Fünf einsame Frauen, von denen jede für sich in aller Stille verrückt wird, trotz Ehemann und Kindern, oder eher deshalb. Eine Eigenschaft hatten sie alle: Zweifel an sich selbst. Ein Schuldgefühl, weil sie nicht glücklich waren. Die Formulierung, die sie alle gebrauchten: "Mit mir muß irgend etwas nicht stimmen."
Doris Lessing Das goldene Notizbuch
I've really been wondering the past days about those killing sprees. The one in the US was almost covered up by the massacre in a German high school, where a 17-year-old shot to death 10 pupils and 3 teachers before killing himself.
The media now are, obviously, full of experts giving their opinion about how and why they think such a thing could happen. What seems striking to me is that most of the people running amok are young men. Granted, the connection of violence and masculinty isn't exactly what you'd call a fresh concept. Apparently we've had - at least since the early 20th century - generations of young men who aren't only willing to kill, but willing to kill themselves. (Which, at least in my opinion, has something to do with the instauration of the modern army and nation states.)
What is thus very interesting in this respect, at least from my perspective, is the fact that almost every killing spree ends with suicide (though I am not sure if - causally speaking - suicide is the end, and not the starting point). I believe those young men are just another form of suicidal bombers. Of course, contrary to religious fundamentalist or separatist suicidal bombers, they do not openly display a political agenda. It seems as if they "merely" suffer on a very personal level and for very personal reasons. But then you have to ask yourself why they seek this kind of publicity (in the sense of a public space and attention), and why they don't merely kill themselves in silence, but chose to go out there and cause as much damage as they possibly can.
And what they are saying, in the end, is fuck you. Fuck this society. Of course it's a personal problem, but if you think about it, those young men do some form of social protest. And it's not about violent video games and nerdy children being outsiders in high school. This 17-year-old kid theoretically speaking was a so-called "winner" of German society: well-off family, educated, with all the possibities of making it. (Notice, by the way, that a lot of the suicide bombers in Western Europe do have a similar situation. The 9/11-terrorists were educated men who, if it weren't for their ethnic background, would've probably been able to live a comfortable life in Germany. Another question - one that Houellebecq might ask - would be whether Tim K. was an economic winner, but a sexual looser.) In any case: what he's saying is: I don't even want to be a winner in this society, in fact, I don't want to be part of it at all; and I want to kill as many people as I can out of sheer rage and desperation.
The host of a discussion round was despairingly asking psychiatrists and teachers, policemen and media experts why there was a generation of angry kids "out there". Quite frankly, I'd find it bewildering if those kids weren't angry; if, given the present social conditions, they weren't on the verge of going completely crazy.
As I said in an earlier post, I think the question isn't why and how things like that happen. The question is why they don't happen more often.
NB: This is the only (and maybe most important) objection to psychoanalysis I would agree on, i.e. that it is reactionary in the sense that it "cures" people's personal problems, as if they weren't suffering from society but from their individual, particular biography. It's like: People go crazy in patriarchal, capitalist, heterosexist nuclear families, but hey, go see a shrink and you'll do fine and be back into your machine routine in no time. I believe Freud was very right with his description of the problematic of identity formation in a Western patriarchal, capitalist society, but since he was an old chauvinist himself, he wouldn't dare think of any other way out other than curing his patients from their neurosis and hysteria so that they could go back to their bourgeois lives which made them sick in the first place.
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