From hate to action: School shooters and jihadists

Abstract

For some young people, violence is the only means of recognition they have to escape a feeling of emptiness or indifference. Violence is a vertigo that seeks a limit to stop it. The self-destructive aspects highlighted in these behaviors call for a search for identity that involves both the ultimate limit, that is, death (falling to someone stronger than oneself, being shot by the police, etc.), and social limits, that is, confrontation with others and the law, in order to find one’s bearings. Sometimes, the act of violence corresponds to a period of crisis in the young person’s life. By exposing himself to a dangerous or conflictual situation, he tries to regain control of the situation, while paradoxically abandoning himself to it at the risk of being arrested by the police or endangering his own life. The art of delinquency is knowing how far to go too far. Two major forms of violence have emerged in recent decades, first school killings, then jihadism, both of which raise specific questions since they involve the premeditated and deliberate killing of others. Killing is undoubtedly the last prohibition of our ultraliberal societies, the ultimate possibility of a grandiose transgression likely to secure power and inscribe one’s name in the media of celebrity. There’s the pleasure of holding someone else’s life in your hands, an unlimited freedom driven by omnipotence.