there’s a deeper discussion to be had about schizophrenia and right wing rhetoric in America
This guy was maybe schizophrenic. Maybe a lot of the other right wing people that go to extreme violence to. Not all of course.
It is important to preface this by saying schizophrenia does not make you violent. It actually makes you more likely to be the victim of violence, statistically.
But delusional thinking processes, grandiosity, and religious or political hallucinations are schizophrenia symptoms. Again, these on their own don’t create violence. But delusional thinking processes can and often are shaped but cultural contexts and social narratives.
So dominant political themes - good vs evil, governmental control and surveillance, authoritarian power structures with strong hierarchy, become amplified. Qanon, racial purity, savior complex, etc.
Where this becomes extremely irresponsible is that it’s then very easy for someone who has this line of thought to then enter a place, many places even, where their delusional thought is not only challenged but encouraged. “You are correct, trump will save us, the democrats are going to kill everyone, you are being watched”.
It doesn’t help that government corruption lends credence to validate these delusions in some ways. While you’re not being watched 24/7 there likely is some kind of info on you in a database if you live in America. Whether it’s a social credit score or simply identification (facial recognition, demographics, etc), is unclear, but its increasingly clear this is the case (and more worrying the data is likely held by 3rd party contractors like palantir and amazon)
So then a mass shooting happens and people go thoughts and prayers (except not really anymore) or they say we need better mental health supports (except again not really anymore, we’ve kind of abandoned the song and dance). The improved mental health supports thing is true but that can’t counteract groups that actively seek out people like this. Lonely, isolated, angry, and unstable. They then amplify that persons bullshit by feeding them conspiracy bullshit and every once and a while they pop off
This could happen in a leftist space, the process is the same, but they appear to do a better job of policing themselves or supporting each other when someone is getting too far gone (at least based on the statistics of political violence in the USA).
I do not agree that they police themselves better in the left space. To me, it seems that there are just as many people in the far left with schizophrenia as the right. I don’t mean communism in general when I talk about the left, to be clear, just Marxism.
What I mean by this is that while the rhetoric of “this will save you/destroy the world, you are being watched, etc” does exist on the far left there doesn’t appear to be as much escalation to violence, to an extremely significant degree that is observable and measurable. This is not conjecture.
Statistics vary depending on source by quite a bit (and time period, violent leftist movements have declined significantly since the 1990s and those were mostly about ecoterrorism rather than communism) but the general consensus is that overwhelmingly right wing extremism escalates these people to extreme violence and murder. This is not conjecture.
Whether leftist movements have a similar number of people with this demeanor, whether those movements target people, etc? Less clear and much harder to quantify
there’s a deeper discussion to be had about schizophrenia and right wing rhetoric in America
This guy was maybe schizophrenic. Maybe a lot of the other right wing people that go to extreme violence to. Not all of course.
It is important to preface this by saying schizophrenia does not make you violent. It actually makes you more likely to be the victim of violence, statistically.
But delusional thinking processes, grandiosity, and religious or political hallucinations are schizophrenia symptoms. Again, these on their own don’t create violence. But delusional thinking processes can and often are shaped but cultural contexts and social narratives.
So dominant political themes - good vs evil, governmental control and surveillance, authoritarian power structures with strong hierarchy, become amplified. Qanon, racial purity, savior complex, etc.
Where this becomes extremely irresponsible is that it’s then very easy for someone who has this line of thought to then enter a place, many places even, where their delusional thought is not only challenged but encouraged. “You are correct, trump will save us, the democrats are going to kill everyone, you are being watched”.
It doesn’t help that government corruption lends credence to validate these delusions in some ways. While you’re not being watched 24/7 there likely is some kind of info on you in a database if you live in America. Whether it’s a social credit score or simply identification (facial recognition, demographics, etc), is unclear, but its increasingly clear this is the case (and more worrying the data is likely held by 3rd party contractors like palantir and amazon)
So then a mass shooting happens and people go thoughts and prayers (except not really anymore) or they say we need better mental health supports (except again not really anymore, we’ve kind of abandoned the song and dance). The improved mental health supports thing is true but that can’t counteract groups that actively seek out people like this. Lonely, isolated, angry, and unstable. They then amplify that persons bullshit by feeding them conspiracy bullshit and every once and a while they pop off
This could happen in a leftist space, the process is the same, but they appear to do a better job of policing themselves or supporting each other when someone is getting too far gone (at least based on the statistics of political violence in the USA).
I do not agree that they police themselves better in the left space. To me, it seems that there are just as many people in the far left with schizophrenia as the right. I don’t mean communism in general when I talk about the left, to be clear, just Marxism.
What I mean by this is that while the rhetoric of “this will save you/destroy the world, you are being watched, etc” does exist on the far left there doesn’t appear to be as much escalation to violence, to an extremely significant degree that is observable and measurable. This is not conjecture.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states - 1994-2020 57% of domestic terrorism is right wing, 25% left wing, ~15% religious (which sometimes coincides with right wing but in this dataset is mostly Islamic extremism)
https://extremismterms.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-united-states-2020 - right wing accounted for 94% of extremist murders in 2020, and 75% of the extremist murders over the previous decade
https://www.congress.gov/committee-report/116th-congress/house-report/213/1 - 2009-2018 right wing extremists account for 73% of extremist killings, Islamic extremist at 23%, leftist at 2%
Statistics vary depending on source by quite a bit (and time period, violent leftist movements have declined significantly since the 1990s and those were mostly about ecoterrorism rather than communism) but the general consensus is that overwhelmingly right wing extremism escalates these people to extreme violence and murder. This is not conjecture.
Whether leftist movements have a similar number of people with this demeanor, whether those movements target people, etc? Less clear and much harder to quantify