Submitted by Alex Birch on Thu, 04/10/2008 - 18:42.
Soon it's one year since the Korean-American student Cho Seung Hui went on a rampage at Virginia Tech University that led that 33 deaths, including Cho's suicide shortly after the massacre. Big newspapers construct glamorous, mournful, psychological analyses of why Cho committed the act, and to no one's surprise, we're supposed to believe that 33 people lost their lives "at random" because of a depressed and deranged student. "It just happened." Bullshit.
Cho was before the killings diagnosed as suffering from selective mutism, which means that the person alienates him- or herself because of social anxiety. Coupled with depression, this explains why Cho wasn't very social in the classroom. From here, TV priests and pop psychologists alike draw the conclusion that Cho began to grow feelings of resentment toward people around him, which eventually led to the school shooting. Note the word "eventually." This is where the media constructs a slippery slope-argument that fails to explain what actually happened.
Why was Cho feeling socially anxious and depressed? Just like any other high school student, he was confined within an environment that's defined by money, escapism and popularity. Cho, like his Finnish counterpart Pekka-Eric Auvinen, was probably unusually aware and intelligent. He quickly learned the social mechanisms behind the behaviour of his Western classmates and saw only emptiness and fear. In his suicide notes and the videos he sent to NBC, he crusades against "rich kids," "debauchery," and "deceitful charlatans." It's a reaction, not against his fellow students, but against a behavioural pattern in our society.
Cho chose to deviate from the essence of our society. Driven by commerce and desperate, hedonistic urges, the modern West is an obese monster devouring itself while in denial of its own self-destruction. Cho came from an Asian background and probably experienced a stark contrast between a cultural behaviour of self-control and what he saw in American teenagers as "debauchery;" alcohol, sex and materialism. This conflict led to his eventual downfall, which reached a bloody climax just before his death. His retaliation found an expression no one would be able to ignore.
The Virginia Tech massacre is no random phenomenon. By merely counting the number of school shootings the last 2 years, this is obvious. The public media is trying to cover these shootings up by focusing on the perpetrator alone and depicting him as a lonely, depressed and hateful individual. While this picture might be accurate in many cases, it fails to address where this social alienation comes from. It also hides the motives behind the shootings, effectively writing all suicide notes and manifestos off as "ramblings of hate." These school shooters don't hate people - they hate society, and they make people suffer for it.
We construct a false image of these perpetrators because we want to avoid panic. All people know, deep down inside, that these incidents are not random events. They all point to a breakdown of the social foundation behind our society and it's falling apart faster than ever. We will see more of these shootings in the future, possibly in other forms, as long as we continue to live in denial. Cho's act of vengeance was a violent revenge against our neurotic lifestyles that force us to compete with money and social fashion, until we cannot take it anymore and self-destruct. For Cho, it was a last, desperate cry for help in a society where everyone's too busy to pay attention to its downfall at micro level.
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The Modern Era, the time of the Anti-Hero
I cant agree more with the last sentence. Contemporary life seeks only the anti-hero
Heroism
A further problem still -- and likely a catalyst for these shootings -- is the lack of heroism in modern society. In earlier times, when humans lived in smaller communities, a youth could use his father as a model for how to live in the world. Today, this should still be the case, despite all our problems, but it isn't. "Our son is depressed and alienated," a parent may say. "Let's take him to a psychiatrist!" What usually happens next? The 'patient' is heavily medicated -- given a patch or a bandaid on an ever-expanding, nearly-ubiquitous social crisis -- while the parents deliberate upon whether the insurance is going to cover everything! You can only put so many patches on a dam before the leaks are so innumerable as to cause a massive breakdown of the dam itself; and, given that medication of this kind is only doled out to help bolster a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry in the name of economic profit, how else do we expect someone in this position to react? The parent, the psychiatrist -- these people have no scruples. Cho didn't need medication; he needed music, spirit, and heroic figures to inspire him.
Cho and the Shootings
Great article---thanks for posting. I was enormously disgusted by the mass media's treatment of this incident after it happened---they couldn't seem to get past their incredulity, only asking themselves, "How could he be so deranged as to do what he did?" It's just like the LIttleton school shooting, or the Montreal shooting. No one is interested in asking the real questions of WHY these things happen---but they're all too happy to just write the perpetrators off as mentally ill, dysfunctional, etc.. The whole media treatment was like a big orgy of disparagement and opinionation. Gross.
Young people are constantly told that their highest purpose in life is to prepare themselves for a career, and the work this requires is punctuated by highly structured, predictable, oftentimes dishonest, and always shallow "recreation" at the bars or at sporting events---even in subcultural milieus, there is tremendous pressure to act a certain way, honesty is not valued. If you aren't aware of any alternatives, then depression and/or suicide may easily seem like the only logical choices.