Society’s Fascination With Mass Murder

2011.09.24   prev     next

Why are people fascinated by mass-murderers? I’m fascinated by mass-murderers. But this is by no means uncommon. A very large number of people are fascinated by mass-murderers — that’s why you see so many TV shows and movies about them and all of that. And news reports about them. The great majority of people are very fascinated by the concept. Even those who would condemn it in the harshest moral terms — even most of them are fascinated by it. And why is that? Why does our language include positive adjectives like “killer,” “bad,” and “wicked?”

Well, it’s because the vast majority of people are very frustrated with and dismayed at what they’re able to achieve in life, and the things that they’ve had to put up with in life. And pretty much 99% of them wanted something a whole lot better. But they didn’t get that. And, you know, the further you go into life, the more obvious it becomes that — you didn’t get it for the portion of your life that you’ve already lived — and then you’re not very likely to get it for the rest of your life, either.

And what most people realize, after a while, is that society has rules that are designed to prevent you from doing anything to get a leg up against this situation. Not that the rules are arbitrary or capricious or anything. They’re there to keep society strong and prevent it from disintegrating into chaos and mass destruction. But from any individual’s standpoint, those rules are what prevent them from getting any further or having anything better. Those rules force them to live within their means, whatever those means are: even if they’re not very good.

And so the person realizes that, first, society has really, really brutal penalties — you know, you lose all your property and wind up strip-searched and caged like an animal 24/7; then you get gang-raped, and all sorts of hideous stuff, beaten if you don’t cooperate with your own torture, and on and on — in store for you if you actually try to do anything to get around those rules.

And if you lash out at society in any way — even if it doesn’t benefit you personally or enable you to get to a better life — then society has those same brutalities (or worse) in store for you.

To top it all off, you can’t even express that you are frustrated. You can’t even act like you’re frustrated. You have to be walking around 99.99% of the time pretending that you’re not frustrated and that everything’s fine. Because otherwise, you know, you’ll be fired from your job, you’ll lose your friends, lose your family — you’ll lose everything. Your life will be slowly, inexorably destroyed, as effectively as if you’d been sent off to prison, until you stop expressing your frustration in any way at all, and keep it completely bottled up inside you.

I strongly suspect that some large percentage of people, like maybe 80% or 90%, are going around every day pretending that everything’s fine and that they like their life, when really they don’t. And they’re keeping this frustration completely bottled up because they know that society will swiftly penalize them for not doing so.

So when they see a mass-murderer, somebody lashing out in the most intense way, at the rules, at the system, doing exactly what the system is trying to prevent them from doing, they’re fascinated. They’re intrigued.

People are kind-of fascinated by bank robbers, but they’re even more fascinated by mass killers, because most people realize that you can’t really get ahead by robbing banks. Even a successful bank robber just gets some money, to get him by for now, and then he’s gonna have to do it again, and who knows whether it will work the next time — probably not.

But a mass killer is somebody who’s lashing out at the whole system. Who’s basically thumbing his nose at the whole system in the most severe way possible, the most effective way possible. And so people are fascinated by this because they see the serial killer, or the spree killer, as someone who has escaped the rules. As someone who has said, “I’m going to take the risks, or make the sacrifice, or both, to completely violate the rules in exactly the way that society is trying to stop me from doing. And I’m going to share the full anguish of my frustrations that I’ve felt throughout my entire life, with society, with this system of rules.”

And so people see the mass-murderer as someone who has, for however brief a moment, escaped the whole system, and gotten to really shove the system’s nose in the crap that they’ve had to slog through their entire life. And that’s why people are fascinated by mass-murderers.

Now, again: These people who are fascinated by mass-murderers for the very reason I just described? They’re not gonna say so. They’re not going to admit it. You’re not gonna see that in a survey, for all the reasons I’ve just described. If you don’t keep it bottled up, you’re asking for it.

Shoot, I might be asking for it just by writing this article.