage. Albert Camus, one random evening in Prague, suddenly felt overwhelmed by “the death of the soul.” James Agee, alone on a broiling Sunday in Alabama, felt
… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…
This is writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything.
Don DeLillo, in Libra, imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling nihilistic one hot afternoon in Texas:
He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.
But Oswald’s angry nihilism, like that of the jihadis and McVeigh, emerges into the light with a particular ideology that justifies slaughter, whereas the NVE is more insidious because ideologically he remains largely underground, unconnected to a group or group identity. He may be discoverable in this or that online violence cult, but basically unless the people closest to him – parents, friends, teachers – are sufficiently alarmed by his accumulation of weapons, or increasingly wild behavior, to report him to the police and/or try to get him committed, he’s free to mass slaughter.
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And this is UD’s thing: People have to report. And the report has to go somewhere. Why aren’t these manifestly, frighteningly, sick people on our radar? Part of it is indifferent, protective, deluded, or themselves crazy, parents. Some of these parents pay a very high price – their kid kills them before heading off to the local preschool; or, if they survive, some of them go to prison.
I ain’t claiming that in every case parents should have suspected something and acted on that suspicion; what I’m saying is this: It’s a new world in the US; hundreds of millions of high-powered guns are around, and anyone can get plenty of them. The pope calls this “a pandemic of arms.”
Which makes having even a mildly disturbed, mildly in trouble with the law, child/adolescent (look at what Sue Klebold, mother of a 17 year old mass murderer, has said about this) very worrisome, and at the very least our schools (where every day loaded guns are discovered in backpacks) should be ready to expel people who give evidence of being dangerous. It’s obscene that it’s still quite hard, in our public schools, to remove fledgling gunnies; in all respects — family, school — we have to toughen up.
We all know that the 15 year old in Washington state who killed his family with a gun to which the father gave him access didn’t just wake up one night and do this; but because by many accounts the household had little do with the outside world, no one beyond the immediate family could judge how nihilistic/enraged he was. This isn’t an argument for an intrusive, freedom-constraining state, but it is an argument for far greater social/familial awareness/responsiveness around the now-toxic mix of adolescence, mental disorder, and guns.
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All of this is necessary because of a much larger nihilism: In this nation, we assign no particular meaning or value to death by gun. It’s something that triggers a thoughts and prayers tweet. It doesn’t even have meaning when children are pulped. We just continue working to make it easier for everyone to get and carry guns. “Everyone dies. That’s life,” says an Oklahoma state senator in response to a question about his state’s astounding gun suicide rate.
That’s very strange, that he says that, but we can’t afford to waste time analyzing it. As we speak, the next insane teenager with a high capacity arsenal prepares.