Whenever a mass murder occurs in the United States, one of the very first things that the police start doing, after the perpetrator of the act has been discovered and established, is to try and determine the motive for what happened. The reason that it is so important for the police to establish a motive is that it is important to try and make some sense of such a senseless action, to try and gain some psychological control over what has seemed to be an action that is so completely out of control. It is hoped that by gaining an understanding of such a horrific act, by understanding the why, we can create social policies that diminish the possibility of such motivations appearing in other people, and by extension, in their daily actions.
A motivation is a form of linear causation. It assumes that there is a defined discrete entity or phenomenon that is impacting on another defined discrete entity or phenomenon. For instance, why does a guy buy a bracelet in a jewelry store? Because he wants to get a gift for his girlfriend. The guy is impacting on his girl friend with a gift.
But I would submit that the nature of causality is very different when it comes to dealing with mass killings in modern technological society. There is no one-to-one cause and effect process going on. Instead, there is simply a whole technology-based environment – an experiential vacuum – the influence of which has no beginning and end on people and that spatially has no precise stream of process that impacts a person in a certain way and a certain place on him or in him. The cause is diffuse and the effect is diffuse. And because there is, underlying everything, no human or humans to focus on as the real cause, no humans with particularly focused lethal motivations, it leaves society feeling somewhat helpless when it comes to ascribing blame and doling out appropriate punishment. Numbness, the primary causal factor in this situation, is subtle in its influence and subtle in its effects. Yes, obviously, there are human actors who carry out the mass killings. But with numb killers, there is no real consciousness of the enormity of what they have done. It is almost as if they are living in a parallel universe from the rest of us.
In short, the lack of a real capacity for motivation is demonstrated by a lack of real capacity to assume a fundamental responsibility for what has been done. And at the end of the spree, the reason so many mass murderers take their own lives is not out of a sense of guilt over what they have done, but out of a sense of frustration that the killings were not able to do enough to pull them out of their numbness. The ultimate abrasive stimulus is first the planning of a suicide and then the actual commission of the suicidal act before death sets in. The few moments before death. Some of the perpetrators of mass killings know ahead of time that they are going to die while carrying out their action, and their death within the killing process, whether by someone else or by themselves, is an eagerly anticipated part of the whole process. However, sometimes their death at the hands of someone outside of themselves comes as a complete surprise. In these cases, the perpetrator believes he will survive his attack or attacks, wants to survive his attack or attacks, but only in order to be able to carry out more attacks in the future. What other path could his life take anyway after the notoriety created by one such attack or group of attacks? In his mind, after carrying out enough attacks, he is then willing to face the music, as it were, and go down in a glorious explosion of gunfire. But the important point here is that his attacks are not really based on focused defined discrete purposes. There is no ultimate linear destination that these attacks are supposed to take the perpetrator. This is shown by how easily the targets of the attacks by the perpetrators can shift at the time of the attacks, according to their availability. The perpetrator is not alive enough to deeply experience a linear destination. To the extent that linear purposes are mentioned, like antagonism towards individuals and groups, they are pretexts that give the perpetrator a surface sense of justification for his basically unfocused purposeless action.
The lack of a linear causation is what makes dealing with these mass terrorist actions so very difficult. If the cause for these actions is so diffuse, so inchoate, so all-surrounding, it makes it very difficult to grasp it and deal with it in such a way that one can control it and prevent it from occurring in the future. The only way of confronting these mass terrorist actions is by doing things that diminish the numbness in people. Pulling people away from television, movies, video games, computers, tablets and smartphones. Getting people more involved in primary experience: sports, creative activities, travel, social activities. People have to be gradually lifted out of their immersion in the experiential vacuum and into a world of more immediate experience. In the long run, this is the only meaningful solution to this intractable problem.