I can relate to the guy but I have not read his manifesto yet. 140 pages it quite a read for me. I am inclined to read it.
I hesitate to berate him. I understand him and relate to him. I feel hesitant to throw about diagnoses. Where many take a quote of the dude and see it as proof or sign of some symptom, like narcissism, I am not at all sure he is a narcissist.
Some of these easily labeled 'bad' or 'outrageous' statements he made, to me show me how deeply he was hurting. The greater the hatred, the deeper the despair.
I wonder if there are people who are more able to feel love than most anybody else and that when they cannot get this need fulfilled, lash out. I think anything that is deep and profound, when unmet, when it turns bitter, will have an opposite reaction in bitterness equal to its purity.
He sounds narcissistic. But how he sounds may have little to do with how he feels, or experiences the world. We assume his ability to understand himself and phrase himself is optimal. But is that assumption real?
I find it interesting, these people. Although I never checked up on the famous serial killers and am not particularly interested in understanding them, these sorts of shootings seem to trigger me. I wonder why. Maybe I can relate more because I have had my gun incident 14 years ago, on an SSRI (Paxil) induced so called 'aggressive impulse breakthrough'. Could I be like him?
I don't think so. I could not actually kill a person. Not for reasons of my own mental issues. I might kill myself. But it is horrifying for me to consider that I would be killing someone who is loved by someone so deeply as Eliot Rodger desired intimacy and connection himself. To take that away from someone... My empathy connects me up to that situation, to be the lover of someone who gets killed, I internalize this and am confronted by a sadness and grief....
In the same way I empathize with the parents of the Dutch two girls missing in Panama. I know they are dead. I am sure of it.
Anyway, The Gopher makes some excellent points. Kuu too, but he falls prone to judgment too much. I am not convinced he was a spoiled brat.
I think that in itself defeats the rest of what Kuu says. To suggest that because he had a BMW and some money to spend he felt entitled as a sort of twisted function of society is too much. I think culture plays a part in these shootings, but rich kids have no special option on feeling entitlement.
A rich kid can hurt too, feel lonely and in reaction starts to feel entitled. So he might not be a narcissist at all. I think maybe his narcissism is a lashing out, not a sort of core behavior. If you want something so badly and are unable for whatever reason to get it, it being your own fault, a mental issue, looks and appearance, self undermining behavior etc., then it can flip around in frustration and despair and become the ultimate mirrored opposition. You will react with entitlement, self-aggrandizement and more of that sort of terms.
Some people might have needs so profound in their scope - no pun intended - that when unmet, the reaction is equal in excessiveness. So there is a layer beneath narcissism that could be a DSM described diagnosis pertaining to having too deep feelings and needs.
I think that is not unreasonable. Human experience should be a Bell curve. On either sides we would have people who lack emotions, have shallow emotions, little need for them to be met, whereas on the other side we have people who have profoundly deep needs, that are very hard to be met by those with average or shallow emotions.
I guess these are two separate scales. The scale of having deep versus shallow emotional needs and the scale of the ability to having these emotions met.
It pays off to be on the top of the curve. A balance between depth of emotion and a good enough ability to have them met.
I would classify myself on the end of having very deep emotional needs, that few will be able to satisfy. Or maybe that is my INTP 'childlike emotional needs that are pure' as it is described in typology.
If people knew how to be in the world I think society as whole would react more positively to be inclusive of people. We walk like zombies passed each other, barely noticing each other, feeling no responsibility for each others feelings. And it may be hard to spot someone who's needs are unmet. But I hope society and culture will change to be more sensitive to people.
We are all so vulnerable. We let people slip. We create a culture where people feel they cannot reach out for help, where the threshold is too high for these people like Rodger. I don't believe that it is entirely impossible to find these people.
