Posted on 02/18/2018 7:21:00 AM PST by Kaslin
As we wade through the news reports and the commentary on the Florida shooting, we can’t help but think that nearly everyone – from journalists to politicians to gun control or gun rights advocates – is missing the point. Everyone is pointing the finger at someone. It’s President Trump’s fault because he practically handed guns to mentally ill people! It’s Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s fault for not banning bump stocks. It’s the NRA’s fault – it’s always the NRA’s fault. Here’s the thing: you can blame anyone you want. You can make any argument you want about the importance or unimportance of this, that, or the other gun control measure. But none of it will change a thing. If we as a society want to figure out and address why this keeps happening, then we have to look beyond guns. Guns are the means of this destruction, not the cause. There is something deeper, sicker in the soul of our society, and it transcends the gun debate.
The link between young men and violence has long been established and is about as close to proven as anything in the social sciences can be. Young men are prone to violence. And in every generation, a certain percentage of those young men are going to deviate from societal norms and become a rather serious threat to society and its stability. As a general rule, over the last couple of decades, crime has dropped significantly in this country, and violent crime has dropped even more. Crime waves that experts expected never materialized, and most of the nation’s biggest cities remained among the safest in the world.
At the same time, though, the incidence of young men turning to mass murder and committing heinous acts of violence nevertheless became a far more pronounced phenomenon, dominating the public consciousness and driving a political agenda. Unfortunately, this paradox – dropping crime rates but increased frequency of high-profile shooting sprees – is explained at least in part by the fantasies that a handful of these young men create to compensate for the lack of real meaning or real human contact in their lives, to offset the nihilism that plagues their existence.
Psychologists who have studied violence in young men and especially young men’s willingness to forsake everything they know, everything they’ve been taught, and everything they might otherwise believe about right and wrong, say that there is a set of shared circumstances and “revelations” that link spree killers and self-radicalized terrorists. Faced with emptiness of their own lives, isolated from many of their contemporaries, and desperately in search of something substantive to give their lives meaning and purpose, young men – and especially young men who find refuge on the internet and in social media – tend to create fantasy lives for themselves, alternate realities in which they not only find the meaning and purpose they crave, but do so in heroic fashion.
Nihilism is a complicated and complex philosophical concept. The heart of it, though – both linguistically and metaphysically – is nihil, the Latin word for “nothing.” Nothing is real; nothing is important; nothing matters; nothing can be known; nothing is good; nothing is evil; nothing . . . well . . . is.
As any schoolboy knows, nihilism as a philosophical notion is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, who notably pondered the concept, its causes, and its cures. Perhaps the most important impact of Nietzsche’s thoughts on nihilism was the effect that they had on Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher and Nazi-backer, who also just so happens to be the patron saint of postmodernism.
Heidegger, through his interpretation of Nietzsche’s nihilism, effectively fashioned what we understand today as postmodern thought and especially postmodernism’s examination of reality, values, and truth. In brief, Nietzsche’s interpretation of the purpose of being and thus the value in being helped form the foundation of Heidegger’s “da-sein” (i.e. “being projected into Nothingness”), which, in turn, helped form the foundation of postmodernism’s critique of objectivity and objective reality.
Nietzsche didn’t kill God. He merely noticed that the Enlightenment had done so. Heidegger, in turn, took God’s metaphorical death as an opportunity to insist that no one believe in anything. In practice, the Heidegger-led revolution against reality, against truth, against everything has led to the formation of a societal ethos that offers its citizens nothing substantive, nothing beyond immediate and material satisfaction. We saw the effects of this nihilism on a mass scale throughout the 20th century, and we are seeing it on a different, but equally deadly, individual scale now.
In the wake of Wednesday’s shooting, many people want to ban guns or certain types of guns or certain types of magazines. This, they insist will stop the violence. For our part, we think they’d be better off reintroducing mandatory prayer into schools. This isn’t a gun problem – appearances notwithstanding – it’s a belief problem and specifically, the lack of them.
