Lack of Agency Leads to Violence

Jordan Peterson once said: “If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

At a time when much of the nation is focussed on cracking down on violent crime, we owe it to ourselves to ask what turns people violent in the first place. Conventional wisdom holds that violence comes from big, strong men who view their muscles as a substitute for their brains. Decades of feminist teaching has given us the term “toxic masculinity,” implying that there’s something inherently wrong with being manly. The armed services are having trouble finding enough virile young men capable of doing any serious fighting. In schools, boys are increasingly expected to behave like girls: to sit still and pay attention, to be quiet, to do as they’re told. Boys who refuse to conform to these expectations are often diagnosed with one or more psychiatric disorders and given tranquilizing drugs to quell their masculine urges.

Yet, for all this effort put into taming men, society seems to be as violent as ever. Mass shootings in schools, churches, and other locations are so common that it’s difficult even to notice them anymore. The President, after being nearly assassinated twice, is insisting that violent crime has gotten so bad in major cities that the National Guard is needed to straighten things out. We’re simultaneously told that men’s testosterone levels have never been lower, and that it’s no longer safe to walk the streets around our homes and businesses. It’s true that the vast majority of violent criminals are male, but in an increasingly feminized society where unprecedented numbers of young men identify as gay or transgender, it’s hard to see how masculinity can be the culprit.

Just look at photos of any recent mass shooter. They tend to be short, skinny, and slight of build. They look like the kind of kids more likely to be bullied than to bully others. It turns out, there may be a reason for that. Dr. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who has spent his whole career working with violent criminals in maximum security prisons, has written several books trying to understand the kinds of things that could drive someone to commit some of the most heinous murders on record. In Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic he identifies several factors common to these kinds of crimes.

One common motivator is shame; society’s most brutal killers often feel that they are being ridiculed and laughed at behind their backs. They kill their victims to, symbolically or actually, silence accusations that they are weak, pathetic, unworthy, or in some way inadequate. Often, acts of violence are an expression of control in an otherwise uncontrollable world. A serial killer may be a failure in his career, in his love life, in his education, or any other aspirations he may have, but he can at least exert control over his victims. Through violence, he asserts himself as an active participant in life.

I’ve long believed that this explains the motivation behind most school shootings.

Schools are unique in that they are inescapable, a feature not found in any other civil institution apart from prisons. A child may find his academic failures humiliating, his classmates merciless and cruel, his teachers condescending, and his coursework stressful, but he is forced to go back day after day, year after year. In the workplace, at least, an adult who finds his situation intolerable can quit and look for another job. The child trapped in an unhappy school environment has no such option. Nor, for many kids, is there much of a respite at home. I routinely see young people marvelling with disbelief, and a little fear, when told that previous generations were allowed to run around outside unsupervised for hours at a time, their parents often not knowing where they were until the street lights came on and it was time for dinner. Such childhood freedom is unheard of today. Is it any wonder that, like a cornered animal, some kids choose to lash out, just as a way of regaining some agency in their lives?

Similarly, the recent shootings we’ve seen targeting executives at United Healthcare and Blackstone, the attack on the CDC, and even the assassination attempts against Donald Trump are understandable if we view them as outpourings of frustration against systems—political, medical, and corporate—where people feel they have no options and no way of affecting change. The fact that Luigi Mangione received such widespread praise and support for his violent actions shows that this sentiment is disturbingly common among Americans.

Progressives believe that violence is the result of poverty, and that if the government would only provide food, housing, health care, and a basic income to every citizen, no one would have any reason to kill or steal. But several of the killers in Gilligan’s books were completely cared for by wives, mothers, and other family members, at the times of their crimes. Prisons are among the most violent places in the world, despite the fact that the inmates don’t have to worry about feeding or housing themselves. It is the situation of being humiliatingly dependent on others that leads to shame and, ultimately, violence.

Violence, at least not the kind of horrific murders that rise far above the level of petty theft, is not caused by poverty, but rather by a feeling of helplessness, a lack of agency, and a perceived inability to affect the world in any way. The kind of socialist utopia progressives dream of where everyone is cared for and the government is in charge of every decision will only worsen the problem by stripping citizens of their independence.

One of my favorite quotes comes from libertarian Thomas Szasz: “The proverb warns, don’t bite the hand that feeds you. But perhaps you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.”

I would suggest that not only should people rebel against an authority that takes away their autonomy, but that they inevitably will. Those who feel that their life has become a cage will sooner or later attempt to break open the bars, and when they do it is liable to be in the bloodiest way imaginable.

Instead of trying to build a society in which everyone is comfortable at all times, what we should be striving for is to empower individuals to take control of their own destinies, to make their own choices, to take risks, in short, to be the masters of their own lives. Of course, not everyone will succeed, but the freedom to try and, when unsuccessful, try again will give life a sense of purpose that it’s impossible to recreate from the safety of your couch. If we want to reduce violence in America, the answer is not armed stormtroopers on every corner. It’s reminding young people—especially young men—that life is still worth living and that, in the words of John Connor, there’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.