One can go too far making psychos an emblem of the era, and it’s definitely a mistake to make celebrities out of killers, as we continue to do.  By social agreement, we ought to erase the names of maladjusted losers who commit atrocities.  It’s a sickness of modern media that shocking acts are such a sure way to do the opposite, garnering a national audience.

Richard Fernandez (via Instapundit) points to another possible illness of our time to be found in the latest poster boy for modern society’s poor handling of young men on its fringes:

It is immediately apparent that [the killer] had an enormous sense of entitlement and a paint-by-the-numbers view of the world. He had stuff coming to him. Video games, white collar jobs, peer respect, and girls. Whether he was born this way or the idea was subtly imprinted in childhood by his upbringing I leave to the pros.

But at all events, the way he thought was, push the button, get the banana. Wear “cool” clothes, get the girl. Get the nifty haircut, get the girl. Learn this or that skill, get the girl. And yet everyone but him always got the girl, however many buttons he pushed. Over and over he misses out. The black guy gets the girl. The buck toothed moron gets the girl. He racks his brains and comes up with racist, ableist, and ageist explanations. Why, why, why do these untermensch get the girls. No matter, they get them somehow. But he himself never gets the girl himself and soon enough he was convinced it was conspiracy.

Without burdening a policy and politics Web site with details more fitting to a memoir, I’ll admit that I had a similar crisis in my late teens and early twenties.  Everything I thought I knew about the way the world worked — picked up through family, friends, and entertainment media — didn’t seem to be working.  The future isn’t an encouraging thought to an atheist who can’t make the world work… or who, for moral reasons, doesn’t want to do the sorts of things that experience has shown might produce results.

So, I reevaluated my beliefs about the world, and although it took a long, long time, that appears to have done the trick.

The problem with an entitlement mentality is that if you’re not getting something to which you’re entitled, it’s implicitly somebody else’s fault.  Other people aren’t living up to their responsibilities.

Among the darkest songs I wrote during my dark old days in college was one called “What Gives Them the Right.”  It detailed the affronts of those walking around “showing everybody that they’re in love” and having parties, “always laughing just loud enough that I can hear, with the wall pressed up against my ear.”  The conclusion of the song, though, came when “maybe it’s me” became the question, “what’s wrong with me?”

The thought isn’t developed enough to call a thesis, but I do wonder:  With education’s emphasis on self esteem, with recognition for achievement being presented as exclusionary, with the bizarre approach to teaching mathematics that de-emphasizes the importance of arriving at the correct answer, and with college students’ demanding that challenging speakers be banned from their graduations; with a philosophy of relativism that removes all absolute truths and thereby erases markers along the path of self improvement; and with a politics that divides up people into classes and treats government as the rightful counterbalance to otherwise irresoluble forces of inequity, are we removing the possibility that “maybe it’s me?”

The left-right dispute on the question of personal responsibility is not new, but are we beginning to see its deeper manifestation, on the level of philosophy?  Doesn’t an individual have a responsibility to review even his or her own core beliefs to see if the world really works that way, to see whether policies implemented with good intentions perhaps don’t produce what was intended?  Maybe when that happens, it’s not a result of powerful outside forces, but because the good intentions obscured plain facts about reality.

Losing such principles would be a dangerous thing, indeed.  Learning not to question is a necessary complement for a society being prepped for propaganda.