Yet again, a mass shooting in the US. Everyone's talking about it, yadda yadda yadda. I'm watching it, grieving it can't get fully online, with the footage and such.

One of my aquantainces says it's a psychotic chain reaction. Each murder that floats up with the media's help works as a signal for the already instable, people brewing ideas get the confirmation and that spur that sends them amok too. If that's true, we'll have to wait for the wave.

As you know, I'm very interested in mass murders and heavy crimes in particular, so each of these occurences get studied and analyzed - it's very helpful and inspiring. One thing that you notice whenever unmotivated violence happens, is the plethora of friends, aquaintances, relatives of the killer starting that chorus of: "he was never a violent man, he had no motives or that sickness in him, this is out of the blue".
Is that really so? Can many people really hide that inner core that's training itself for premeditated murder so perfectly that it escapes the eye - or people generally just don't look close enough?

One of my favorite books is "American Psycho". And my favorite scene there is this... no, no the scenes of murder and gore, though they are magnificent.. no, it's the scene where Bateman talks to his girlfriend in a cafe, and tell her that he kills people - or wishes to kill them - and she replies to him as if they were continuing to talk about her friend's wedding. Completely ignoring and letting pass whatever he says, and just continuing her own self-absorbed monologue.
That little scene, that is oh so relatable, is the perfect representation of the way people interact. And then, the exact same people who with their white noise just snuff out every other sound, make mourning surprised faces and say that they never though something horrid as this could happen.

It's bullshit. There are always evident clues. The perpetrator may even intendely throw them around - not to be stopped, no. To let others get a slight taste of what may come next. But the others usually never take those hints.

Murder, as I sometimes think of it, is akin to art. An artist dies metaphorically, starves when his creativity is channeled only to himself, in the table drawer, in the dark depths of a hard drive. Any work of art, having just been formed in the mind and might even not be materialized yet, seeks to see the light of day. There is no normal artist without the audience. And so, these seemingly unstable, psychotic people, usually want to show a sneak peak preview of their masterpiece.

That's why you get the blog postings. You get the video diaries, manifestos, letters sent to the media or police, purely verbal promises and hints.
But the audience is never ready for the promise. Never. Can it be blamed? No, it can't. We are all desensitized, we are overfed with various entertainment and art, and these feeble attempts to show one's constructs to others in hopes they'd be in awe and shock, don't work. No on there to gasp at the creativity, at the magnificence of plans.

And if the teasers don't catch the public's eye, it's time for the real thing.

When I think about murder, I try to dig to the root of the motivation. There is a lot of superfical motives clouding around the act and obscuring the true driving momentum even from the person that is commiting the act. Sexual frustration - yes, probably. Psychological issues dealing with the basic emotional and human needs that aren't being fullfilled, which render the normal course of existence unsatisfactory - yes, indeed. Anger - yes. Ideological motivations - on the counter too, surely.
But that is the upper level. The lower level, in my opinion, is that we exist in such a situation that the life of an average person, when he finally thinks about it, is completely devoid of any purpose whatsoever.
Before the 20th century, when wealth and basic human comforts had finally begun to be available not to the teeny weeny bits of percents of the entire populace, people didn't have the time, en masse, to think about why they survive and function. They were to busy actually surving - and they had that goal, to maybe, just maybe, with the help of Gods or fate to join that petite circle of the chosen ones who needn't struggle that furiously. The idea of existential crisis didn't touch the average person, for he knew that he wanted goods, a nice home, family, and more luxury.

But now, the situation changed. For a normal western person with average income, the difference between his say, Volkswagen Golf and a Nissan GT-R is quite small. The difference between his house and a manor isn't big either. Material goods are available. Friendship and sexual life too, with the minimum of effort. The institute of family is no longer important, and all options of self-realisation are open to him.
Many exploit that and life a normal life. But others break these components down to find a void behind all these efforts and experiences.
In the end, there is no purpose.
Of course, not many people actually realise it on a concious logical level, and it'd be a stretch to say that suicide mass murderers understand all that. However, subconciously, I'm quite sure, that understanding dwells in everyone, and it can be sharpened by actual personal failings and the superficial motivations I listed above.

When a person conciously or subconciously feels that entropic, fundamental pointlessness and lack of actual purpose to his short life, the caused stress causes him to react in a way that would dull that sensation. And the best dulling tool is doing something that lies not in the plane of his normal everyday existence. It can start out as weird sexual experiments, continue on with substance abuse, risky behaviour, and for some, the ultimate adrenaline rush - murder. The greatest taboo of them all.

Taboos, yes. Let's take a look at the medieval times, for example, such a wonderful historic document as the "Russian Truth", written, if I'm not mistaken, in the 10th century. It clearly states, that for a murder of somebody else's slave, the fine is such and such amount of money. And for a murder of a free person, the fine is such and such amount of money. Was mudrer a taboo, a horrid occurence? No. It wasn't. The funner part is that it's naive to think that in earlier times more people got murdered on a daily basis. It may sound really strange and fallacious, but no. Studies show that heavy crimes are a constanta proportional to the population, and no police, no progress of the society change that fact.
But the outlook on it changed. Our reactions to it changed.

This epoch of prudeness is a wierd time indeed to live in. On the fictional side, murder, perversion and gore are flourishing - because of the complete intolerance of it in reality - and that fuels to upkeep the real level of it quite high.

When our person is stripped of any substantial connection to his life and purpose - a purpose of being just another piece in a puzzle with no real direction or guidance - he will seek to break all the ultimate taboos.

And isn't the breaking of taboos the goal of high art?

I think it is.

Thusly, people who's inevitable personal evolution leads to commiting murder, going on killing sprees and such, are being born and created. In that act of killing, the last, maybe even delusional, strands of the so called freedom of will, are being materialized.

"Fight Club" stated that the crisis of the modern generation is in the fact that men were being raised by single mothers and hadn't got no scars to validate their worth. But Palahniuk never had the guts to drag the analogy to it's aboslute, to be honest and not servicing the angstying office workers. The crysis of the modern generation where everyone flashes their scars, is that people are being taunted with the sweet promise of ultra-violence, but get slapped on the hands even when they touch an animal, let alone a human. In the absence of adequate means to lift the stress, some people will inevitably decide that commiting the most gruesome act of violence is the best conclusion to their pointless existence, and no matter how they will sugercoat it with ideology, religon, anything, the core will be there - if everything's void, then everyone is dehumanized and deserves a big bloody FUCK YOU.

After all, these mannequins don't even have a clue what kind of a canvas and paint that work shall be done with.
They're virually, mute.


And so, the killing begins.