I don’t blame society for preventing this. But I do think society influences the manifestation of certain pathology. The obsessive thoughts that OCD sufferers have vary from culture to culture. And some mental disorders are more prevalent in some cultures than others. Like social anxiety in Japan. We don’t have a problem with hikikomori here in the US. If answer isn’t societal, what is it?
Society can also shape the kind of treatment the mentally disordered receive. Schizophrenics in developing nations often fare better than they do in the developed world, because the former tend to be more collective and family-centered. They also have more low-stress niches for people. Carrying water all day is hard work, but it’s not like anyone’s going to fire you if you don’t punch the clock on time. We don’t have very many “carrying water” types of jobs in a developed society. And the ones we do are stigmatized as jobs for “losers”.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that if Elliot Rodger lived in a society where young men were not pressured to represent their worth by the number of vaginas they can score over a weekend, then maybe he wouldn’t have gone off the deep end. This doesn’t mean that it’s all society’s fault or that it could have prevented this from happening. But it does say that everyone time we make a movie like “40-Year-Old Virgin”, we’ve got expect that some lonely guy somewhere is feeling butthurt over it. I don’t know what the solution is. I’m just saying that we need to stop acting like this is coming out of nowhere.
I just don’t think it would ever matter. Once the information perks out anywhere, agencies (and other people in general) try to capitalize on it. Heard it nowhere else? “Look here! We’ve got the scoop!” “Hey, you just think they’ve got all the details. Over here, we’ll tell you every last sordid account of what happened like you’ve never read before!” And on and on ad fintum. The world just has way too much morbid curiosity of trainwrecks and tragedies to let something like this pass by without using whatever is already available. The bloodlust for that has always been high and won’t be sated until it’s been satisfied. In my opinion, that is.
Something like that. I don’t think it would be professional for journalists or the media to refer to them as “the sicko that…” but yes, something different about the way they cover the story. Minimize the attention he receives. It is the media’s responsibility to identify the murderer but they can choose not to sensationalize his story. Instead, focus on the names and stories of the victims.
Look at Rolling Stone magazine. Not only did they put one of the Boston marathon bomber on the cover but they purposely used a photo that made him look like a rock musician. They want to sell magazines by romanticizing the image of a murderer.
Good point and I was thinking about that. But we as society set standards of decency for most mainstream publications. For example, no major network or even cable channel I know of showed footage of Daniel Pearl being killed. Yet there were people who wanted to see that and had to search the internet to find the video.
Pornography is something very much in high demand and more mainstream than ever but we don’t, as society, allow network television to show outright nudity and sexual intercourse. People would be outraged and start boycotting networks and their advertisers.
So the major news organizations like CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC should get together and agree on some general guidelines out of a sense of social responsibility. They already censor nudity and gore, refrain from using or airing profanity. They’ve already agreed upon censoring cartoons of Mohammad out of their own sense of self-preservation. Why should what I’m proposing be outside the realm of practicality?
Well I watched the video. It’s just a spoiled kid driving a bmw complaining because he never got any pussy and all the girls just wanna fuck “obnoxious brutes.”
He has a point, but I feel no sympathy. $ is the easiest way to pussy so homie just had no game.
That’s a great observation / comparison, Gerald, and one I hadn’t thought of. I suppose it would work, although I think it would create an adjunct market for such salaciousness. Because, just using the porn industry here as an example, they certainly are thriving even without basically being mainstream. You can see porn as a minor, in the privacy of your own home, for free after all. So, I’m still not sure it would matter collectively. It could slow down the consumption though for those not that interested or less inclined to put in the time, effort or money to seek it out. Interesting.
That’s a very good point. However, I don’t think the impulse would be nearly as strong to look up the motivations or intimate details about a murderer as it would be to look up content that stimulates you sexually. If the media minimized the amount of time they gave the murder and treated that aspect of the story in a banal fashion I think it would further lessen the urge to look him or her up.
People might look it up more on their own but without the help of the media how would mass murderers become popularized? Porn has become more mainstream partly because of the entertainment industry. Careers of talentless but attractive people are created just by making a sex tape. Musicians go out of their way to incorporate porn stars or create their own x-rated music videos. Great directors get porn actresses to star in their films. Was Soderbergh really that impressed with his choice Chelsea in The Girlfriend Experience? Or was it to get press attention? The media fawning over porn stars and the industry itself is what changes it from a widespread vice into something socially stylish.
So getting back to the issue of mass murderers, the mainstream media dialing down the content and coverage about the murderers might increase individuals looking them up themselves. However, it wouldn’t give the murderers and the *idea *of the murderers that same level of notoriety. These mass shooters want the world to know their grievances. The more you lessen the places they can broadcast their message or their complaints the better.
