MASSES, HATE and DEHUMANIZATION

August, 15, 2012 - We know that the masses that is to say a multitude of human beings grouped together can lead to deshumanization. By their number, a group of fellows may feel unliable regarding their actions and so generating violence easily without any guilt. In this case, the individual reason disappears, giving way to tribal and primary feelings which create either involuntary accidents (trampling, crushing) or violent abuses (lynching, rape, tortures, crimes ...).

But masses can be also a push to crime because in return, there are mass killers, those ones who shoot at the masses for killing them.

On August 5, 2012, a killer fired a shot at people in a Sikh Temple of Wisconsin... On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. On March 19, 2012, in Toulouse, Southwest of France, in a Jewish school, a killer chased little children for shooting them while filming his crimes after having murdered two servicemen... Previously, some months ago there was also a massacre in a Norvegian island... The list is very long around the world...

It exists a number of theories about mass killers. But one appears particularly interesting to develop because it is unusually evoked by the media.

Indeed, if we adopt the point of view of a mass murderer, it is because he no longer distinguish people as individuals but because he sees them as a whole, that the killer operates: it is the mass which triggers the mad gesture because he has an irresistible urge to fire a shot into a group of people heaped up in front of his eyes. Here is a simple case to consider: if one makes an effort to select at random one fellow in a crowd for speaking to him, then one will find him nice, intelligent, charming ... in short, anybody is able to enjoy his part of humanity and will respect him on this account. But, if you consider a crowd as a whole, then you have many reasons to hate it: because of the noise, odor, color, clothing, socio-professional category and so on. Just it is sufficient a trite triggering event and the fire is set to the powder, the bumb explodes into the mass killer’s brain and frustration changes into a so great hate that he transforms himself into a killer.

One incriminates video games, violent movies, the availability of weapons, the loss of social values, the abuses of drugs and alcohol together with the increasing unsociability, loneliness, madness and dispair of our societies. Indeed, depending the cases, they may influence but it does not explain all.

There is a film that sums up the descent into hell of a man who, considering the society in which he lives, comes to be transformed into
a killer: it is "Falling Down" (1993) where Michael Douglas plays an unemployed worker highly frustrated with the various flaws in society and who begins to psychotically and violently lash out against them.

Thus we are more and more numerous and from now on there are crowds and masses everywhere (at supermarket, burgers restaurants, tolls, public toilets, events of all sorts ...). For the spark, simply a depressed person frustrated in a mob, injured by an incivility, wounded in his self-esteem who is going to develop in the future some psychotic tendencies and then, it is likely that he will take action one day... against something, somebody!

If the various civilizations brought progress, health, culture, they do prevail against this phenomena. Overcrowding causing human concentrations, there will be more and more mass murderers who will shout-kill around the world.