Shame, Celebrity, and the Oregon Shooter

Following yet another campus massacre, predictable calls for greater gun control have appeared on op-ed pages and social media platforms everywhere, engendering the usual acrimonious and politicized debate. While background checks might help to keep guns away from criminals and those with severe mental illness, this disturbing spate of shootings is the result of complex social trends not so easily addressed.

From Columbine to Sandy Hook to Roseburg, Oregon, the profile of these shooters is remarkably consistent: isolated young men who feel like failures, unable to build and sustain meaningful social connections with other people or to succeed in school or at a career. In simple terms, they feel like “total losers,” unbearably so; they prove themselves “winners” by killing enough people that T.V. news programs and newspaper articles will make them famous.

This winner-loser dynamic lies at the heart of what I call Extreme Narcissism in my new book. Afflicted by profound shame — that is, an excruciating sense of inner defect and damage — the Extreme Narcissist seeks to build and maintain a grandiose self-image that will “disprove” all that damage and thereby alleviate shame. I would argue that these disturbed young killers, invariably products of early trauma and broken families, are drowning in shame. Because they feel small, defective, and insignificant, they transform themselves into media celebrities in the only way they can envision — through spectacular acts of violence.

The winner-loser dynamic also reflects the prevailing cultural values of our Golden Age of Narcissism. Everyone wants to come across as a social media winner, and so we cull and Photoshop our selfies to look even more attractive before posting them to Facebook. We selectively tweet about our successes and never mention our disappointments. We let all our friends and followers know about the fabulous lives we lead — the amazing parties and concerts we attend, the trendy restaurants where we dine, the fascinating people we know.

In a culture that reveres celebrity, social media has given us the means to broadcast ourselves as winners to an ever-larger audience of admiring spectators.

Almost everyone wants to be a celebrity these days, or at least to be affiliated with famous people. A well-publicized study of middle school students in Rochester, New York found that more of them would prefer to be the personal assistant to a celebrity than to be the president of Harvard or Yale. In the modern world, celebrities are the ultimate winners — impossibly beautiful, wealthy, and admired people who seem to lead perfect lives. We all live in their shadows, and non-stop images of celebrity winners in the media instill a pervasive anxiety about personal significance.

Does my own life have any meaning when perfection is the standard?

Will I be attractive to other people if I’m not beautiful and popular?

Am I a comparative loser?

These infamous young men who accumulate massive arsenals and then massacre people are products of this Golden Age of Narcissism; they struggle with the same anxieties as the rest of us but even more intensively because of the shame at their core. The shooters in both Sandy Hook and Roseburg apparently did extensive research on the forms of destruction that would garner the most media attention — that is, on how to achieve the greatest degree of celebrity.

Better background screening might prevent some of these shootings. A more effective mental health care system could help to reach disaffected and disturbed young men before they break. But until we as a society can wean ourselves from celebrity worship and learn to value the flawed, the damaged, or the merely average, the Golden Age of Narcissism will continue making the most disadvantaged and disturbed among us feel like social losers, desperate for some way to escape from shame and achieve a fleeting “winner” status.