I thoughtful and reasonable response. I hate that.
My only comment is that I do not believe we (as a society) will be able to avoid more incidents like this regardless of how we address the issues concerning the mentally ill. At least not with the tools/knowledge we currently have. As such, society is not always at fault - sometimes you do everything right and things still go wrong. However, this is not to say we ought not continue to try or that there is no room for improvement.
Gerald, I do believe you’ve convinced me. I was about to come back with the cult of notoriety that follows things like this, like all the losers who believe that Manson is the next incarnation of Christ. But then I realized, if he hadn’t been overhyped in the media, would that many people have been interested? Sure, there’ll always be some fringe element that obsesses and fetishizes stuff like this, but if we (as a society) do what’s been suggested in this thread, then they’d basically be relegated to the sidelines, about as important as the minority of militia types prepping out in the boonies. So, thanks. It’s been an enlightening discussion and I appreciate you giving me something to chew on.
I agree you can’t change the common mans obsession with gory details, train wrecks etc. but you may have noticed it doesn’t consume the news hour, though I’m certain there is no shortage of car and train crashes.
Yes, a train crash gets coverage, the day it happens! We’re told how many died, how it happened. But if ‘people like gory details’ was everything, the news should be full of accident scene photos, car crashes etc. It gets coverage, yes, but it doesn’t reach cult creating heights like the coverage of these events seems to.
But to acknowledge what kind of effect, this type of media attention, could have on the weak minded or disturbed, is a discussion I think most people would rather not have. Maybe because it might shine an uncomfortable light on the open adoration for things like the Godfather movies, or The Sopranos, or even Game of Thrones. Isn’t the news media just exploiting a taste entertainment media has wetted?
The problem is that the murderer is always the most interesting person in the story. Why did he do it? What was his motivation? How did he do it? What were people saying about him? Could he have been stopped? Is there anything in his past that pointed to his killing that was obviously missed?
The victims are just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and once you’ve answered that, the story’s over pretty much, whereas we can keep finding more and more about the killer in the coming weeks and months.
The problem with such murderers is that they’re often made into these interesting mysterious even heroic figures, when reality is that they just some really pathetic absurd losers. They should be rightly, publicly and thoroughly ridiculed. Who would want to copy-cat the public fool?
btw. What’s the difference between Elliot Rodger and an egg? An egg gets laid before it cracks
Stringbean, you don’t have a history of being a jerk so I’m going to let you off with a mod note. This sort of thing is wholly inappropriate in Great Debates.
I think the press should be guided by the best available research to make sure it’s not doing anything to encourage these types of acts. But beyond that the solutions people propose tend to range from impractical to unworkable to not worth the cost, usually on the basis of “I can’t prove this, but it feels like it would work.” Take “murder for attention,” for example. From the little I’ve read, what happened in California this week wasn’t about attention. It was about revenge. A lunatic thought he’d been insulted, so he got revenge on the people who he felt had wronged him. How are you going to discourage a maniac from getting upset that people don’t worship him?
Define “sensationalize” or “glorify,” please. Unfortunately it has kind of an ‘I know it when I see it’ quality that doesn’t make for consistent standards. I do think coverage of these things usually gets excessive in a hurry, but that’s more about volume than tone.
That can be just as awful because it turns exploitative and manipulative while giving us no insight into what happened.
No, they didn’t. They used a photo other outlets had already printed and wrote a really good story about how a relatively normal teenager kid wound up being a murderous terrorist. The fact that he looked like a regular-to-handsome kid was the whole point of the exercise. “Evil” was not stamped on his face or in his character. Perhaps you could read the thing sometime instead of making assumptions based on what you think they were trying to do based on a picture.
Saying that there is a sociobiological explanation does not mean that society is to blame.
Sociobiology is the tenet that aspects of behavior are shaped by evolution, and in a social animal such as humans, a lot of that behavior relates to other people.
Even if we stretched the point to allow a “society is to blame” interpretation, we’d have to remember that we’re talking about “society” during much of human evolution, not just of the last millennium or so, and certainly not modern society. Mostly, hunter-gatherer society.
Sociobiology is fascinating. Unfortunately, many of its most ardent critics don’t seem to have a clue what it is.
Exactly. Just going to some of the major, respectable news sites you can see one story is dominating and they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to publish any new headline about a person who so wanted to be the center of attention.
Even jokes like that play into the whole, “woe is me” routine they push.
Veronika Weiss, one of the victims. link
