How to ‘explain’ the shootings in Cumbria?

Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian helpfully shows why he is inexplicable:

The second thing is, in our desire to explain these events solely as examples of personal pathology, we concentrate on the individual, and do not interrogate the role of society and a socially produced ideology of individualism …

The importance of self-expression, self-indulgence, self-realisation in our society is bound to have its less glamorous form; and for all the exaltations of success, the parade of showy individuals who, by virtue of their beauty or skill, or simply their assertiveness and celebrity, there is bound to be another, suppressed march of misery, frustration, despair and hatred.

The insistent singleminded worship of wealth and power is itself a powerful generator of a darker side of human experience; and all the pathologies of crime, disorder, emotional breakdown, psychiatric illness and depression, are simply the shadow of the excessive adulation offered up to fame, youth or talent…

This is junk journalism, discombobulated sentences filling the available space but based on nothing coherent at all. As far as he is making any claim which is capable of being understood, it appears to be that the horrible shootings committed by Derrick Bird were somehow caused by a socially produced ideology of individualism.

Jeremy. If you want to write for a supposedly serious newspaper by making outlandish claims, try looking at the other side of the argument as well.

Your claim might make some sense if it can be shown that societies which emphasise the Collective over the Individual consistently do better when it comes to mass murderers.

Yet what do we find when we look at the finest example of a society which has made strenuous efforts to suppress any ideology of individualism?

Take the case of hungry Nikolai Dzhumagaliev. And lots of other Soviet-era cannibals. Or even Andrei Chikatilo.

More importantly, those societies which play down the ideology of individualism tend to produce people in positions of authority who really enjoy murdering on a lavish scale for the sake of the ideologically proclaimed common good.

Such as our favourite NKVD killer Vasili Blokhin. Every night for some four weeks he executed Polish prisoners every three minutes, some 250 a night. Then he went home and slept and did whatever NKVD killers did in their free time in those days, before heading back to another busy night’s work.

And Che Guevara himself:

"If in doubt, kill him" were Che’s instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island.

Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written–adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment…

No, Jeremy. You have it exactly the wrong way round.

It’s because we live in a civilisation which values individual life that (a) the sort of horrible shootings seen in Cumbria are mercifully rare, and (b) the state does not execute people on a massive scale.