I will don my tin foil hat, as the criminal DNC, OBAMA HILLARY investigation is on fire and getting hotter by the day we experience this event. odd. that the very agency the FBI is accused of dropping the ball, coincidence? seems like the media narrative needs a direction change since collusion is found to be fake like their reporting
Did I say it was the victims’ fault? Pretty sure I didn’t.
However, if you think that what I described doesn’t occur in schools all day every day, then you are a fool.
If you don’t believe that kids are cruel, just look at Nikolas. He’s quite cruel, is he not?
“Make them earn it.”
Exactly how? Aren’t we born with freedoms and inalienable rights? In other words we don’t have to earn freedoms,we are born with them, and only force can take them away.
“This country was founded by men who would have been appalled by the idea that anyone 18 and older who is capable of breathing on a mirror would have the right to vote.”
True, but that train left the station long time ago. What do we do now?
The USA has a population of 330 million. About 200 million are adults, 100 million males. I would think that one out of one hundred males is a sociopath (likely even more). Thus, it is a wonder we don’t have more of these incidents.
Was Cruz disaffected?
What do you think?
Is what he did the actions of a normal, well adjusted, socially accepted person?
I know a narcissistic sociopath right now. 39 years old. The man is a total fraud and an absolute nightmare.
He would easily be capable of something like this, and then praising himself afterward.
His MO is different though. he is more of a cult leader type who seeks out weak willed people to manipulate for various purposes that benefit himself.
The man is scary as s*** though, no joke. As dangerous as they come.
Dennis Prager has a theory - the Germans are always wrong. Based on some of their philosophers (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, and I would throw in Freud, even though he was technically Austrian), he may have a point. The ideas of these four, and I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting, have had a horrendous, murderous influence on mankind over the last 150 or so years.
‘For our part, we think they’d be better off reintroducing mandatory prayer into schools.’
gonna take a lot more than that to work any kind of cultural change...it seems we’ve spawned a generation of the most powerful and least caring among us, who are accustomed to reveling in their iconoclasm; and in order to make their unique mark, find themselves expressing their social maladies by upping the violence quotient...
‘If there is no God then all is permitted.’
radical Muslims fervently believe in the Abrahamic God; I’ve not noticed much restraint in their barbarity due to that belief...
I don’t think threats of future fire and brimstone are going to stop a young man willing to die at the hand of immediate antagonists...
He reportedly crazy for quite some time. Cops called repeatedly. Autistic. Under mental health care. Medicated. Expelled. But I bet it was all because other kids were mean to him.
You seem to have a bug up your rear end about something. You also don’t seem to have much of a clue about how kids are. I never said it was their fault. I wonder how it came to be that he wanted to kill all of them, and then acted to do so. I’m sure it was totally random.
I used to live in Broward. I have a friend whose kids graduated from Douglas. This idiot should have been locked up a long time ago.
The summary of my post from 17 years ago is this:
In my opinion, not much has changed in the last 17 years to change my mind.
-PJ
I’m not sure that he committed a crime prior to this that would warrant his being locked up. I’d love to know why the police were called to his house so many times though, and why no action was seemingly taken.
Outside of that, his family should have seen that his life was spiraling downward, and he was collecting an unusual amount of weapons. I also wonder what kind of drugs he may have used. I think he should have been committed.
But, at the very minimum, there is no way he should have been able to access the school and its students as easily as he did.
Security is nonexistent. That needs to end right now. The kids are sitting ducks.
The gates at school had been opened because school was getting ready to release and he knew that. Do our schools need to become prisons?
The gates at school had been opened because school was getting ready to release and he knew that. Do our schools need to become prisons?
And now look at what the German cardinals are trying to propagate against the Catholic Church.
I don’t know.
You tell me what they need to become, because what they are right now ain’t cuttin’ it, is it?
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