And so he sets himself upon society. The shooter smites the rich or some other privileged group. Or viciously he rages against the communities that have conditioned him. He correctly calls their influence corrupting, but cannot stop indulging in those corruptions. By default now he attacks, finding no other outlet for his circular maddening frustration. Partly this explains why the shooter usually kills himself, as well as others. Escaping his mental dilemma bedrocks his motivation. But one cannot escape society’s ethic while still exercising it (which the shooter does). One can only escape through a completely new way of thinking. The saints identify that new way of thinking and walk away. The shooter destroys society’s ethic—at least in himself—by destroying himself.
We want to dismiss these motivations of the shooter. His crimes so categorically repudiate how society trains and manages us that we flinch from considering his unspoken complaints. And his complaints reverberate so fundamentally through our ethos that we cannot amend them anyway. In fact, since we have to acknowledge these complaints as valid, but know we cannot resolve them, we end up just clicking along in the heinous contraption that provokes them. Or worse, we find ourselves fueling and lubricating society’s game with our willing, even eager, defending of its rules. It is hard for us to face this. We answer that one just has to endure, to adjust to society’s gratuitous manipulations, and that somehow those dysfunctional individuals never learned to do so. Unsettling, it is, to find this answer our best; to realize that even in explaining these crimes to ourselves we participate in attitudes that led to them. But this is what we do.
The oppressive conformity stifling our self-expression and actions; the relentless indoctrination via all sorts of media warping our sense of “success” and “failure”; the constant preying on our feelings of insignificance to goad us to buy things and have things and flaunt things; to compare ourselves with others, and to compete with others and defeat them. All of this must necessarily create a class of misfits and “losers”–and among them, inevitably, monsters. For some will always be confused by the game, and some will be enraged. Occasionally these confusions and furies crystalize into one single being; sometimes one intelligent, creative, and determined enough—or twisted, perverted, and detached enough to turn the rules of the game against the game itself. When this happens we have the shooter.
But the opposing end of the anti-social spectrum offers a legitimate alternative. The ethic of the saints looks beyond the successes and failures of the world, cultivates humility, simplicity and purity, and then harvests a peace of mind so thoroughgoing that it renders worldly concerns laughably irrelevant. In the end, we can either hope for society to embrace the ethic of the saints and voluntarily free itself from our culture’s distorted values; or, as individuals, we can embrace the ethic of the saints ourselves and affect our own liberation. The worldly persona created in us by society mauls our authentic self. Society fashions that persona from our weaknesses, from tendencies in us the saints warn against: from our greed and envy and acquisitiveness; from our desires and pride and lusts and egos and aggressions. These ill capacities of ours nourish society. They grow society, keep it alive, thriving. Society will foster them in us for as long as we bow to it, as long as we worship it. If you doubt this just browse the internet for an hour. Monitor as you browse whether that tool of our age rouses in you lust or desire or greed or aggression.
It is for each of us individually to recognize we have been trained into society’s ethic, and to mitigate how it corrupts us, or to free ourselves. The saints of every religion insist society’s values endanger our well-being and imperil our very souls. Those saints also implore us to rebuke society’s way of thinking and to embrace instead a simpler, truer outlook. But we do not listen to the saints. And because we do not listen to the saints a new teacher has come to teach us their message. That new teacher is the shooter.
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