In every social and political group there is friction. Depending on how well the individual components unite under common values and goals, the amount of friction will vary between being a small differ in opinion to a large opposition that might cause a cataclysmic break down, tearing the community apart.

Our modern civilization in the West is currently on the verge of such a break down. A hollowed out culture, traditions whose original meaning has been lost and the values that once held our societies together have slowly disintegrated, leaving the individuals without a feeling of being a part of something larger that ultimately means more than their "individual worth."

As a result, we end up trying to piece our communities together with police force, social conformity and political correctness. These short-term solutions only deal with the effects of problems, whose root causes we don't dare to treat. Despite our rigid individualism that offers us a safe world in which we don't have to account for our actions, we sense that things around us will slowly fall apart and possibly take us with them.

Those who understand societies as organisms and realize that the West is moving without direction, heading towards environmental destruction, ethnic dissolution and cultural havoc, will desperately try to change the behavioural patterns of the organism and attack the faulty functions of its internal mechanisms.

Constructive political dissidence is brave but hard because for every sane voice out there that has got something meaningful to say, a thousand opinions by people who only care about money, sex, drugs and jobs, will drown it out. Even further, since we are all a part of the society we wish to change, we automatically experience a clash between our observations and how people around us are behaving; a conflict similar to seeing something you love being absorbed by negative forces.

When 18-year-old Pekka-Erik Auvinen decided to take revenge upon a society he saw as inherently dysfunctional, by shooting fellow classmates and later on taking his own life, he became a symbol of this cognitive dissonance. Driven by pure desperation of being a part of something destructive, he ironically became absorbed by the same mechanisms that rule our society and the result was a small but powerful tragedy that for other dissidents out there, pointed to an even larger tragedy: that of the downfall of the Western civilization.

The alternative Australian news site NewMatilda recently wrote an article called The Art of Shooting, describing how modern political dissidence in our liberal democratic times has evolved into extreme territory:

The tragedy of school shootings is manifold. The events reveal as much about the perceived futility of protest as the perceived futility of contemporary life. While they are reflections of an extreme, it seems that extreme is being pushed further and further.

As all things in our society, including the media, become increasingly product-orientated, getting one's 15 minutes, or even publicly making a point, requires something increasingly extreme, violent, or ridiculous. And even then, it's difficult to make the message clear.

When the opinion of the lonely individual is drowned out by the mass, it will be prone to attract attention by perpetrating an act of terror that then can be symbolically linked to the idea in question.

This is not an approval or a praise of what happened in Jokela; it's a cold confirmation of the current situation in the West. The intelligent segment of our population has got no voice in our society because people who simply wish to maintain their safe positions fear their ideas. Thus the march towards self-destruction continues and the few who oppose it will do so by temporarily disrupting that process via means of chaos, misery, hate and death, pointing out the errors of our time. Will we listen? Only the next tragedy, whether it will be in the form of global food shortages, race wars or political corruption, can tell.