The making of a
rampage killer
By
Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
July 26, 2012
I find it intriguing that
the latest rampage killer in the US was described as a loner. Someone
commented that the other rampage killers before him were invariably
loners too.
We now wonder why the US and
many other supposedly rich and developed countries in the West and
Australia seem to be breeding loners who turn out to be rampage
killers.
It doesn’t mean that Asia,
Africa and the East in the general don’t have this kind of
individuals. There are many of them too in these places. But they are
usually described as ignorant fanatics, or at worst, religious or
political terrorists. Not so with their Western counterparts, who are
known to be educated and all that.
Is there anything wrong then
with Western culture, or is it their current difficult social and
economic condition, that turns loners into rampage killers? I suppose
there are many reasons and factors that can enter into the explanation
of this very disturbing phenomenon.
But we cannot discount the
fact that in these places, many broken and dysfunctional families,
children raised by single parents, and a good number of adults who
remain single and live alone, must contribute to the making of many
loners. They provide the elements that lead to horrible sicknesses,
mental, emotional, psychological, etc., that loners are most prone to.
The unavoidable relations
made among them are hardly of the deep and enduring type. They are
most of the time just casual flings, made for merely practical
purposes and not anchored on any stable basis, principle or spirit.
It’s really a pity that the
relations of people have turned out this way. But this could be
because many people do not know anymore what it is to be a person who
is supposed to be vitally connected with God and with others.
That a person is a rational,
intelligent individual meant to enter into relationship with God
first, his creator, and then with everybody else, his equal partners
in life, is lost on many people. A person is by definition meant for
love – to love God and others.
For them, to be a person is
just to enjoy freedom without realizing where it comes from and how it
should be used. To be a person is simply to enjoy oneself, unmindful
of any external and objective law to govern him. They make themselves
their own law, or their own lawgiver, their own God. Selfish in
character, it’s a freedom that does feel the need for prayer, for
faith, etc.
Freedom has become a captive
of a purely subjective interpretation, detached from its objective
source and not oriented to its proper goal. It most likely gets
entangled in the realm of the material and carnal, the pragmatic
considerations, etc. It hardly goes beyond that level. The spiritual,
the supernatural, the religious aspects are ignored.
This is often the sickness
of liberalism that allows freedom to run wild on its own. It’s a
terrible disease because it gives the heady sensation that everything
is all right as long as one doesn’t inconvenience another. Any problem
can just be solved by some practical means that in themselves are also
very prone to manipulations and deceptions.
One of the architects of
liberalism and its relative of utilitarianism – the attitude of
valuing things according to their usefulness to an individual – was
John Stuart Mill, a 19th century British philosopher who actively
batted for extreme individualism and even eccentricism.
He certainly had a confused
understanding of how a person can be at the same time an individual
person and a social being, meant to enter into communion with God and
with others. He not only distinguished these two aspects of man’s
life, but rather separated them.
In his book, “On Liberty,”
he wrote: “It is desirable that in things which do not primarily
concern others, individuality should assert itself.” These words
already show his tendency to contrast individuality and community.
This attitude is reinforced
when he said in the same book, “Precisely because the tyranny of
opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable
that people should be eccentric.
“Eccentricity has always
abounded when and where strength of character has abounded...That so
few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”
This is a terrifying thought
that seems to enter into the ethos of Western culture. There is no
mention about God. It is just pure eccentricity that can be based on
anything.
This, I believe, is how
loners who can turn to be rampage killers are made.